Miracle of Quran: In Birmingham University Oldest Quran Found MashALLAH

Two leaves of an early Quranic manuscript in the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts of the University of Birmingham's Cadbury Research Library were discovered in 2015 as being dated between 568 and 645, making it one of the oldest Quran manuscripts to have survived.

The manuscript is written in ink on parchment, using a monumental Arabic Hijazi script and is still clearly legible. The leaves preserve parts of Surahs 18 to 20. The university intends to place the manuscript on display for the first time at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts during October 2015, and then at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2016.

The two leaves have been recognized as belonging with the 16 leaves catalogued as BnF Arabe 328(c) in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, now bound with the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus; and witness verses corresponding to a lacuna in that text.

The Birmingham leaves, now catalogued as Mingana 1572a, are folio size (the leaves of BnF Arabe 328(c) are 33.3 cm by 24.5 cm) and are written on both sides in a generously-scaled and legible script. One two-page leaf contains verses 17-31 of Surah 18 (Al-Kahf) while the other leaf the final eight verses 91-98 of Surah 19 (Maryam) and the first 40 verses of Surah 20 (Ta-Ha), all in their recognised sequence and conforming very closely to the standard text. The two surviving leaves will have been separated in the original codex by a number of missing folios containing the intervening verses of surahs 18 and 19. There are no diacritical marks to indicate short vowels, but consonants are occasionally differentiated with oblique dashes. The text is laid out in the format that was to become standard for complete Quran manuscripts, with chapter divisions indicated by a decorated line, and verse endings by intertextual clustered dots.

Dr Alba Fedeli, who was studying items in the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern Manuscripts for her PhD thesis Early Qur'ānic manuscripts, their text, and the Alphonse Mingana papers held in the Department of Special Collections of the University of Birmingham, found the two leaves misidentified and bound with those of a late seventh century Quranic manuscript (now catalogued as Mingana 1572b). She arranged for them to be radiocarbon dated at the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. They dated the parchment to between AD 568 and 645, within a 95.4% (2σ) confidence interval.