Discoveries - Ancient Koran History revealed

 As fragments of the oldest Koran is found its produces bigger questions about the origins of this ancient manuscript.
And there are now suggestions from the Middle East that the discovery could be even more spectacularly significant than had been initially realised.

There are claims that these could be fragments from the very first complete version of the Koran, commissioned by Abu Bakr, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad - and that it is "the most important discovery ever for the Muslim world".

As reported by BBC This is a global jigsaw puzzle.

But some of the pieces have fallen into place.

It seems likely the fragments in Birmingham, at least 1,370 years old, were once held in Egypt's oldest mosque, the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As in Fustat.

This is because academics are increasingly confident the Birmingham manuscript has an exact match in the National Library of France, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France

In summer 2015 two leaves of an ancient Koran at the University of Birmingham were identified and dated as being much earlier than anyone had anticipated and among the oldest in the world. The National Library of France, Paris has leaves from the same Koran, brought from Egypt by a vice consul under Napoleon.  The Mosque of Amr ibn al-As in Fustat, Egypt. The fragments of the Koran in Birmingham are believed to have come from this ancient mosque. Alphonse Mingana was born near Zakho in modern-day Iraq in 1878. He brought the manuscript to Birmingham from the Middle East on a collecting trip in the 1920s funded by the Cadbury family. 

Read more about the history here