The Qur’an may be older than Muhammad, according to new carbon dating

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The oldest Qur’an in the world may be too old for Islam’s most ardent followers.

Back in July, researchers at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom found chapters from a Qur’an that had been mis-bound into a copy whose pages didn’t match. After some examination, they found that the chapters in question were both very, very old and remarkably consistent with the Qu’ran of present day. Their find was cheered by those within the faith as a testament to the resiliency of the Muslim tradition and the consistency of the faith over time, showing once and for all that the Qur’an as read today is aligned with the Seventh Century original.

But there’s a problem: As the London Times reported yesterday, carbon dating of the manuscript places the text, written on sheep or goat skin, between the years 568 and 645 C.E. (with researchers estimating 94% accuracy on their dating techniques). The Prophet Muhammad is thought to have lived between the years 570 and 632 C.E., receiving the revelations that became the text of the Qu’ran some time after 610 A.D. The faith teaches that the first written copy of the holy book was compiled by the caliph Uthman in 653 C.E.

In other words, Islam’s foundational text could be older than Islam itself.

Of course, the emphasis there is on “could.” As Islamic scholars were quick to point out, just because the material on which the manuscript was written dates to during or before Muhammad’s lifetime doesn’t mean that was when the words on said material were written. During that time period, it wasn’t uncommon for pages to be washed and written over. Furthermore, the notation and formatting in the manuscript includes dots and separated chapters, which are said to have been a later development. So it isn’t a sure thing that the carbon dated text completely disproves claim that the Qu’ran is the perfect word of God as delivered to a human being and then transcribed some time later.

But it does make the claim a whole lot less believable. Again from the London Times’s report:

The Qur’an, via Wikimedia Commons

Tom Holland, the historian and author of In The Shadow of the Sword, said evidence was mounting that traditional accounts of Islam’s origins were unreliable or even wrong.

This would be especially challenging for the Salafist branch of Islam, whose offshoots include al-Qa’ida and Islamic State, and which attempts to rebuild the politics and lifestyles of Mohammed’s contemporaries as described in later historical sources, most of which were only compiled after AD800.

“It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged — and that in turn has implications for the historicity of Mohammed and the Companions [his followers],” Mr Holland said.

And that’s the whole point. You can use the text in the Qur’an to derive any message that you wish, but you can’t claim with any level of certainty that the text is definitely, certainly, without a doubt, for a thousand percent sure, the literal word of God as claimed by the religion’s founders.

And once that Jenga piece is removed, much of the faith’s moral doctrine comes crashing down with it. The justifications for taking religious texts seriously isn’t that they’re great works of philosophy; it’s that they’re capital-T True because the texts say so. Once you take a chunk out of that piece of circular logic, showing that the claims to inherent truthfulness are uncertain at best, all of the rest of the claims made in the book require a better defense than “because the book says so.”

And that’s what’s got Islamic scholars freaked out about the notion that the Qur’an is older than Muhammad; not the carbon dating itself.

from AMERICAblog News http://ift.tt/1NW6Tfi