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[orochi91]

Complete and utterly wrong. This story is sourced from Daily Mail, which basically extrapolates the carbon dating into a misleading headline. The parchment is cdated to be anywhere from 568 AD onwards. Muhammad was born in 570. Zomg, Quran before Muhammad! Here is some insight from reddit into this:


And


One more

I suspected that this would be the case.

This is nothing more than a shameful attempt to further disparage Muslims and delegitimize Islam.

 

[Maninthemirror]

Complete and utterly wrong. This story is sourced from Daily Mail, which basically extrapolates the carbon dating into a misleading headline. The parchment is cdated to be anywhere from 568 AD onwards. Muhammad was born in 570. Zomg, Quran before Muhammad! Here is some insight from reddit into this:


And


One more

I was hoping you waited on this a bit longer so we can get maximum posts (saying what people really think) and then you throw in the factual megaton lol

 

[Lamel]

News stories need to be researched a bit better. Sensationalist stuff is almost never true.

 

[bonesmccoy]

Well, regardless, I hope more research is done on these parchments and we can see where the facts fall. Attacking the veracity of a person who is quoted in the article sensationally isn't really helpful though. The actual source for the news story is here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article4542663.ece

Absolutely.

From what I've read (your article is behind a paywall), the wrinkle is that one of the 3 carbon-dated fragments dates to 499-599, while the other 2 are dated to the late 6th - late 7th century.

 

[Dennis]

The carbon dating suggest that it could predate Muhammed. It doesn't mean that it does, just that it is a possibility.

 

[Maninthemirror]

Well, regardless, I hope more research is done on these parchments and we can see where the facts fall. Attacking the veracity of a person who is quoted in the article sensationally isn't really helpful though. The actual source for the news story is here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article4542663.ece

What are you talking about man. Daily Mail is the source. from 30th august, yesterday


the Times posted their article today

 

[RustyNails]

The carbon dating suggest that it could predate Muhammed. It doesn't mean that it does, just that it is a possibility.

What could predate Muhammad? The material? If so, No shit sherlock. Material always predates the ink on it.

 

[FelixOrion]

Complete and utterly wrong. This story is sourced from Daily Mail, which basically extrapolates the carbon dating into a misleading headline. The parchment is cdated to be anywhere from 568 AD onwards. Muhammad was born in 570. Zomg, Quran before Muhammad! Here is some insight from reddit into this:


And


One more

Lmao great take down

 

[Maninthemirror]

The carbon dating suggest that it could predate Muhammed. It doesn't mean that it does, just that it is a possibility.

Carbon Dating always has a range. from before Islam to at the end of Islam. Islamic history suggests people started memorizing Quran as soon as it started to be revealed, this falls within the range. scientifically a range is needed as carbon dating cannot pinpoint a date with 100% accuracy. History suggests it would be during revelation, opinions suggests it could be before or after Islam

 

[Messofanego]

Interesting that there is proof of little alteration since that oldest fragment and Quran of today.

 

[Maninthemirror]

Interesting that there is proof of little alteration since that oldest fragment and Quran of today.

This was the process the Quran was completely compiled under Caliph Usman ra

1. Zayd bin Thabit verified each verse with his own memory.
2. Umar ibn Al-Khattab verified each verse. Both men had memorized the entire Quran.
3. Two reliable witnesses had to testify that the verses were written in the presence of the Prophet Muhammad.
4. The verified written verses were collated with those from the collections of other Companions.

 

[Nerokis]

Well, regardless, I hope more research is done on these parchments and we can see where the facts fall. Attacking the veracity of a person who is quoted in the article sensationally isn't really helpful though. The actual source for the news story is here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article4542663.ece

What isn't helpful is misleading people with selectively constructed, sensationalized articles. I enjoyed Rubicon, and wasn't aware of the author's views on Islam's history. Latching onto him to put these dates in a new light is nothing short of deceptive, because his reaction to them merely reflected his preexisting views, and apparently he isn't a particularly good source on this subject anyway.

I hope research on those parchments continues, as well. In the meantime, we could all afford to do more research next time we see a sensationalist headline.

 

[Facism]

What could predate Muhammad? The material? If so, No shit sherlock. Material always predates the ink on it.

i laughed way to hard at this.

thanks

 

[Fusebox]

So when did all the Hadiths get tacked on?

 

[Maninthemirror]

So when did all the Hadiths get tacked on?

250-300 years after the death of prophet Muhammad (saw). that is at least 6-9 generations after Islam began. this is why Hadith are often unreliable if seen without reference and only considered true in nature if they dont contradict the Quran

 

[TrojanBlade]

Translation of one of the pages :

The Quran matches word for word the text in this

Subhan Allah! All glory be to Allah ...

Another miracle of Quran that was promised by God that no one would be able to change His word till the last day.

 

[orochi91]

Subhan Allah! All glory be to Allah ...

