The Birmingham Folios

A PhD Student in an English Library

In the previous article we followed the carbon-14 to the Kufic fragment of Tübingen, where a radiocarbon measurement in Zürich dated a substantial portion of the Quran to the seventh century with ninety-five percent probability, and thereby irrevocably removed the orientalist thesis that the Kufic script had to be late. We saw how a natural-science measurement, blind to theology and polemic, confirmed the Islamic timeline from a quarter in which no Muslim scholar had had a hand. But the carbon-14 had yet a second, sharper word to speak. A second witness would come from an entirely unexpected quarter, and its dating would lead even Tübingen to a still earlier window.

Birmingham is not a city where one expects to find the history of Islam. It is a city of factories and canals, of chocolate and steel, of a grey sky that promises rain nine months of the year. And yet there, among the tall bookcases of the Cadbury Research Library on the Edgbaston campus, somewhere in a box under the shelfmark Mingana Islamic Arabic 1572, lay a manuscript that would make the world look up. It had lain there for ninety years. No one knew what it was.

In the spring of 2015 a young researcher at the University of Birmingham was working on her doctorate. Her name was Alba Fedeli. She was an Italian Quran specialist, trained in Milan, and she studied the manuscripts of the Mingana Collection with the patient devotion that only a doctoral candidate musters. Folio after folio. Page after page. Comparing the script, examining the ink, noting the orthography, recording the variants. It was the kind of work for which one sits eight hours a day in a reading room and at the end of the day has three sentences down on paper.

And then something caught her eye.

In the manuscript that bore the catalogue number 1572 sat two folios that did not belong with the rest. The rest of the book dated from a later century, probably the seventh or eighth century after the hijra. But these two leaves, bound in among the others, were different in everything that counts: the parchment, the ink and the script betrayed a different hand and a different age. The script was larger, rounder, simpler; not graceful Kufic measure, but the old, organic Hijazi hand that the first generation of calligraphers used.

Fedeli knew enough of Hijazi script to grasp what she held in her hands. The Hijazi hand was the script of the first century after the hijra, written without diacritical points and without vowel marks, with a slightly forward-leaning ductus that carries the elongated and vertical character of the earliest mushafs. The great codices of Sana’a, the mushaf of Tashkent, the mushaf of Samarqand, and the fragments in the British Library all display this same script. Whoever has once seen it recognises it at once.

She took her finding to her supervisor. Prof. David Thomas, head of the department of Christian-Muslim Relations at the University of Birmingham, listened attentively. The director of Special Collections, Prof. Susan Worrall, was brought in. The three looked at one another and made the only decision that is justified in such a situation: they sent a minuscule fragment of the parchment to the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit for dating. The rest science would do.

What they got back was not the answer they had expected. It was an answer that bound the whole calendar of early Islamic history to a laboratory result.

Before this moment no one had seriously argued that somewhere beneath a British university library one of the oldest material Qurans in the world lay waiting. The Mingana Collection was known in academic circles, but was valued above all for its Syriac and Christian-Arabic holdings. The Quran fragments were a by-product of Mingana’s broader ambition. That one of his breakthroughs would lie unseen for ninety years between the leaves of a younger book was a possibility no catalogue had reckoned with. It shows, alongside all it shows about the Quran, also something about the fragility of scholarly discovery: how much still slumbers in our libraries, waiting only for someone who looks closely enough.

The Mingana Collection

To understand why two Hijazi folios could have lain in Birmingham for ninety years without anyone knowing their age, one must go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, to a Chaldean priest with an unusual passion and an unexpected patron.

Alphonse Mingana was born in 1878 in a village near Mosul, in the north of present-day Iraq. He was a scholar of the East Syriac church, schooled in Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic. In the 1910s he moved to England, and in the 1920s he found an unexpected patron in Edward Cadbury, the heir to the famous chocolate empire in Bournville near Birmingham. Cadbury was a Quaker, a man with a deep interest in religious heritage, and he financed what would become one of the most remarkable collecting journeys of the twentieth century.

