Link for reference: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33436021
I know much more about the history of the New Testament, so reading that a manuscript had been carbon dated from less than fifteen years after Muhammad's death kind of shocked me. Is this find as big a deal historically as the BBC article makes it sound? I know that journalists often overstate the importance of these sorts of finds to get a splashier headline. Do old manuscripts of the Koran vary as wildly as old manuscripts of the Gospels do? Is it really possible that this manuscript was written by someone who actually met Muhammad?
Depends what you mean by "big deal." In terms of accepted scholarship about the Qur'an, not a big deal at all. There's never been much serious credence to the idea that there have been widely varying texts of the Qur'an or that what we have is very different than what Muhammad passed on to this followers. I mean, there have been a few theories floated of the Qur'an being composed much later than popularly thought or being originally a Syriac text or other more out-there theories. However, none of them really had much traction to begin with in academia. Don't get me wrong, those theories do exist but they were untenable to begin with and rested on flimsy evidence. The Qur'an as it exists today has no variation between geographic regions and pretty much all manuscripts of Qur'an are virtually identical (aside from accepted diacritical variations of variant recitations). The tradition of [oral preservation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafiz_(Quran) and recitation out loud in front of each community every Ramadan in night prayers have always gone hand in hand with the written text and helped preserve the Qur'an.
So from that point of view, this wasn't a big deal at all. You can match up the modern text easily with the manuscript. However, it is a huge deal in the fact that this is AFAIK, the absolute oldest manuscript every discovered. Carbon dating of this time period is actually a lot more accurate than carbon dating recent material. So there's a very good chance that whoever wrote this had met Muhammad in person. The latest this manuscript could have been written (with 94% certainty anyway), is in the caliphate of 'Umar. So from that point of view, it's huge. But solely as an artifact and simply additional confirmation of the dominant theory that the Qur'an as it exists today is the same that existed in the time of Muhammad.
So in short, it might be something nice to add in a powerpoint slide while teaching a class on Islamic history but it's not important in terms of changing our understanding of early Islam.
