"Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.
He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said."
Parenthetically, the "dots" mentioned were a later diacritical feature added to Qur'anic texts to mark the placement of short vowels; since Arabic, like Hebrew, elides short vowel sounds in the written text, Muslims without Arabic fluency need markers to show them how to verbalize the Qur'an. (Arabic is seen in Islam as a particularly holy language, and while the Qur'an is widely translated, it is considered especially pious to recite and memorize the text in the original Arabic, even if one does not know the language.) I believe diacritics were introduced some 250 years after Muhammad, as they were only needed as Islam expanded beyond the Arabic-speaking world.
Yes, it would seem so. Not an expert but my guess is the earliest use of diacritics appeared around 100 years after Mohammad's death. So even, being generous the claims they make in the article don't hold water.
The probability is fairly high that this is a very old piece of animal skin with some Quranic text written about 100 years or so after his death (being generous).
It should also be noted that there is absolutely zero contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Mohammad. Zero.
We have piles and piles of contemporary historical evidence in multiple forms (statues, tablets, pottery, artwork, etc.) for many important and lesser important persons in history both much more ancient and equally ancient, but for him, nothing. It is only after a significant time gap after his death that we find a trickle of evidence and then a torrent. Exact same thing for Jesus.
If anyone is interested, Tom Holland's "Islam the untold story" is a fascinating introduction to this sacrilegious line of thought.
"It is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography."
I believe both Jesus and Mụhammad existed and both were just humans, the former just a prophet who managed to be ingloriously killed, the later just a military leader who invented a surprisingly effective ideology for his bloody conquests (or the prophet who had the "luck" to live his bloody character, whatever). How these things develop can be easily seen on the more recent and good documented example of
"Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.
He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said."