Variant Korans-

[hawk]

IN 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers working in a loft between the structure's inner and outer roofs stumbled across a remarkable gravesite, although they did not realize it at the time. Their ignorance was excusable: mosques do not normally house graves, and this site contained no tombstones, no human remains, no funereal jewelry. It contained nothing more, in fact, than an unappealing mash of old parchment and paper documents -- damaged books and individual pages of Arabic text, fused together by centuries of rain and dampness, gnawed into over the years by rats and insects. Intent on completing the task at hand, the laborers gathered up the manuscripts, pressed them into some twenty potato sacks, and set them aside on the staircase of one of the mosque's minarets, where they were locked away -- and where they would probably have been forgotten once again, were it not for Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa', then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, who realized the potential importance of the find. Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.

Al-Akwa' sought international assistance in examining and preserving the fragments, and in 1979 managed to interest a visiting German scholar, who in turn persuaded the German government to organize and fund a restoration project. Soon after the project began, it became clear that the hoard was a fabulous example of what is sometimes referred to as a "paper grave" -- in this case the resting place for, among other things, tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran, the Muslim holy scripture. In some pious Muslim circles it is held that worn-out or damaged copies of the Koran must be removed from circulation; hence the idea of a grave, which both preserves the sanctity of the texts being laid to rest and ensures that only complete and unblemished editions of the scripture will be read.

Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries -- they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.

The mainly secular effort to reinterpret the Koran -- in part based on textual evidence such as that provided by the Yemeni fragments -- is disturbing and offensive to many Muslims, just as attempts to reinterpret the Bible and the life of Jesus are disturbing and offensive to many conservative Christians. Nevertheless, there are scholars, Muslims among them, who feel that such an effort, which amounts essentially to placing the Koran in history, will provide fuel for an Islamic revival of sorts -- a reappropriation of tradition, a going forward by looking back. Thus far confined to scholarly argument, this sort of thinking can be nonetheless very powerful and -- as the histories of the Renaissance and the Reformation demonstrate -- can lead to major social change. The Koran, after all, is currently the world's most ideologically influential text.

Looking at the Fragments

THE first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Puin, who had been sent by the German government to organize and oversee the restoration project, recognized the antiquity of some of the parchment fragments, and his preliminary inspection also revealed unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Enticing, too, were the sheets of the scripture written in the rare and early Hijazi Arabic script: pieces of the earliest Korans known to exist, they were also palimpsests -- versions very clearly written over even earlier, washed-off versions. What the Yemeni Korans seemed to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.

Koran Fragments
Yemeni Koran Fragments,
as they were found in 1972.
Photograph by Ursula Dreibholz

Since the early 1980s more than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Korans have painstakingly been flattened, cleaned, treated, sorted, and assembled; they now sit ("preserved for another thousand years," Puin says) in Yemen's House of Manuscripts, awaiting detailed examination. That is something the Yemeni authorities have seemed reluctant to allow, however. "They want to keep this thing low-profile, as we do too, although for different reasons," Puin explains. "They don't want attention drawn to the fact that there are Germans and others working on the Korans. They don't want it made public that there is work being done at all, since the Muslim position is that everything that needs to be said about the Koran's history was said a thousand years ago."

To date just two scholars have been granted extensive access to the Yemeni fragments: Puin and his colleague H.-C. Graf von Bothmer, an Islamic-art historian also based at Saarland University. Puin and Von Bothmer have published only a few tantalizingly brief articles in scholarly publications on what they have discovered in the Yemeni fragments. They have been reluctant to publish partly because until recently they were more concerned with sorting and classifying the fragments than with systematically examining them, and partly because they felt that the Yemeni authorities, if they realized the possible implications of the discovery, might refuse them further access. Von Bothmer, however, in 1997 finished taking more than 35,000 microfilm pictures of the fragments, and has recently brought the pictures back to Germany. This means that soon Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely -- a prospect that thrills Puin. "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word," he says. "They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this."

Puin is not alone in his enthusiasm. "The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt," says Andrew Rippin, a professor of religious studies at the University of Calgary, who is at the forefront of Koranic studies today. "Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic text is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed."