Between 1924 and 1929 Mingana travelled three times to the Middle East, each time with the charge to acquire manuscripts for what would come to be called the Mingana Collection. He crossed Iraq, Kurdistan, Egypt, Palestine and Syria. He bought manuscripts from monasteries, from private libraries, from traders in the bazaars of Mosul and Baghdad. He brought more than three thousand Syriac, Arabic, Christian-Palestinian and Coptic manuscripts back to Birmingham. Among that mountain of paper and parchment were church fathers, prayer books, legal treatises, chronicles, and a number of early Quran fragments whose cataloguing would sometimes take decades.

The manuscript that would receive the number 1572 belonged to that first arrival. It was catalogued as a Quran manuscript, dated broadly to the seventh or eighth century after the hijra. The two older folios bound in among it had gone unnoticed by an early bookbinder, or, more probably, had been deliberately joined to the younger leaves by that same bookbinder to strengthen the volume or to fill out the library.

For ninety years nothing happened. The box was opened now and then, the manuscript consulted now and then. But the critical eye needed to see that two different centuries had here been joined in a single binding came only with Alba Fedeli. It is a reminder that a discovery sometimes asks not for new materials, but for new eyes.

Mingana himself had written nothing very flattering about the Quran. In a notorious essay from 1917 in The Moslem World he had claimed that the Arabs in the time of the Prophet ﷺ scarcely possessed an alphabet of their own, and that their script, in his view, resembled Syriac estrangelo or even Hebrew. It was a view that could count on little agreement in Islamic scholarly circles, and that was dismantled piece by piece by the paleographic discoveries that followed: pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions at Zabad and Jabal Asis, and the documented letters and dictations of the Prophet ﷺ and his scribes. It is an irony of history that the collection which bears his name would, in 2015, deliver one of the most powerful counter-proofs to his own thesis. Mingana had gathered Arabic manuscripts that spoke of a script he had himself distrusted. Beneath his folios lay a Hijazi mushaf that refuted everything he had claimed.

The Contents of the Two Folios

The two folios together number four written sides. They are leaves of sheep or goat parchment, probably the latter, in a generous format of about thirty-four by twenty-six centimetres. They are sizeable leaves, no pocket format; this was a mushaf meant to be recited lying open on a lectern, not to be carried in a bag. Each page bears seventeen to twenty-five lines, in a spacious, regular Hijazi hand. The ink is dark brown to black. The margins are broad.

The text of the folios contains parts of three consecutive surahs: the close of Surah Al-Kahf (Surah 18), a portion of Surah Maryam (Surah 19), and the beginning of Surah Taha (Surah 20). The order is exactly that of the modern Quran. This sounds obvious, but it is not. It is a first proof, in the most fundamental sense of the word, that the order of the surahs already stood fixed in the earliest phase as it stands fixed today.

The script is pure Hijazi. It lacks diacritical points, the *nuqat al-i'jam* that would later be introduced to distinguish the letters from one another. It lacks vowel marks, the *tashkil* that Abu al-Aswad ad-Du'ali ﵀ would design only decades later under the authority of Mu'awiya ﵁. It is the naked *rasm*, the skeleton of the text, exactly as 'Uthman ﵁ had it copied and exactly as the early mushafs of Sana'a show it. It is a Quran without aids, for its readers needed no aids: they had the text in their hearts, and the parchment was only a second memory.

What astonished the world in July 2015 was not the beauty of the script. It was the agreement with the modern Quran. Line for line. Verse for verse. Word for word. Not one meaningful deviation. Not one reversed sentence, not one added or removed ayah. Here and there an orthographic variant of the kind that occurs in all early mushafs, an alif missing where we now write it, a spelling that strictly follows rasm. Such variants are precisely what the rasm 'Uthmani is characterised by: a frugal spelling in which certain long vowels are not written out, because the oral transmission held the pronunciation fast and the script was only the cornerstone.

The kind of detail that weighs most is in this case the absence of deviation. Whoever hopes for dramatic variants that would undermine the canonical text finds nothing on these two leaves. Whoever hopes for confirmation that the Quran of today is the Quran of the first generation finds everything on these two leaves.

