Birmingham's ancient Koran history revealed

When the University of Birmingham revealed that it had fragments from one of the world's oldest Korans, it made headlines around the world.

By Sean Coughlan

In terms of discoveries, it seemed as unlikely as it was remarkable.
But it raised even bigger questions about the origins of this ancient manuscript.

And there are now suggestions from the Middle East that the discovery could be even more spectacularly significant than had been initially realised.

There are claims that these could be fragments from the very first complete version of the Koran, commissioned by Abu Bakr, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad - and that it is "the most important discovery ever for the Muslim world".

This is a global jigsaw puzzle.
But some of the pieces have fallen into place.

It seems likely the fragments in Birmingham, at least 1,370 years old, were once held in Egypt's oldest mosque, the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As in Fustat.

Paris match

This is because academics are increasingly confident the Birmingham manuscript has an exact match in the National Library of France, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.


Image by BBC

The library points to the expertise of Francois Deroche, historian of the Koran and academic at the College de France, and he confirms the pages in Paris are part of the same Koran as Birmingham's.
Alba Fedeli, the researcher who first identified the manuscript in Birmingham, is also sure it is the same as the fragments in Paris.

The significance is that the origin of the manuscript in Paris is known to have been the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As in Fustat.

'Spirited away'

The French part of this manuscript was brought to Europe by Asselin de Cherville, who served as a vice consul in Egypt when the country was under the control of Napoleon's armies in the early 19th Century.

Prof Deroche says Asselin de Cherville's widow seemed to have tried to sell this and other ancient Islamic manuscripts to the British Library in the 1820s, but they ended up in the national library in Paris, where they have remained ever since.

But if some of this Koran went to Paris, what happened to the pages now in Birmingham?
Prof Deroche says later in the 19th Century manuscripts were transferred from the mosque in Fustat to the national library in Cairo.

Along the way, "some folios must have been spirited away" and entered the antiquities market.
These were presumably sold and re-sold, until in the 1920s they were acquired by Alphonse Mingana and brought to Birmingham.

Mingana was an Assyrian, from what is now modern-day Iraq, whose collecting trips to the Middle East were funded by the Cadbury family.

"Of course, no official traces of this episode were left, but it should explain how Mingana got some leaves from the Fustat trove," says Prof Deroche, who holds the legion of honour for his academic work.

And tantalisingly, he says other similar material, sold to western collectors could, still come to light.

Disputed date

But what remains much more contentious is the dating of the manuscript in Birmingham.
What was really startling about the Birmingham discovery was its early date, with radiocarbon testing putting it between 568 and 645.
The latest date in the range is 13 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632.


Image by BBC

David Thomas, Birmingham University's professor of Christianity and Islam, explained how much this puts the manuscript into the earliest years of Islam: "The person who actually wrote it could well have known the Prophet Muhammad."

But the early date contradicts the findings of academics who have based their analysis on the style of the text.

Mustafa Shah, from the Islamic studies department at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, says the "graphical evidence", such as how the verses are separated and the grammatical marks, show this is from a later date.

In this early form of Arabic, writing styles developed and grammatical rules changed, and Dr Shah says the Birmingham manuscript is simply inconsistent with such an early date.
Prof Deroche also says he has "reservations" about radiocarbon dating and there have been cases where manuscripts with known dates have been tested and the results have been incorrect.

'Confident' dates are accurate

But staff at Oxford University's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, which dated the parchment, are convinced their findings are correct, no matter how inconvenient.

Researcher David Chivall says the accuracy of dating has improved in recent years, with a much more reliable approach to removing contamination from samples.

In the case of the Birmingham Koran, Mr Chivall says the latter half of the age range is more likely, but the overall range is accurate to a probability of 95%.
It is the same level of confidence given to the dating of the bones of Richard III, also tested at the Oxford laboratory.

"We're as confident as we can be that the dates are accurate."

And academic opinions can change. Dr Shah says until the 1990s the dominant academic view in the West was that there was no complete written version of the Koran until the 8th Century.

But researchers have since overturned this consensus, proving it "completely wrong" and providing more support for the traditional Muslim account of the history of the Koran.
The corresponding manuscript in Paris, which could help to settle the argument about dates, has not been radiocarbon tested.

The first Koran?

But if the dating of the Birmingham manuscript is correct what does it mean?
There are only two leaves in Birmingham, but Prof Thomas says the complete collection would have been about 200 separate leaves.


