Did Muhammad Exist? The Sana Quran is Strong Evidence that Muhammad did exist.
In 1972, some 12,000 Quranic parchment fragments were discovered in the Great Mosque in the Yemeni capital Sana. One of the findings is a palimpsest which, based on radiocarbon dating, dates with a 68% probability to the period between AD 614 to AD 656. It has a 95% probability of belonging to the period between AD 578 and AD 669. 1Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’ān of the Prophet,” Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, p.348.
This is significant for a number of reasons: one of which is that this is strong evidence for the historicity of Muhammad’s existence which is being questioned by people like Robert Spencer who argues there:
are reasons to believe that the Qur’an took its present shape not in the seventh century but later or even much later (Did Muhammad Exist?, xi).
The Sana palimpsest—assuming the radio carbon dating is accurate and the text was written relatively soon after the parchment was prepared—undermines Spencer’s argument that Muhammad did not exist and that the Quran took its present shape not in the seventh century but later or even much later. 2Sadeghi and Bergmann argue that it is likely that the date of the parchment gives a fairly reliable dating of the Quranic text because:
Given its dimensions, this manuscript must have been expensive, requiring a whole flock of animals. It is unlikely that the folios required for this Qurʾān were procured for a purpose other than the one to which they were put. In the initial decades of Islam, the period to which this manuscript belongs, the Arabs did not have many books to copy beside the Qurʾān. Indeed, the only extant vellum manuscripts of a comparable size in the Higazi script are without exception Qurʾāns. There would not have been a large supply of unused folios this size (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’ān of the Prophet,” Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, p.354).
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References
| ↥1 | Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’ān of the Prophet,” Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, p.348. |
| ↥2 | Sadeghi and Bergmann argue that it is likely that the date of the parchment gives a fairly reliable dating of the Quranic text because:
Given its dimensions, this manuscript must have been expensive, requiring a whole flock of animals. It is unlikely that the folios required for this Qurʾān were procured for a purpose other than the one to which they were put. In the initial decades of Islam, the period to which this manuscript belongs, the Arabs did not have many books to copy beside the Qurʾān. Indeed, the only extant vellum manuscripts of a comparable size in the Higazi script are without exception Qurʾāns. There would not have been a large supply of unused folios this size (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’ān of the Prophet,” Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, p.354). |
