Koran Older Than The Prophet Muhammad?

According to some new research the world's oldest Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad himself.

After assessing the fragments of the Koran kept at the Birmingham library, experts revealed that contrary to popular opinion it might not have been created by the Prophet Muhammad. With the help of carbon dating scientists from the University of Oxford revealed that this text was produced between 568 and 645 A.D. In common knowledge, authorized by Islamic scholars, the Prophet Muhammad between 570 and 632 A.D.

According to a Times of London report this is not consonant then, with the claim that the Koran was a scripture that carried forward the words of the Muhammad over 1,350 years.

The report goes on to reveal that historians have started to question the scholarly wisdom that has been accepted thus far. The age of the parchment could change the history of the Koran as we know it. Historian Tim Holland spoke to The Times about the implications of this finding.

"It destabilizes, 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 history of Muhammad and the Companions," he said.

According to Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, this also lends credence to some views that suggest that the Muhammad worked with an already existing text and offered a revised version fitting to his ideology:

"This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran'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."

This discovery could actually challenge a lot of the accepted wisdom about the genesis of the Koran. Professor Nadir Dinshaw, who works in the department of inter-religious relations at the University of Birmingham concurs.

"This could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam," he said. "According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Qur'an, the scripture of Islam, between the years AD 610 and 632, the year of his death."