The Birmingham Quran manuscript is a single sheet of parchment on which two leaves of an early Quranic manuscript or muṣḥaf have been written. In 2015 the manuscript, which is held by the University of Birmingham, was radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE (in the Islamic calendar, between 56 BH and 25 AH). It is part of the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, held by the university's Cadbury Research Library.
The manuscript is written in ink on parchment, using an Arabic Hejazi script and is still clearly legible. The leaves preserve parts of Surahs 19 (Maryam) to 20 (Taha). It was on display at the University of Birmingham in 2015 and then at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until 5 August 2016. The Cadbury Research Library has carried out multispectral analysis of the manuscript and XRF analysis of the inks.
Background
The Mingana Collection, comprising over 3,000 documents, was collected by Alphonse Mingana over three trips to the Middle East in the 1920s and was funded by Edward Cadbury, a philanthropist and businessman of the Birmingham-based chocolate-manufacturing Cadbury family.
Description
The two leaves have been recognized as belonging with the 16 leaves catalogued as BnF Arabe 328(c) in the 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 (343 mm by 258 mm at the widest point), 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 present day sequence and conforming to the standard text. The two surviving leaves were 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.
Although the Quran text witnessed in the two Birmingham leaves almost entirely conforms to the standard text, their orthography differs, in respect of the writing (or omission) of the silent alif (ألف). Arabic script at the time tended to not write out the silent alif. Subsequent ultraviolet testing of the leaves has confirmed no underwriting, and excludes the possibility of there being a palimpsest.
In a detailed analysis of the Mingana 1572a and BnF Arabe 328(c) folios in combination, dubbed MS PaB in her thesis, Alba Fedeli summarised her findings:
Identification
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 another seventh-century Quranic manuscript also written in Hijazi script (now catalogued as Mingana 1572b). Following an approach by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy in 2013 to contribute a sample from Islamic Arabic 1572 to the Corpus Coranicum project to investigate textual history of the Quran, which coincided with Fedeli's research into the handwriting, the Cadbury Research Library arranged for the manuscript to be radiocarbon dated at the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. They determined the radiocarbon date of the parchment to be 1465±21 years BP (before 1950), which corresponds with 95.4% confidence to the calendar years CE 568–645 when calibrated.
Significance
The proposed radiocarbon date possibility for the manuscript is significant, as the Islamic prophet Muhammad lived from to 632. According to Sunni Muslim tradition it was Abu Bakr (r. 632–634), the first caliph, who compiled The Quran, and Uthman (r. 644-656) who canonized the standard version of Quran since accepted and used by all Muslims worldwide; then he commanded that all previous versions of the Quran had to be burned.
In the University announcement, Muhammad Isa Waley, Lead Curator for Persian and Turkish Manuscripts at the British Library, said:
David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham said: