A Saudi in the southern city of Abha claims to own one of the oldest handwritten copies of the Holy Quran. The first page of the Quran is dated with the Hijrah year 116 - over 1,300 years ago.
Mohammad bin Nasser Al-Kudry said that he purchased the Quran several years ago from an elderly man for a large sum of money. The Quran is covered in natural leather with Islamic calligraphy, and the text is an Arabic script known as cursive Neskhi.
Supervisor of the Shada Archaeological Palace in Abha, Anwar Mohammad Al-Khalil, said that the Quran is beautiful. “I cannot say exactly when it was written. In order to find out, we must have it examined at a specialized research centre,” he explained.
A large number of very old copies of the Quran are preserved in libraries and museums worldwide. At the library of the Great Mosque in Sanaa, there is a copy of the Quran which is reputed to be in the handwriting of Imam Ali bin Abu Taleb, Zayd bin Thabit and Salman Al-Farsi; written in large un-vowelled Kufic script, the Quran is in two parts of 150 pages.
UNESCO has compiled a CD of over 40 Quranic manuscripts dated from the first century Hijrah (in both Hijazi and Kufic scripts), one of which is from the beginning of the first century. A library in Mashhad, Iran, has 11,000 Quranic manuscripts - the world’s largest collection of its kind. The Islamic Museum in Jerusalem is also a repository of Quranic manuscripts in various scripts and of various sizes and ages.
Source: SPA
