Dating of old Quranic manuscripts with modern scientific methods (Carbon-14 dating)

Considering the importance of the Quranic manuscripts as objective documents in the Quran’s history studies, verifying the date and history of old Qurans in the early Islamic centuries can be a strong evidence for researchers and impact theorizing the history of the Quran. Recently, C14 experiments on old manuscripts and presenting the results in the media have made a new revolution in the Quranic manuscript researches. In this paper, we discuss the principles and methods of determining the date of an old object using C14 radiocarbon and express the restrictions, weaknesses and strengths of this method. We also analyze the results of the radiocarbon dating of the various fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient Quranic manuscripts such as Sanaa, Birmingham, and etc. We aim to show that carbon dating is such a powerful method for determining the age of the objects specifically old manuscripts that we can be sure about the history of an object with one or two centuries accuracy. However, it is not right to rely on these results unconditionally and non-conservatively, because the existence of unknown parameters and a margin of uncertainty in the results of this method leads to inaccuracy of the obtained results. For example, this method may not be able to determine whether a manuscript belongs to before or after 'Uthman era which is an important issue in studying the history of Quran.