Image by BBC

"It would have been a monumental piece of work," he said.
And it raises questions about who would have commissioned the Koran and been able to mobilise the resources to produce it.

Jamal bin Huwareib, managing director of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, an education foundation set up by the ruler of the UAE, says the evidence points to an even more remarkable conclusion.

He believes the manuscript in Birmingham is part of the first comprehensive written version of the Koran assembled by Abu Bakr, the Muslim caliph who ruled between 632 and 634.


Image by BBC

"It's the most important discovery ever for the Muslim world," says Mr bin Huwareib, who has visited Birmingham to examine the manuscript.
"I believe this is the Koran of Abu Bakr."

He says the high quality of the hand writing and the parchment show this was a prestigious work created for someone important - and the radiocarbon dating shows it is from the earliest days of Islam.

"This version, this collection, this manuscript is the root of Islam, it's the root of the Koran," says Mr bin Huwareib.
"This will be a revolution in studying Islam."
This would be an unprecedented find. Prof Thomas says the dating fits this theory but "it's a very big leap indeed".

'Priceless manuscript'

There are other possibilities. The radiocarbon dating is based on the death of the animal whose skin was used for the parchment, not when the writing was completed, which means the manuscript could be a few years later than the age range ending in 645, with Prof Thomas suggesting possible dates of 650 to 655.

This would overlap with the production of copies of the Koran during the rule of the caliph Uthman, between 644 and 656, which were intended to produce an accurate, standardised version to be sent to Muslim communities.

If the Birmingham manuscript was a fragment of one of these copies it would also be a spectacular outcome.
It's not possible to definitively prove or disprove such theories.

But Joseph Lumbard, professor in the department of Arabic and translation studies at the American University of Sharjah, says if the early dating is correct then nothing should be ruled out.
"I would not discount that it could be a fragment from the codex collected by Zayd ibn Thabit under Abu Bakr.

"I would not discount that it could be a copy of the Uthmanic codex.
"I would not discount Deroche's argument either, he is such a leader in this field," says Prof Lumbard.

He also warns of evidence being cherry-picked to support experts' preferred views.
BBC iWonder: The Quran

A timeline of how the Quran became part of British life
Prof Thomas says there could also have been copies made from copies and perhaps the Birmingham manuscript is from a copy made specially for the mosque in Fustat.

Jamal bin Huwaireb sees the discovery of such a "priceless manuscript" in the UK, rather than a Muslim country, as sending a message of mutual tolerance between religions.

"We need to respect each other, work together, we don't need conflict."
But don't expect any end to the arguments over this ancient document.

First Snake Crawled on Four

The world's first known snake has quite recently been found in Brazil, as indicated by new research that settles numerous secrets about the crawling reptiles.

The snake (Tetrapodophis amplectus), depicted in the most recent issue of the diary Science, is likewise the first known snake to have four appendages. This emphatically proposes that snakes advanced from physical reptiles, and not from water-abiding species, as had been thought some time recently.

"The marine speculation is dead," senior creator Nicholas Longrich of the University of Bath told Discovery News. "It's really been really dead for some time now, however this is truly beating the nails in the box. Oceanic snakes developed from physical snakes - numerous, multiple occassions."

As this picture shows, Tetrapodophis otherwise known as "Four Feet" was a meat-eating predator. It lived in what is currently the Crato Formation of Ceará, Brazil, somewhere around 146 and 100 million years prior.

In the event that Four Feet could be breathed life into back today, "You would be confounded, on the grounds that you would be feeling that this resembles a snake...but it's odd; it shouldn't have feet," lead creator David Martill of the University of Portsmouth told Discovery News.

He, Longrich, and co-creator Helmut Tischlinger accept that the bizarre reptile and its kinfolk advanced ever-littler appendages after their ancestors experienced an underground stage. Amid this time of the Early Cretaceous, the creatures tunneled underground.

"Appendages act as a burden on the off chance that you are tunneling through delicate sand," Martill clarified. "Vastly improved to "swim" through leaf litter or sand. As legs got littler, "swimming" turned out to be more effective."

The researchers further suspect that these undulating developments were pre-adjustments to genuine swimming in water.

Four Feet's front appendages were small to the point that Martill portrayed them as being "despicable" and "little."

