(English) Birmingham’s ancient Koran history revealed

When it was revealed this summer that the University of Birmingham had fragments from one of the world’s oldest Korans, it made front-page news around the world.
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 Gulf that the discovery could be even more spectacularly significant than had been initially realised.
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.
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.