There is a further paleographic aspect that a trained eye notices at once. On the Birmingham folios the ayah dividers are missing. In the earliest mushafs the verses were not separated from one another by dots or little circles; the divider would be introduced gradually in the late first century, first in the form of three columns of three dots, later in a triangular arrangement, later still with gold-ink teardrops for every tenth verse. That the Birmingham folios lack these aids places them paleographically in the earliest phase of the mushaf tradition, before the first reading aids made their entry. The absence of ayah dividers is no defect; it is a dating.

A second paleographic detail. The surah titles in the Birmingham folios are absent. The earliest mushafs did not separate the surahs with titles but with a simple bismillah or, in a somewhat later phase, with a coloured ornament and gold. The absence of titles on the Birmingham folios is a second indication that they belong to the very first phase, prior to the ornamentations that arose in the late first and early second century after the hijra.

A third detail, for those who see it. The spelling of certain words follows the rasm 'Uthmani so purely that it is early rather than a later normalisation. For the modern reader this means that some words are not written quite as they stand today in a printed Quran; the pronunciation is identical, but the written form is spare. Whoever lays the mushaf of Ibn al-Bawwab from the year 391 after the hijra beside a modern Madinah printing finds already differences in spelling that are not meaningful but are illustrative; the Birmingham folios lie at the earliest end of that spectrum.

Radiocarbon: 568 to 645 CE

The laboratory that examined the parchment skin in Oxford is among the most respected in the world. The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit has dated manuscripts, bones, textiles and wood since 1980 by means of accelerator mass spectrometry, a method that measures with great precision the quantity of carbon-14 in a sample. The method has a margin, but that margin is clearly fixed with uncertainty percentages.

The result for the two Birmingham folios was remarkable. The parchment had been produced, with a confidence interval of 95.4 per cent, between the year 568 and the year 645 of the common era.

One must let that figure settle for a moment.

The year 568 CE lies two years before the birth of the Prophet ﷺ in the Year of the Elephant. The year 645 CE lies thirteen years after his passing in the year 11 after the hijra. The middle value, the most probable year, would fall somewhere near his prophetic mission. The parchment on which this Quran is written came from an animal that lived during, or just after, the life-years of the Messenger of Allah ﷻ.

Here is a paleographic detail that makes the outcome sharper still. Parchment is prepared immediately after the slaughter of the animal. It is stretched, scraped, limed and worked; that process takes a few weeks to a few months. After that it is writable. It can in principle lie unused for years, but the practice in the early Islamic period was that parchment was costly and rarely hoarded for long. A sober upper bound for the writing date is therefore a few decades after the production of the material. A sober lower bound is directly after the production.

Practically this means: these two folios were written within, or very shortly after, the lifespan of the generation that had received the Quran directly from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ. They are not copies of copies of copies. They are, with great probability, copies made under the direct authority of the Companions ﵃, in the very decades in which Abu Bakr ﵁ had issued the first compilation order and 'Uthman ﵁ had sent the canonical copies to the provinces.

The Announcement of July 2015

On 22 July 2015 the University of Birmingham held a press conference in the halls of the Cadbury Research Library. The BBC was present. The Guardian. The Times. Reuters. Al Jazeera. CNN. Before the press conference the two folios had lain in a box for ninety years. After the press conference they made every major newspaper front on earth.

Prof. David Thomas put it carefully. The radiocarbon dating, he said, suggests that this is one of the oldest Quran manuscripts in the world, possibly written by someone who knew the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ personally. Prof. Susan Worrall displayed the manuscript under glass, with white gloves, as the cameras clicked. Dr. Alba Fedeli, the PhD researcher whose eye had seen it, gave interviews in Italian, English and French.

The Muslim community of Birmingham, a city with one of the largest Islamic populations of the United Kingdom, streamed in great numbers to the university. On the first public exhibition days queues formed that stretched far beyond the building. Men and women, young and old, came to look at two leaves of parchment behind thick glass and many wept. It was their Quran. The same one they recited daily. Written on animal skin, thirteen centuries ago, in the hand of a scribe who had perhaps listened to the Prophet ﷺ himself.

