silent points from that pub .. thank you zeca...
1). ...... The oldest surviving book on "Arab" or "Islamic. paper is gen-erally thought to be a Greek manuscript of the teach-ings of the Church fathers (Vat. Gr. 2200), believed to have been copied in Damascus ca. 800. Apart from a manuscript in the Alexandria public library recently discovered by the Israeli scholar Malachi Beit-Arie,7..............
2). ........ the oldest surviving book on paper in Arabic (in Europe) is a work in Leiden on unusual terms in the prophetic traditions, which is dated Dhu'l-Qa.da 252 (November—December 867). It bears no indication of where it was copied .8 Over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries the use of paper became increasingly common as the early Islamic traditions of oral culture were trans-formed into, although not entirely replaced by, a text-based culture of boo..• As in many cases, the lead seems to have been taken in Iraq and Iran, where paper had been known longest and used in various contexts and by bureaucrats, who were the fitrst to use pap, in large quantities, although few, if any, examples of paper documents have survived from the early period..
3). .......Several dated manuscripts of the Quran copied on paper, presumably in Iran and Iraq, survive from the tenth century, the most famous of which is, of course, that copied by the noted calligrapher Ibn al-Bawwab at Baghdad exactly one thou-sand years ago..
4). ......... In Egypt, over the course of the tenth century, the manufacture of paper completely supplanted the 4,000-year-old papyrus industry, and archaeology confirms what the medieval geographers , that papyrus was no longer used in Egypt.. George Scanlon's excavations at Fustat showed an overwhelming preponderance of paper over papyrus from the eleventh-century levels.
5)....... Only in North Africa and Spain, which was known for its production of leather and hides, did parchment remain the preferred material for copying manuscripts, particularly the Koran, but by the year 1000 even in this region pa-per was being made in significant quantities.
6)..... Several Christian manuscripts in the library of the monastery of Burgos, for example, were partly copied on paper, presumably of Muslim manufacture, as early as the tenth century................
well every day new questions arise on origins of present Islam and Origins of Quran...... .. I wonder what we have now is MONGOL ISLAM...HADITH ISLAM not ISLAM OF QURAN...
Topic: Qur'anic studies today