Koran Carbon Dating May Change History Of The Religion

Could the world's oldest Koran actually be older than the Prophet Muhammad?

A team of researchers at the University of Oxford assessed fragments of the Koran kept at the Birmingham library with the help of carbon dating. They discovered that the text was produced between 658 and 645 A.D. Yet Islamic scholars believe that Muhammad lived between 570 and 632 AD; this would mean that the text was compiled either before the Prophet's birth or during his childhood.

The report by the Times of London now questions the words of the Koran, a scripture that carried the prophet's words over 1,350 years. This new discovery could forever change the history of the Koran as we know it.

"It destabilizes, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged - and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions," said historian Tim Holland, via The Times.

Some views regarding the subject suggest that Muhammad may have worked with an already existing text and offered a revised version within the ideology, according to Keith Small of the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library.

"This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven."

However, Small also cautioned that the carbon dating only used parchment rather than the ink from the book. "If the dates apply to the parchment and the ink, and the dates across the entire range apply, then the Koran -- or at least portions of it -- predates Mohammed, and moves back the years that an Arabic literary culture is in place well into the 500s."

"This would radically alter the edifice of Islamic tradition and the history of the rise of Islam in late Near Eastern antiquity would have to be completely revised, somehow accounting for another book of scripture coming into existence 50 to 100 years before, and then also explaining how this was co-opted into what became the entity of Islam by around AD700."

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