The international scholarly press reacted more cautiously but was unmistakably impressed. Joseph Lumbard, an American Quran scholar, wrote that this, together with the Sana’a fragments, consigned once and for all to the archives the thesis of orientalists who claimed that the Quran had only been compiled in the second century after the hijra. Mustafa Shah, lecturer at SOAS in London, indicated that the Hijazi script and the orthography of the folios agreed entirely with what one would expect of a mushaf from the very first decades.

One visitor in particular deserves mention. The rabbi of the central synagogue of Birmingham, Dr. Tann, came with a delegation from his congregation to see it. He stood for a long time before the display case. For him it was the first time he saw a Holy Book of another tradition that could be dated with the same paleographic age as some biblical manuscripts, and he spoke with respect of what he saw. It was, however small the scene, a Birmingham moment in a Birmingham library: an Italian researcher, a British university, a Chaldean-Iraqi priest who had once collected the material, a Jewish-British rabbi who came to see it, and thousands of Muslims who came to touch their heritage with their eyes. It was the best of what an academic community can be.

In the weeks that followed the television crews came in a row. Birmingham, a city usually associated in the press with deindustrialisation and with communal tensions, was suddenly the city where the oldest Quran in the world might lie. The local economy of cultural tourism briefly flourished. The university received book-sponsorship applications from the Arab world that were meant to extend the exhibition. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean American academic journals published discussion forums with titles such as “What does the Birmingham manuscript change?” and “Reading the Cadbury folios alongside Sana’a”. The academic world had a new artefact to think about.

The crucial framing in the press became quickly clear. Together with the Sana’a palimpsest these Birmingham folios formed the oldest material Qurans in the world. Sana’a was a larger find in volume; Birmingham was a finer find in dating, because here for the first time a radiocarbon result compressed the writing date to a window of only eighty years, with an average that fell right in the middle of the prophetic period.

What It Proves and What It Does Not Prove

A careful argument calls for careful distinctions. It would be tempting for the author of this article to let the Birmingham folios stand for more than they are; it would be tempting for the critic to let them stand for less. Both temptations must be resisted.

What do the folios prove?

First: that the rasm of the Quran, the skeleton of the text, is in the earliest material witness we possess identical to the rasm of the modern Quran. The order of the surahs, the demarcation of the verses, the spelling of the words, the choice of wording, all of them fall within the margin of orthographic variation that was normal within every early mushaf. Spelling variants of the type hatta that was pronounced by some tribes as 'atta, or alif that was or was not written out in the script, are all within the Hijazi writing system that 'Uthman ﵁ recognised.

Second: that the Quran, in a material sense, was not “compiled” in the second or third century after the hijra, as a whole line of orientalist scholars, from Goldziher to Wansbrough, had argued. A mushaf on parchment written with 95.4 per cent probability in the seventh century destroys that theory without further argument. The material history speaks more strongly than the speculative history.

Third: that the oral and the written transmission of the Quran went together from the very beginning. It is known that the Prophet ﷺ in Medina had a great number of scribes, drawn from diverse tribes and regions, who at his direction recorded the revelation on pieces of parchment, leather, shoulder blades of camels, palm branches and white stone. The Birmingham folios are a product of precisely that process: parchment written by a scribe from that circle or his direct pupils.

What do the folios not prove?

The parchment dating does not, strictly speaking, prove when the ink was applied to the parchment. It proves only when the animal whose skin it came from lived. In theory a scribe could still have written on an unused sheet decades after the production of the parchment. This is a nuance that every serious paleographer acknowledges. The ink examination that would offer additional certainty requires destructive sampling and has, for understandable reasons, not been carried out.

But this nuance has its limits. Hijazi script was not used for endlessly long; it was gradually replaced by the Kufic variants over the course of the first century after the hijra. A scribe in 720 CE who copied a Quran onto old parchment from 600 CE would probably not write in Hijazi, but in an early Kufic hand. The combination of early parchment and early script strengthens the argument that the writing cannot have been much later than the production of the material.

