Thanks. That's very useful and easy to follow.
Here's a podcast on the Birmingham Qur'an from the same series:
http://15minutehistory.org/2015/11/04/episode-75-the-birmingham-quran/Also a podcast on Islamic origins with Fred Donner:
http://15minutehistory.org/2014/04/23/episode-51-islams-enigmatic-origins/Finally, your current project involves an Arabic papyrus that you discovered in the archives of the Oriental Institute. Can you tell us what you found and how it’s significant for your work?
Yes, it was very surprising and exciting for me to find it. I had actually spent a year on leave several years earlier looking at papyrus collections in Europe trying to find very early documents which would actually predate the crystallization of Islam out of the Believers’ movement. So, that would be documents from the 7th century that didn’t reflect a later understanding. I did find a few fragments, but not much that was very helpful.
Then, when I came back to Chicago and I was preparing for a class on paleography, I was looking over some of the papyri, and I came across this one which somehow has escaped everyone’s notice. It seems to be a very early letter. The script of it is what first struck me because the script is of a very early variety; some of the letter forms aren’t used after about 700, so this is what suggested to me that it was a very early document.
And then, when I began to read it, I found in it a whole bunch of names who are individuals in the orbit of the Prophet and his close companions. It seems to be dealing with the disposition of a relatively modest amount of money–not an insignificant amount, but it’s not a huge fortune. It’s describing basic day to day affairs in a family, perhaps. The letter is about how this small amount of money is to be divided: one dinar to this person, two dinars to that person, and so on.
As I say, it’s very striking because, first of all, some of the people mentioned in it are people from the time of the Prophet. One is one of the Prophet’s daughters, Umm Kultoum, who dies in 630. So if this is actually what it appears to be, it’s one of the oldest Arabic letters we’ve ever found, and it dates from the time of the Prophet himself.
On the other hand, the content is also striking because it does not conform to what a later forger might want to include in it. It does not mention the Prophet, it doesn’t mention Islam, it doesn’t really grind any religious axe, it doesn’t establish any claims to religious authority, political authority, social status, or wealth–so, why would anyone later on forge this thing? It’s very interesting.
It does include phrases that you find in other Arabic letters at the beginning and at the end, phrases that say things like, “I praise you God, other than whom there is no God,” a very nice monotheistic invocation, and at the end things like “peace be upon you and the blessings of God” – salaam aleikum wa rahmat Allah [...] – this is something you find in many letters right up until today.
So, it appears that the writer lived in a community that was clearly monotheistic or oriented toward the worship of a single god, but there’s nothing in the letter that could be called distinctively Muslim. Or, for that matter, distinctively Jewish or Christian. There’s just reference to God, so mindfulness of God is something that’s there. So, it’s extremely interesting, because if it is, in fact, of the date that the content seems to suggest, that is from the 1st part of the 7th century, it’s extremely early and it gives us a window into this community that we don’t know much about on the basis of documentation.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today