A recent discovery of the world’s oldest Quran has “startling” implications for Islam.
The fragments of the text were tested for age, revealing the words of Islam are at least 1,370 years old, according to The British Broadcasting Corporation. More specifically, though, experts believe the text was written between A.D 568-645.
“They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam,” David Thomas tells BBC. Thomas is an Oxford University’s professor of Christianity and Islam. “According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the (Quran,) the scripture of Islam, between the years 610 and 632, the year of his death.”
Other scholars are reading between the lines, establishing that the document followed today was altered to fit the new Islamic agenda Muhammad founded.
“This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Quran’s genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven,” Keith Small of Oxford’s Bodleian Library says.
The Muslim faith is built on five pillars, according to PBS, one of which is the declaration of faith, which claims, “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger.”
But how could God speak to Muhammad to write the Quran if the book predated the messenger?
“It destabilizes, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the (Quran) emerged—and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions,” Historian Tom Holland says.
Many blogs have challenged the Quran’s authorship in the past, most of them decreeing the Muslim holy book was “Allah-inspired,” much like the Christian Bible was God-inspired. But it is still widely believed that Allah’s prophet, Muhammad, authored the words.