While miniscule, the feet appeared to be particular, as they were more extensive than those of reptiles. Therefore, the analysts think the feet helped the snake to seize prey and fasten onto an accomplice when mating.

Four Feet's head was marginally pointed and slim, proposes its skull. With respect to its general appearance, "It looked, well, twisted," Longrich said.

"It had the long, slim, serpentine body; it would have had a forked tongue," he proceeded. "It had the expansive stomach sizes of a snake. This is extraordinary to winds, and amazingly the fossil really saves them." 

1969:Armstrong takes a stroll on the moon

At 10:56 p.m. EDT, American space traveler Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, talks these words to more than a billion individuals listening at home: "That is one little stride for man, one titan jump for humankind." Stepping off the lunar landing module Eagle, Armstrong turned into the first human to stroll on the surface of the moon.

The American push to send space explorers to the moon has its beginnings in a well known offer President John F. Kennedy made to an exceptional joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: "I accept this country ought to confer itself to accomplishing the objective, before this decade is out, of finding a man on the moon and returning him securely to Earth." At the time, the United States was all the while trailing the Soviet Union in space advancements, and Cold War-time America respected Kennedy's strong proposition.

In 1966, following five years of work by a universal group of researchers and designers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) led the initially unmanned Apollo mission, testing the auxiliary honesty of the proposed dispatch vehicle and rocket mix. At that point, on January 27, 1967, catastrophe struck at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when a flame broke out amid a kept an eye on platform test of the Apollo shuttle and Saturn rocket. Three space explorers were executed in the flame.

Notwithstanding the setback, NASA and its a great many workers moved forward, and in October 1968, Apollo 7, the initially kept an eye on Apollo mission, circled Earth and effectively tried a large number of the modern frameworks expected to direct a moon adventure and landing. In December of that year, Apollo 8 took three space travelers to the dim side of the moon and back, and in March 1969 Apollo 9 tried the lunar module interestingly while in Earth circle. At that point in May, the three space travelers of Apollo 10 took the first finish Apollo shuttle around the moon in a dry keep running for the booked July landing mission.

At 9:32 a.m. on July 16, with the world viewing, Apollo 11 took off from Kennedy Space Center with space explorers Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin Jr., and Michael Collins on board. Armstrong, a 38-year-old non military personnel examination pilot, was the leader of the mission. Subsequent to voyaging 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 went into a lunar circle on July 19. The following day, at 1:46 p.m., the lunar module Eagle, kept an eye on by Armstrong and Aldrin, isolated from the order module, where Collins remained. After two hours, the Eagle started its plummet to the lunar surface, and at 4:18 p.m. the art touched down on the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong quickly radioed to Mission Control in Houston, Texas, a well known message: "The Eagle has landed."

At 10:39 p.m., five hours in front of the first timetable, Armstrong opened the trapdoor of the lunar module. As he advanced down the lunar module's step, a TV camera joined to the specialty recorded his advancement and radiated the sign back to Earth, where several millions observed in awesome reckoning. At 10:56 p.m., Armstrong talked his renowned quote, which he later fought was somewhat jumbled by his mouthpiece and intended to be "that is one little stride for a man, one titan jump for humankind." He then planted his left foot on the dim, fine surface, made a mindful stride forward, and mankind had strolled on the moon.

"Buzz" Aldrin went along with him on the moon's surface at 11:11 p.m., and together they took photos of the landscape, planted a U.S. banner, ran a couple of basic experimental tests, and talked with President Richard M. Nixon through Houston. By 1:11 a.m. on July 21, both space travelers were back in the lunar module and the trapdoor was shut. The two men dozed that night on the surface of the moon, and at 1:54 p.m. the Eagle started its rising back to the order module. Among the things left on the surface of the moon was a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon–July 1969 A.D–We came in peace for all humankind."

At 5:35 p.m., Armstrong and Aldrin effectively docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 started its adventure home, securely sprinkling down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:51 p.m. on July 24.

There would be five more effective lunar landing missions, and one spontaneous lunar swing-by, Apollo 13. The keep going men to stroll on the moon, space explorers Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission, left the lunar surface on December 14, 1972. The Apollo project was an immoderate and work escalated attempt, including an expected 400,000 architects, specialists, and researchers, and costing $24 billion (near to $100 billion in today's dollars). The cost was supported by Kennedy's 1961 command to beat the Soviets to the moon, and after the deed was refined continuous missions lost their practical