Copyediting God

BY the standards of contemporary biblical scholarship, most of the questions being posed by scholars like Puin and Rippin are rather modest; outside an Islamic context, proposing that the Koran has a history and suggesting that it can be interpreted metaphorically are not radical steps. But the Islamic context -- and Muslim sensibilities -- cannot be ignored. "To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community," says R. Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally -- though obviously not always in reality -- Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless."

The orthodox Muslim view of the Koran as self-evidently the Word of God, perfect and inimitable in message, language, style, and form, is strikingly similar to the fundamentalist Christian notion of the Bible's "inerrancy" and "verbal inspiration" that is still common in many places today. The notion was given classic expression only a little more than a century ago by the biblical scholar John William Burgon.
The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the Throne! Every Book of it, every Chapter of it, every Verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it ... every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High!Not all the Christians think this way about the Bible, however, and in fact, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1981) points out, "the closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Kur'an in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ." If Christ is the Word of God made flesh, the Koran is the Word of God made text, and questioning its sanctity or authority is thus considered an outright attack on Islam -- as Salman Rushdie knows all too well.

Oldest Koran
A page from perhaps the world's
oldest extant Koran, from before
750 A.D. Ultraviolet light reveals
even earlier Koranic writing
underneath. Photograph by
Gerd-R. Puin.
The prospect of a Muslim backlash has not deterred the critical-historical study of the Koran, as the existence of the essays in The Origins of the Koran (1998) demonstrate. Even in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair the work continues: In 1996 the Koranic scholar Günter Lüling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism about "the wide extent to which both the text of the Koran and the learned Islamic account of Islamic origins have been distorted, a deformation unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamicists until now." In 1994 the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam published a posthumous study by Yehuda D. Nevo, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, detailing seventh- and eighth-century religious inscriptions on stones in the Negev Desert which, Nevo suggested, pose "considerable problems for the traditional Muslim account of the history of Islam." That same year, and in the same journal, Patricia Crone, a historian of early Islam currently based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, published an article in which she argued that elucidating problematic passages in the Koranic text is likely to be made possible only by "abandoning the conventional account of how the Qur'an was born." And since 1991 James Bellamy, of the University of Michigan, has proposed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society a series of "emendations to the text of the Koran" -- changes that from the orthodox Muslim perspective amount to copyediting God.


"A Macabre Farce"

THE Koran is a text, a literary text, and the only way to understand, explain, and analyze it is through a literary approach," Abu Zaid says. "This is an essential theological issue." For expressing views like this in print -- in essence, for challenging the idea that the Koran must be read literally as the absolute and unchanging Word of God -- Abu Zaid was in 1995 officially branded an apostate, a ruling that in 1996 was upheld by Egypt's highest court. The court then proceeded, on the grounds of an Islamic law forbidding the marriage of an apostate to a Muslim, to order Abu Zaid to divorce his wife, Ibtihal Yunis (a ruling that the shocked and happily married Yunis described at the time as coming "like a blow to the head with a brick").

Abu Zaid steadfastly maintains that he is a pious Muslim, but contends that the Koran's manifest content -- for example, the often archaic laws about the treatment of women for which Islam is infamous -- is much less important than its complex, regenerative, and spiritually nourishing latent content. The orthodox Islamic view, Abu Zaid claims, is stultifying; it reduces a divine, eternal, and dynamic text to a fixed human interpretation with no more life and meaning than "a trinket ... a talisman ... or an ornament."

For a while Abu Zaid remained in Egypt and sought to refute the charges of apostasy, but in the face of death threats and relentless public harassment he fled with his wife from Cairo to Holland, calling the whole affair "a macabre farce." Sheikh Youssef al-Badri, the cleric whose preachings inspired much of the opposition to Abu Zaid, was exultant. "We are not terrorists; we have not used bullets or machine guns, but we have stopped an enemy of Islam from poking fun at our religion.... No one will even dare to think about harming Islam again."

Old Koran
From the Yemeni Hoard: probably a ninth- or tenth-century Koran. Photograph by Gerd-R. Puin.

Abu Zaid seems to have been justified in fearing for his life and fleeing: in 1992 the Egyptian journalist Farag Foda was assassinated by Islamists for his critical writings about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and in 1994 the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed for writing, among other works, the allegorical Children of Gabalawi (1959) -- a novel, structured like the Koran, that presents "heretical" conceptions of God and the Prophet Muhammad.

Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the University of Paris, is "a very sensitive business" with major implications. "Millions and millions of people refer to the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations," Arkoun says. "This scale of reference is much larger than it has ever been before."

