Muslim tradition holds that the scripture was revealed to the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) between roughly 610 CE and his death in 632, during the era when Heraclius was the emperor of Byzantium and the Tang Dynasty ruled China.

While this find at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham is important, the press seems unaware that a copy of the Quran that dates from the 640s and has about half of the entire book was discovered by a

German team in Sanaa, Yemen two decades ago.

The oldest nearly complete Qurans in the world are just sitting there in the middle of Sanaa, and Birmingham is not the really big story here. And Sanaa is being daily bombed from the air by Saudi Arabia, which has hit civilian buildings

and a refugee camp and part of historic downtown Sanaa.

Islam grew up in Western Arabia at a time when the capital of the old Roman empire had been moved east to Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) and when that eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire ruled much of the Middle East (what is

now Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Syria). The rest, Iraq and Iran, was ruled by the Zoroastrian, Persian Sasanid Empire. Islam grew up about six centuries after the beginning of Christianity, but only about 300 years after it had been

officially recognized as one of the legitimate religions of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine.
Farsnews