Could this Quran fragment really be older than Muhammad?

Fragments of the oldest Koran to the world discovered during the last month could predate the generally accepted founding date for Islam by Muslim prophet Muhammad, according to British Scholars.

Keith Small from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, said, “The discovery could force scholars to give more attention to outlier theories that Muhammad appropriated texts already in existence and claimed that he received them as revelations from Angel Gabriel”. This means that at the very latest it was written before the first formal texts were supposed to have been collated, and at the earliest it was written before or shortly after Mohammed was born, thus contradicting traditional accounts of his life and radically altering “the edifice of Islamic tradition”, reports Brietbart News.

“Finding out we had one of the oldest fragments of the Quran in the whole world has been fantastically exciting”, Worrall said, according to BBC News.

The Prophet Muhammad is thought to have founded Islam sometime after 610AD and the first Muslim community was founded in Medina in 622AD.

“It destabilises, 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 historicity of Muhammad and the Companions [his followers]”, he said.

“At this time, the divine message was not compiled into the book form in which it appears today”, said Thomas.

The Birmingham manuscripts “consist of parts of Suras [chapters] 18 to 20 of the holy book, written in an early form of Arabic script known as Hijaz”.

Through radiocarbon analysis researchers have dated the Qur’an manuscript as being written between AD 568 and 645 with 95.4 per cent accuracy.

Professor Thomas said the concept of a Koran that predates Mohamed would require “a radical revision of Islamic history”, adding: “I think there are substantial obstacles in the way of that”. They came to the library of the University of Birmingham in England as part of a collection of Middle Eastern texts accumulated in Iraq back in the 1920’s.

Some of these manuscripts have been digitized and published online, in order to make the various beliefs and artifacts of the ancient past accessible to all.

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Modern methods can only accurately provide a range of dates for the Birmingham manuscripts origins, however, opening up a controversial time window during which the pages could have been created.