[Ansar Al-'Adl]

The book by M. M. Azami (The History of the Qur'anic Text) responds in detail to all such myths and fantasies.

However, a direct response to the above article is in order:

Orientalists plot against the Qur'an under the guise of academic study and archive preservation

By Aisha Geissinger

In 1972, a 'paper grave' was found by labourers doing restoration work in the Great Mosque in Sana'a, Yemen. Between the mosque's inner and outer roofs was a collection of old parchment and paper documents, damaged books and individual pages. Centuries of rain and damp, and damage by insects and rats had made much of it unreadable. Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa', then president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, thought that the find could be important, and tried to obtain the funds and expertise necessary to examine and preserve the documents. In 1979 he managed to interest a visiting German scholar in the documents, who in turn persuaded the German government to fund and organise their restoration.


The German government sent Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Qur'anic paleology, from Saarland University to supervise the project in 1981. Now, more than 15,000 documents have been cleaned and sorted, and lie in Yemen's House of Manuscripts. The documents include tens of thousands of fragments from almost one thousand different copies of the Qur'an. Some pieces may date back to the first and second centuries after the hijra, making them among the oldest surviving Qur'anic manuscripts. The Yemeni authorities do not want the fact that Orientalists are working on these documents to be widely known, fearing protest from concerned Muslims. So far, they have only allowed Puin and H.-C. Grant von Bothner, an Islamic art historian from the same university, to examine the documents closely.

To the excitement of Puin and von Bothner, some showed minor differences in wording and verse-order from Qur'ans in use today. Knowing that access to the documents could be prevented in future if Muslims realized the implications of their research, von Bothner took more than 35,000 pictures on microfilm of the texts. Now that the microfilm is safely in Germany, Orientalists are free to study the documents and publish their conclusions, and journalists, self-proclaimed reformers and other interested parties can also discuss the implications of the find without having to worry about jeopardizing Puin and von Bonther's research.


An article entitled What is the Koran? was published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1999 about this restoration project. It clarifies its objectives: Puin wants to challenge the Muslim belief that the Qur'an is the unchanged word of God. Muslims, he says, have agreed with the textual critics of the Bible that the Bible has a history and "did not fall straight out of the sky", but have refused to accept that the Qur'an also has a history. He believes that the fragments found in Sana'a will prove that the Qur'an is "a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad" (p. 46). Andrew Rippin, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada, claims that they show that the Qur'anic text "is less stable, and therefore has less authority, than has always been claimed" (p. 45).


The fact is that the existence of minor differences in wording and in the ordering of the surahs in the earliest masahif (manuscripts) is no surprise to Muslims familiar with classical Islamic scholarship of the Qur'an. Such variations occurred for several reasons. One factor is the dialectical differences then existing in different regions of Arabia. Another is that some of the Sahaba kiram (Companions) recorded such masahif for their own personal use. As these persons had either memorised the Qur'an in its entirety or large portions of it, such masahif were written merely as an aid to memory. Therefore, notes in the margins such as the wording of du'as (supplications) occurred, and the order of surahs varied. Books written by classical Muslim scholars, such as al-Suyuti's Itqan, go into great detail about such issues.


When the Khalifa 'Uthman ibn 'Affan ordered that one standard text be used and others destroyed, the Sahaba who possessed masahif containing variants did not object to this ruling, which shows that they agreed with his verdict. Moreover, in the subsequent civil war between the supporters of the Khalifa Ali ibn Abi-Talib and Mu'awiya, calls for arbitration according to the Qur'an never involved claims that the other side had an incomplete or changed Qur'an. This would have been a convenient and devastating weapon if it could have been at all convincing. Knowledge about these variations has been preserved by classical Muslim scholarship, and has been useful to scholars of tafsir (Qur'anic interpretation). It was never seen as evidence against the integrity of the Qur'anic text, however, and for this reason Orientalists have not succeeded in building a compelling argument upon it. Having their own documents to build speculations upon gives them much more room to manoeuvre, as they can define the terms and conditions of their research.


