Ancient Islamic Manuscripts Hidden in Plain Sight, in Birmingham
For some eight decades, one of the earliest, maybe the earliest, Koranic manuscripts have been in the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library, mistakenly stashed amongst other relatively ‘older’ manuscripts.
Until PhD student Mrs. Alba Fedeli came along.
A scholar with a focus towards Islamic manuscripts, her working thesis is on “Early Qur’anic manuscripts, their text, and the Alphonse Mingana papers held in the Department of Special Collections of the University of Birmingham.”
She has been creating an XML transcription of the manuscripts, of which surahs (chapters) 7 to 17 are to be found in the Cambridge University Library, while surahs 18, 19, and 20 are to be found in the Mingana Collection at the Cadbury research Library.
The Mingana Collection has over 3,000 documents scrounged from across and beyond the Middle East by Alphonse Mingana, an ethnic Assyrian of the Ottoman Empire born in present day Iraq in 1878 and later resettled in Birmingham. From 1924 to the early 1930s, he made several trips to the Middle East, collecting precious manuscripts in Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Samaritan; the vast bulk of the collection is on Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, but there are also Christian manuscripts in Arabic, Syriac and Garshuni (where Syriac has been written in Arabic despite having its own script and vice versa).
While the Collection is a treasure trove in its own right, Fedeli’s interest was in seven 7th century folios that had been purchased in 1936, from a von Scherling.
While leafing through these folio, she noticed something odd; some two folios, made either of parchment or papyrus, looked markedly different from the rest of the folios, written in clear Hijazi script and didn’t flow with the other folios.
The two folios found in the Mingana Collection have been dated to a time coinciding with when Prophet Muhamad was alive according to Islamic belief.
She took the two folios to her department with her observations, and the folios were taken to the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at Oxford University to determine just how old they were.
The folios were found to be made of either goat or sheep skin, and more importantly, were dated to between 568AD to 645AD with a 95.4% accuracy.
According to Islamic lore, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), to whom the Qur’an was revealed, lived between 570AD and 632AD, which places the folio around the same time as the Prophet (PBUH), and hence among the oldest Islamic manuscripts.
According to Prof. David Thomas (focus in Christianity and Islam, plus interreligious relations) of Birmingham University, the author of the manuscript may have actually known the prophet or at least heard him preach, even if neither the author nor where the script was actually found is known (remember it was taken from an antiquarian, about a year before Mingana passed away).
Those uncertainties notwithstanding, the scripts bear a great similarity to the modern-day Qur’an, which reinforces the belief that Islam’s holy book has remained largely unchanged since it was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (between 610AD to 632AD) and compiled into a standardized form during the reign of the first three caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman); the standardization was completed in the reign of Caliph Uthman, whose reign ended with his assassination in 656AD, having ruled for 12 years.
This was the extent of the caliphate under Uthman, under whose reign the many oral versions of the Qur’an were compiled into one standard book. All other written pieces were to be discarded, so as to remove whatever confusion may arise in variants that may be in circulation. The Islamic empire was expanding and absorbing non-Arabs at this point, having made contact with Persians, Turks and other groups.
It is thought that the folios were an aide-memoire used by early Islamic preachers to help them remember verses that they were supposed to have committed to heart, because Arabian society around the time of Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) recorded their deeds and all in oral literature, though in a few towns, literate people could be found.
This oral tradition lives to this day in the numerous Qur’an recitation competitions held every year, the biggest of which is held in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. It was won by a Nigerian last year.
The Folio May Be Old But the Writing New
Not all scholars are in agreement that the two folios found in Birmingham University could have been written while Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W) was alive.
According to three Saudi scholars, the Birmingham scholars erred in measuring the age of the parchment, instead of the age of the ink, because while the parchment may be old, the writings may be very new.
Parchments were hard to make, precious and few, so there was a tendency to reuse them whenever possible (such parchments are called palimpsests), which means the parchment’s age doesn’t always have to correspond to the age of the inscriptions upon it, and these parchments are long-lasting; if you drop by the Cairo Museum, you can find parchments from 4,000 years ago, and you can still make out a few characters. So what of 2-3 decades?
Besides, there are very few inks that can be carbon dated, because the levels of the Carbon-14 isotope that is need to perform the test is infinitesimally tiny, or non-existent, which makes it next to impossible to ascertain the age of the ink.
The Saudi scholars also claim that the red ink, used to create lines delimiting surahs, and used in words beginning each surah are an indicator that the writings are in conformity with styles prevalent during the reign of Caliph Uthman, who I shall remind you compiled the standardized Qur’an. The bits and pieces that were the earlier versions of the Qur’an used only one ink, and didn’t attempt any clear organization, according to the scholars.
Be that as it may it is clear that the manuscript, or at least the parchment upon which it is written is of as greatest historical significance as the Sana 1 manuscript, which has been dated to before 646AD (75% certainty) and 671AD (99% certainty).
Part of the San’a manuscript. Early Islamic manuscripts were largely written in Hijazi Arabic.
They are also written in the Hijazi script.
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