Qur'an

I was very struck by a picture of a page from a very old Qur'an in a recent TLS, otherwise a bit thin on content of much interest to me. Struck mostly by the fine script, presumably easily legible to those familiar with such, old enough in this case for the scribe not to have bothered much with vowels.

And old enough that the parchment involved may have been manufactured from a goat which was alive during the life of the Prophet, and so some time before the codification of the Qur'an by committee, around 650 on our calendar - and with reading about this committee reminding me of King James' rather similar committee some thousand years later.

So meat and drink for those scholars who like to probe the origins, and who, it seems, get the same sort of mixed press from Muslims at large as the German scholars who poked around in the origins of our Bible in the nineteenth century - with some Christians preferring to leave their origins in decent obscurity.

Perhaps they have a point. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-garden-of-eden.html.