Carbon dating suggests the world’s oldest Koran predates the Prophet Muhammad, thus suggesting Muhammad was a fraud, and destabilizing Islam.

According to a recent report issued by The Times of London a copy of the Koran held in England may be even older than the Prophet Muhammad. Scholars report the Birmingham Koran was produced between 568 and 645 AD, while the life of Prophet Muhammad was from 570 to 632 AD.

The carbon dating suggests the Birmingham Koran is so old that it contradicts most accounts of the Prophet’s life and legacy. It’s like finding a copy of the Gospels dating back to before the time of Jesus Christ.

Historian Tom Holland told The Times that the new evidence suggests that traditional accounts of Islam’s origins are wrong, noting:

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 Muhammad and the Companions [his followers].

Keith Small, from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, believes the findings give credence to the theory 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.”

Small said:

This would radically alter the edifice of Islamic tradition and the history of the rise of Islam in late Near Eastern antiquity would have to be completely revised, somehow accounting for another book of scripture coming into existence 50 to 100 years before, and then also explaining how this was co-opted into what became the entity of Islam by around AD700.

Obviously, if Muhammad was lying about receiving the divine revelations which are thought to make up the Koran, Islam would be rendered a fraud. However, as one might expect, Muslim apologists are rejecting the implications of the carbon dating, as well as questioning the fact that while the parchment has been dated, the ink on the parchment has not.

Bottom line: If the Koran predates the Prophet Muhammad, it follows that the Koran is most likely not a product of divine revelation as Muhammad and his followers have claimed, and thus renders false the claims which form the foundation of Islam.

(Note: Reasonable people do not need carbon dating, or any other extraneous test, to reject on its face any claim based on supposed “divine revelation.”)