Qur'an fragments may be world's oldest
What could turn out to be the world’s oldest fragments of the Qur’an have been found at the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom’s second-largest city, which has a 28 percent Muslim population.
The manuscripts were brought to England in the late 1920s and were lying in a drawer next to the diaries of English playwright Noel Coward when doctoral student Alba Fedeli decided to take a closer look at them.
Radiocarbon dating found that the two weather-beaten parchments, probably made from sheep or goat skins and covered in neat symmetrical flowing lines of an early Arabic script, were at least 1,370 years old, making them among the earliest pages of the Qur’an in existence—if not the very oldest.
