Ninety Years in the Wrong Binding

Two parchment leaves in the Mingana Collection carry Quranic text in an early Hijazi hand. They came to Birmingham with the rest of the collection in the 1920s and sat there for some ninety years without being catalogued as anything in particular, because they had been bound together with leaves of a different seventh century Quran and the volume had always been read as one manuscript.

Alba Fedeli, working on the collection for a doctorate on early Quranic manuscripts, recognised that the two sets of leaves were not the same book. The university submitted a sample for radiocarbon dating at Oxford and announced the result in July 2015: the parchment dated to between 568 and 645 CE at 95.4 per cent probability. The other manuscript the leaves had been bound with is now catalogued separately as Mingana Islamic Arabic 1572b.

What the date settles is narrower than much of the coverage suggested, and the distinction is the reason the find matters rather than a qualification on it. Radiocarbon dates the death of the animal whose skin the parchment is, not the moment a text was written on it, and parchment could be stored or scraped and reused. The leaves are early on any reading and the range overlaps the lifetime of the Prophet, but the measurement is a terminus for the material and not a date for the writing. The specialist literature on early Quranic manuscripts says so plainly, and so did the university's own announcement.