Transmission of the Qur’an

Last updated: May 30th, 2025 at 2:43 pm · Est. Reading Time: < 1 minute

Noseda has studied all available folios of the Quran reputed to be from the first Islamic century.  He infers that the combined content of all of them constitutes about 83% of the Uthmanic Text.¹

Kodex Wezstein II 1913 is a Qur’an manuscript kept at Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.  It is from the early eighth century CE.  Its radiocarbon dating has established it to be from 662 CE to 765 CE with 95.4% probability.  Its preserved 210 folios contain 85% of the Uthmanic text.²

So, the Quran has been in written form since the 7^th century CE and has been a fairly stable text since then.

Further Reading

https://islamichistory.com/advent-of-islam/earliest-quran-manuscript

https://historyofislam.org/sources-of-advent-of-islam

Endnotes

1. François Déroche and Sergio Nojo Noseda (eds.), Sources de la transmission manuscrite du texte coranique I: Les manuscrits de style ḥijāzi, Volume 2.  Tome I.  Le manuscript Or. 2165 (f. I a. 61) de la British Library, (Lesa, Italy: Fondazione Ferni Noja Noseda Studi Arabo Islamici, 2001), xxvii.
2. Michael Joseph Marx and Tobias J. Jocham, “Radiocarbon (¹⁴C) Dating of Qur’ān Manuscripts,” in Qur’ān Quotations Preserved on Papyrus Documents, 7^th – 10^th Centuries, eds. Andreas Kaplony and Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 188 – 221.