Another miracle of Quran that was promised by God that no one would be able to change His word till the last day.

Yea, I'm rather impressed the numerous Caliphates and subsequent rulers didn't attempt to change it over the centuries.

I wish we had more fragments!

 

[RustyNails]

Yea, I'm rather impressed the numerous Caliphates and subsequent rulers didn't attempt to change it over the centuries.

I wish we had more fragments!

We have TON of fragments/inscriptions/manuscripts. See this here:http://www.islamic-awareness.org/New/

This one in particular caught people's attention because it is the oldest recorded manuscript.

 

[orochi91]

We have TON of fragments/inscriptions/manuscripts. See this here:http://www.islamic-awareness.org/New/

This one in particular caught people's attention because it is the oldest recorded manuscript.

I should've clarified, I meant more fragments belonging to the same Quran that this newly discovered piece was from.

Btw, the sheer amount of Islamic sources you and Maninthemirror manage to pull out in these sort of discussions is incredible.

It's almost overwhelming at times lol

 

[RustyNails]

Conclusive evidence against Tom Holland's orientalist bullshittery courtesy of Dr. Jonathan Brown

Holland’s argument rests on several assumptions:

1) That the parchment used for these Quran pages was produced at the same time as it was used for writing the text down (the equivalent of someone producing a piece of paper and then using that piece of paper, let’s say, in the same year to write something)

2) That the pages in question were written at the earlier end of the window give by the carbon dating and not the latter part, which would put them right in the career of Muhammad

3) That the Quran not only predates Muhammad’s life as a general text, but that it, in fact, word-for-word predates his life, along with divisions between chapters in the Quran and even markers between verses.



These are highly unreasonable assumptions. Let’s look at each one in turn:

Parchment was very expensive to produce and was frequently re-used after the ink was washed off. Let’s take a more recent example free from the controversy of religion. The Swiss Federal Charter of 1291, a founding document of Switzerland, includes the date of 1291 as its date of composition, but carbon dating has dated the parchment as having been produced between 1252 and 1312. Scholars have come to agreement that the text was actually written in the 1300’s sometime. So, even according to this document’s own claim, the parchment could have been produced almost forty years before the writing occurred. If we go by scholarly consensus, it could have been produced a century earlier! When he was challenged on the possibility that the parchment of the Birmingham Quran pages predated the writing, Holland simply replied that back then parchment was “generally” used “almost immediately.” (I wonder what evidence he has for this claim).
Holland wants us to assume that, within the 77 year window given by the carbon dating, these Quran pages were written in the first 42 years. The 35 years after that would put the writing of these pages, shockingly, right during the career of the man who was supposedly composing them (i.e., between 610-632) or, even more shockingly!, in the 13 years after Muhammad’s death, exactly when the current theories of the Quran’s origins says that semi-official copies of the Quran were being produced.
Many Muslim traditions hold that it was not the Prophet who put the chapters of the Quran in their canonical order, and even that it was not the Prophet who put the many verses of the Quran together in order to form the chapters. Rather, this was done after his death by the committees that compiled the official versions of the Quran around 650. The majority of Muslim scholars have disagreed with this and hold that the verses and chapters were ordered by the Prophet (NB: a study of an early Quran copy from Sana’a has shown that ordering the verses and chapters predates the official Quran compiled by Uthman).[2] If the Birmingham Quran pages predate Muhammad’s career by decades, what this means is that not only did the themes and ideas in the Quran predate Islam, but that the very text of the Quran, word for word, predates Islam. Not only that, even the Quran’s chapter and verse divisions predate the Prophet’s life! This would be astounding, since Muslim tradition holds that not even the official copies of the Quran disseminated by Uthman had chapter and verse dividers.[3]


So, Holland makes a proposition: we should accept that, sometime within, and only within, the period between 568 and 610 CE pieces of parchment were produced from animal skin and then immediately used to write the text of the Quran, word for word as it would be adopted by Muslims decades later, along with verse and chapters divisions, which Muslims would then forget about when they issued their own official versions of the Quran (no doubt to cover of their reliance on earlier material). This would result in a startling, revolutionary scholarly discovery: the Quran actually predates the career of Muhammad!

I have another proposition, one that I think requires fewer leaps of faith: that pieces of parchment were produced from animal skin sometime between 568 and 645 CE, probably later rather than earlier, and that sometime in the decades after the Prophet’s death in around 632, after the chapter and verse divisions of the Quran had been to be formalized and written down in copies of the holy book, someone used these pieces of parchment to write down a copy of the Quran. This would involve absolutely no interesting scholarly development. It would mean that the Quran, which Western scholars have long generally held dates from around the time of the Prophet and certainly before 692 CE, dates from around the time of the Prophet and certainly before 692 CE.

I think this is a much more reasonable proposition. Unless… the Quran comes from the future…

http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2015...matism-the-case-of-the-birmingham-quran-pages