The cautious conclusion is therefore measured and correct at the same time: the Quran of Birmingham is, with overwhelming probability, a mushaf from the middle of the seventh century, written within one generation of the passing of the Prophet ﷺ, in the same period in which 'Uthman ﵁ distributed his canonical copies. It is an early material witness that fits seamlessly into the timeline the tradition has always transmitted, without one having to stretch the window of the dating so much as a single step. It is not a “Quran of the Prophet ﷺ himself”; such claims are made for other manuscripts, and will be discussed in the next article. But it is a Quran of the Companions ﵃, or of their direct pupils, and that is in itself a wonder of preservation.

A second distinction that must be made here: the Birmingham folios likewise do not prove, on their own, that all early Muslims recited the same Quran without any variation. History knows accounts of private mushafs of Companions ﵃ such as Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ and Ubay ibn Ka’b ﵁ that deviated in detail; these deviations concerned mainly the order of surahs and sporadic word choices, not the content of the revelation itself. The canonisation under 'Uthman ﵁ had as its aim to replace those divergent private copies with one standardised rasm, and the Birmingham folios are a fruit of that canonisation process. They therefore prove that the canonisation project was successful, not that variants had never existed; and they confirm that the canonical rasm of 'Uthman ﵁ is the text the Umma has preserved ever since.

A third distinction: one sometimes speaks loosely of “the Birmingham Quran” as if it concerned a complete mushaf. It is only two leaves, together four printed sides, with the text of three surahs in fragments. It is no closed volume. But the fragmentariness detracts nothing from the evidential force; the chemistry and the paleography do not depend on the quantity, only on the quality of the material. Two folios suffice to cut short a century of revisionist speculation.

The Silence of the Academy

In the years after the announcement of 2015 there was a noticeable phenomenon to which one usually pays too little attention. It is a phenomenon of silence.

When a discovery is made that has uncomfortable consequences for a scholarly paradigm, peer-reviewed articles usually appear within a few years that call the discovery into question, interpret it otherwise, or limit its implications. That is healthy. That is science as it ought to function.

For the Birmingham folios this has happened to a limited degree. A few paleographers have suggested that the parchment is indeed old, but that the script must perhaps be dated somewhat later than the radiocarbon result implies; a minority voice, emphasising the upper end of the 568 to 645 margin or cautiously shifting it a few decades later. Others have observed that the two folios may come from the same codex as some leaves that are held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, under the shelfmark Arabe 328c, which helps to fix the archaeological context of the Birmingham folios.

What is, however, remarkably absent is a serious textual argument against the agreement of the Birmingham text with the modern Quran. It is absent because there is nothing to write about. The variants that occur on the two folios are of the kind of orthographic detail that is found in every early mushaf. No ayah is shifted, no verse is missing, no word is different.

The crucial silence is precisely there where the critics had beforehand predicted static noise. A whole generation of revisionist scholars had expected that, if ever a genuinely early Quran were discovered, it would deviate dramatically from the canon. Sana’a delivered, in its lower layer, a few variants; all small, none of meaningful theological character. Birmingham delivered no variants of any weight. Where the critics had predicted textual turbulence, they found textual fidelity.

That is, for those who have followed the history of critical Quran research, not nothing. It is the silent confirmation that a whole theoretical edifice, erected on the presupposition that the Quran must have been “compiled” in the second and third centuries, is washed off its foundation by one radiocarbon result and one pair of Hijazi folios.

Whoever has read the three great revisionist works of the twentieth century, John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies from 1977, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism from that same year, and Gerd-Rüdiger Puin’s early articles on the Sana’a fragments from the nineties, recognises in all these works a common presupposition: that the silence of archaeology was an argument. The Quran, so ran the reasoning, could not stem from the seventh century, because there were no material traces. The silence was, so it was supposed, evidence for a later origin.

The silence, however, is no evidence; it is a gap that awaits filling. Sana’a filled the gap in 1972. Birmingham filled it more deeply in 2015. And with every new radiocarbon result published over the past fifteen years on Hijazi fragments in Paris, Tübingen, Leiden and Saint Petersburg, the material window closes further around the seventh century. The silence of archaeology was never the evidence it was taken for; it was the patience of a waiting truth.

Two Witnesses, One Text

Quran scholarship knows an old rule of law taken over from Hadith scholarship: one reliable witness is evidence; two independent reliable witnesses who say the same thing is certainty. The Arabic word mutawatir denotes that independent multiple transmission about which no reasonable doubt can be raised.

