Conservation
As part of the Cadbury Research Library's collections, the Birmingham Qur’an is kept in a secure, climate-controlled environment.
Recognising the text's sacred nature, the manuscript is treated with the utmost respect. A specialist in Islamic manuscript conservation has conserved it and placed in an Islamic-style binding with a fore-edge flap for protection.
Research
International scholars have studied this Qur’an since it arrived in Birmingham in the 1930s. In the 1940s it was catalogued as dating from the 8th or 9th century. While pursuing her PhD at the University of Birmingham, Dr Alba Fedeli used palaeographic analysis - the study of historical handwriting - to identify the script as Ḥijāzi, an early form of Arabic dating to the 7th century.
Following the 2013 Corpus Coranicum Project's investigation of physical evidence from Qur'anic texts, the Cadbury Research Library commissioned independent radiocarbon dating from the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit to enhance scholarly understanding.
The radiocarbon testing, carried out by the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit in 2014, dated the parchment of the Birmingham Qur'an, made from goatskin or sheepskin, to 568-645 CE with 95.4% probability. This analysis dates the death of the animal whose skin was used to make the parchment on which the text is written. The University of Birmingham shared these results in July 2015 and, in response to public interest, opened a temporary exhibition of the manuscript in October 2015.
The radiocarbon result: OxA-29418 Parchment, MS1572 Cadbury Research Library, d13C=-21.04 1456 ± 21 BP
The calibrated date range: OxA-29418 R_Date (1461,21) 95.4% probability 568 (95.4%) 645 calAD
In 2017, the University commissioned further scientific analysis to determine whether the manuscript contained writing invisible to the naked eye. R B Toth Associates, global leaders in new technologies for cultural heritage, working with the Cadbury Research Library, used multispectral imaging to examine the manuscript under different wavelengths of light. The results, shown below, reveal no hidden text, confirming that the manuscript is not a palimpsest (reused parchment) and that the writing visible represents the parchment's first use as a manuscript. A short film of multispectral analysis of the parchment and inks is available on the University's YouTube channel.
In 2018, the Cadbury Research Library commissioned XRF analysis to understand the constituents of the inks on the manuscript. Combined with the multispectral imaging, this confirmed that the brown ink is iron gall ink, while the red ink is made from red lead pigment. Both these inks are contemporary with the radiocarbon result of the parchment. The inks have not been age-tested as there is currently no scientifically reliable method of dating inks.
