Manuscripts · a Light

A Tübingen fragment holds a quarter of the Qur'an

The university library at Tübingen holds a Qur'anic manuscript catalogued as Ma VI 165, which reached Germany through the nineteenth century consul and collector Johann Gottfried Wetzstein. In 2014 the library published radiocarbon results for it: 649 to 675 CE with 95.4 per cent probability, which places the parchment within about forty years of the Prophet's death. The fragment is not a scrap. It runs continuously from Surah al-Isra to Surah Ya-Sin, roughly a quarter of the whole text, in an early script with sparse dotting. Radiocarbon dates the animal skin and not the ink, so it gives an earliest possible date rather than an exact one, and that caution belongs on every result of the kind.

Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, Ma VI 165