The Birmingham leaves, now catalogued as Mingana 1572a, are folio size (343mm by 258mm; 13½" x 10¼" at the widest point),[13] and are written on both sides in a generously scaled and legible script.

The text is laid out in the format that was to become standard for complete Quran manuscripts, with chapter divisions indicated by a decorated line, and verse endings by intertextual clustered dots.

[2] Following an approach by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy in 2013 to contribute a sample from Islamic Arabic 1572 to the Corpus Coranicum project to investigate textual history of the Quran, which coincided with Fedeli's research into the handwriting,[citation needed] the Cadbury Research Library arranged for the manuscript to be radiocarbon dated at the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

[25] In the university announcement, Muhammad Isa Waley, Lead Curator for Persian and Turkish Manuscripts at the British Library, stated:[2] The Muslim community was not wealthy enough to stockpile animal skins for decades, and to produce a complete Mushaf, or copy, of the Holy Qur’an required a great many of them.

The carbon dating evidence, then, indicates that Birmingham's Cadbury Research Library is home to some precious survivors that – in view of the Suras included – would once have been at the centre of a Mushaf from that period.

These portions must have been in a form that is very close to the form of the Qur’an read today, supporting the view that the text has undergone no alteration and that it can be dated to a point very close to the time it was believed to be revealed.Saud al-Sarhan, Director of Centre for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, has been more skeptical, questioning whether the parchment might have been reused as a palimpsest, and also noting that the writing had chapter separators and dotted verse endings – features in Arabic scripts which are believed not to have been introduced to the Quran until later.

They emphasise that while Muhammad was alive, Quranic texts were written without any chapter decoration, marked verse endings or use of coloured inks, and did not follow any standard sequence of surahs.

[27] Historian Tom Holland stated that the manuscript's carbon dating "destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Quran emerged, [and] that in turn has implications for the historicity of Muhammad and [his followers].

[32] In December 2015 François Déroche of the Collège de France confirmed the identification of the two Birmingham leaves with those of the Paris Qur'an BnF Arabe 328(c), as had been proposed by Alba Fedeli.

[4] Marijn van Putten, an academic expert on Quranic manuscripts and who has published work on idiosyncratic orthography common to all early manuscripts of the Uthmanic text type[5] has stated and demonstrated with examples that due to a number of these same idiosyncratic spellings present in the Birmingham fragment (Mingana 1572a + Arabe 328c), it is "clearly a descendant of the Uthmanic text type" and that it is "impossible" that it is a pre-Uthmanic copy, despite the parchment's early radiocarbon dating.