A copy of the Quran the size of a thumbnail and believed to be around 120 years old has been discovered.<\/p>\n
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A copy of the Quran the size of a thumbnail and believed to be around 120 years old has been discovered.<\/p>\n
Raschid Sohawon, the chairman of the Canterbury mosque in Giles Lane, was given the unusual item 40 years ago by a stranger when he was browsing an Arabic bookshop in Finsbury Park.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But, after recently noticing some of the smudges in the text – which is thought to contain a staggering 84,000 words – he started to wonder just how old it is.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt looks handwritten and it\u2019s in very old Arabic,\u201d Mr Sohawon said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure how old the language used in it is because nowadays everyone writes Arabic in a standardized way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He explained that modern copies of the Quran tend to have 13 or 15 lines of text on each page in order to help people memorize it; whereas in the miniature copy there are 18.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With its front cover missing and pages yellowing, Mr Sohawon says he is reluctant to flick through it as he fears harming the integrity of the book further.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cYou can\u2019t read it without magnifying it because the text is so small.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s unlikely, even with a magnifying glass, that people would have read them because I think a pocket-sized edition wouldn\u2019t have taken up much more room and would have been a lot more legible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
During the same period, there were also similar copies published in Glasgow by David Bryce and Sons, who produced a series of miniature books.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A copy of the Quran the size of a thumbnail and believed to be around 120 years old has been discovered. \u00a0 \u00a0 A copy of the Quran the size of a thumbnail and believed to be around 120 years old has been discovered. Raschid Sohawon, the chairman of the Canterbury mosque in Giles Lane, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":17052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_108372464460192_245495985553329":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[106,224],"class_list":["post-5898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-england","tag-quran"],"yoast_head":"\n