With the Birmingham folios the world possesses a second independent material witness of the Quran text from the first century after the hijra. The first was Sana’a, unearthed in 1972 from the woodwork of the Great Mosque. The second is Birmingham, lying since the 1920s in a box in England, identified in 2015 by an Italian doctoral candidate.

Both witnesses were preserved in different places. Both witnesses were dated with different methods. Both witnesses have different early histories. Sana’a came from Yemen, probably from the second half of the first century after the hijra. Birmingham comes possibly from Egypt or Syria, probably from the first half of the first century after the hijra, given the extremely early radiocarbon margin. Two independent witnesses, two different locations, one text.

They agree with each other and with the modern Quran. The deviations that appeared in Sana’a beneath the scraped-away surface had already been erased within the first century as faulty personal copies. The Birmingham folios show no deviations of any weight. Together they deliver the material confirmation of what Muslim scholarship had always taught: that Allah ﷻ has not only promised to preserve His Book, but that He has actually fulfilled that promise in history.

That verse was revealed to an unlettered Prophet ﷺ in Mecca, in a cave, on a mountain, in a city where books had as yet no value. Thirteen centuries later two leaves of parchment in an English university library point to the fact that the promise of that ayah was no poetic phrase, but a historical programme that, century after century, could be read off in the parchment itself.

The Evidence Accumulates

When a judge weighs a case, he asks for evidence of various kinds. He asks for material exhibits, for witnesses, for documents, for plausible motives, for independent confirmations. The more independent lines of evidence point in the same direction, the more firmly his verdict can rest.

For the Quran the lines of evidence have grown visibly over the past century and a half. The hadith transmission and the historical works of the first two centuries after the hijra had always been detailed about the compilation under Abu Bakr ﵁ and the canonisation under 'Uthman ﵁. The Sana’a manuscript added to that in 1972 the first great material witness. The Birmingham folios added to that in 2015 a second and chronologically still earlier witness. To these come dozens of smaller fragments in Berlin, Paris, Saint Petersburg, Cairo and Istanbul, all Hijazi or early Kufic, all within the first century or beginning of the second century after the hijra, all in textual agreement with the canonical mushaf.

The evidence accumulates. It accumulates in one direction. It all points to the same Quran text, in the same order, with the same verses, in the same wording. The Quran that the Muslim of today lays on his lectern is the Quran that stands on the parchment of Birmingham, is the Quran that glimmers away in the palimpsest of Sana’a, is the Quran that the Prophet ﷺ dictated to his scribes in Medina.

Two great mushafs remain, and their story deserves an article of its own. In the Topkapi Sarayi museum in Istanbul a mushaf is kept that the tradition ascribes to 'Uthman ﵁ himself. In the Telyashayakh mosque in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, a second mushaf is kept of which it is likewise claimed that it stems from 'Uthman ﵁; some leaves moved to Saint Petersburg in the nineteenth century, others were returned in 1924 by Lenin to the Muslims of Turkestan. Both manuscripts are visited, photographed and kissed by thousands of visitors per year. Both carry claims that are contested in the paleographic community.

Are these really the mushafs that 'Uthman ﵁ sent to the provinces in 25 after the hijra? Or are they somewhat later copies that took over the name of the Caliph through reverence and use? The question is large, and the answer calls for patience. In the next article we follow two chests of parchment through thirteen centuries of history, from a prayer near Medina to a display case in Istanbul, from a Central Asian mosque to the palace of the tsar and back again. It is the story of two codices each of which carries the sacred status of a third Aaron’s staff: perhaps real, perhaps a derivative, but in both cases a window onto the devotion with which the Umma has carried its Book through the ages.

For that is how this history works. A cave near Mecca, a room in Medina, a souk in Mosul, a box in Birmingham, a display case in Istanbul, a lectern in Tashkent. No age carried it alone, no place preserved it entirely, no man could break it. The Quran travelled through the ages as a river travels through a landscape: it takes the shape of the place through which it flows, and remains itself from source to sea. Birmingham was one bend in that river. Topkapi and Tashkent are the next.