Koran fragments dating back more than 1,000 years found in a British library

(Image credit: Twitter.com/SkyNews)

last updated 23 July 2015

At the U.K.'s University of Birmingham, researchers have discovered that pages found in the school's library, untouched for nearly a century, could be the oldest fragments of the Koran in existence.

Radiocarbon dating shows that there is a probability of more than 95 percent that the parchment is from between 578 and 645. "They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam," David Thomas, the university's professor of Christianity and Islam, told the BBC. "According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Koran, the scripture of Islam, between the years 610 and 632, the year of his death. The person who actually wrote it could well have known the Prophet Muhammad. He would have seen him probably, he would maybe have heard him preach. He may have known him personally — and that really is quite a thought to conjure with."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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