Discovery of 'oldest' Quran fragments could resolve history of holy text
For the world's 1.6 billion Muslims, the idea that the Quran is a seventh century text disseminated by Islam's founder, the Prophet Mohammed, is neither news, nor particularly controversial.
But in academia the history of this holy text is much more opaque.
For researchers in Islamic studies, historical evidence dating the Quran back to Islam's foundational era has proved elusive. This has led to hotly contested academic debates about the early or late canonization of the Quran, with a small handful of scholars claiming that the book is a product of a much later (mid-eighth century and after) age of compilation or even confabulation, when 'Abbasid-era scholars rationalized and expanded the Muslim religious corpus.… Seguir leyendo »