Studies of the texts are likely to achieve two main objectives. For Orientalists, the Sana'a fragments provide more material upon which to build conjectures about the 'evolution' of the Qur'anic text and events in early Islamic history. Would-be reformers will use the documents, or, more likely, Orientalists' conclusions about them, to undercut the authority of the classical scholars and contemporary ulama. The Atlantic Monthly indicates that some Orientalists and 'reformers' will work together on the project of reinterpreting the Qur'an: An Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, similar to Biblical encyclopedias written by textual critics, is being published to present the latest Orientalist approaches to Qur'anic interpretation. Nasr Abu-Zaid, who claims that the Qur'an can only be understood as a literary text, and was legally declared an apostate in Egypt in 1995, is on the advisory board.


Western study of the Qur'an and of Islam originated in missionary and military concerns. Modern 'specialists' in Islam have tried to distance themselves from this heritage and project their conclusions as secular, scientific and unbiased. However, the article reveals a persistent Biblical as well as secular bias These specialists seem blissfully unaware that Biblical criticism and their version of Qur'anic studies did not "fall out of the sky" either. These approaches to scripture are products of a particular historical, political and economic climate.


The Bible is the implicit model against which the Qur'an is measured. It is considered a "cocktail" because it does not present material in the chronological or thematic order typical of Biblical narratives. Secular biases in both Biblical and Qur'anic studies are revealed in hostility to divine revelation in any form: any text dealing with miraculous occurrences is deemed inauthentic. Also, the Biblical form of any narrative is considered to be the most authentic, because it is older, while the idea that the Qur'an, as the latest revelation, could be correct in its different accounts of events is dismissed. The limitations of the purveyors of this 'unbiased' and 'scientific' study of the Qur'an are arrogantly imposed on the sacred text itself. Puin claims that one-fifth of the Qur'an is incomprehensible, apparently because he himself cannot understand it. Fourteen hundred years of Muslim scholarship, devotion and art issuing forth from the Qur'an are seen as carrying less weight than the opinions of a handful of non-Muslims who cannot even claim native fluency in classical Arabic.


The fact that the preservation of Qur'anic documents is left in the hands of such people is a tragedy that reflects the impotence and lack of faith of the Muslim Ummah. It brings to mind the ahadith which describe the disappearance of the Qur'an from the masahif and the memories of people which will occur in the Last Days. The openly political agenda of these Orientalists is evident; once the Muslims' confidence in the authenticity of the Qur'an is undermined, Islam will have no social or political authority. Muslims will no longer be able to claim to know what the divine will is on issues ranging from the implementation of Islamic laws to the liberation of al-Quds (Jerusalem).

Convenient solutions, based on the realities of the political and economic domination of the west, will be imposed upon them with utter impunity.

Muslimedia: May 16-31, 1999

[Muhammad]

Jazakallah Khayr Ansar.

[Khattab]

Here we go again.....................

[Ibn Syed]

Way to go Ansar. I didn't get what Hawk was trying to say at all. What is his point. To me, what I read is a ton of mumble-jumble. Makes no sense. This article is good at answering:

Here are some lecture notes I made for one of my talks on the noble Quran. They are skimpy, unpolished and do not use the normal spelling convention for certain non-English words and names. Moreover, since the notes were for personal use, I did not write down recommended formulae such as "sallallaahu 'alaihi wa sallam" at places where the reader needs to be reminded of them. I'm making them available as is due to demand and their general usefulness.

Preservation of the Quran

1. The Quran was committed to writing during the lifetime of the Messenger. [See al-Itqaan of as-Suyooti]

2. The Quran had not been put into a book form until after the Messenger was taken away by Allah because:

a) It was revealed piecemeal over a period of 23 years and the possibility of fresh revelation existed so long as the Messenger was alive.

b) Certain verses were abrogated by subsequent revelation.

c) So long as the Messenger lived, the community had an infallible guide as to the correct recitation.

3. The decision to compile the Quran was a response to a definite crisis.

4. The project at first was thought to be audacious since it was not something done by the Messenger. This shows the companions' care.

5. Many of the companions had committed the entire Quran to memory.

6. Only material which met the following conditions was accepted for inclusion:

a) It must have been originally written down in the presence of the Messenger. [Ibn Hajr in Fath]

b) It must be confirmed by two witnesses. [Ibn Hajr in Fath]

c) It must clearly not represent portions of the Quran subsequently abrogated by the Messenger. [See Ibn Taimiyyah in Qawl, Zarkashi & Qastallani]

7. The expansion of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula brought about a new crisis which first became evident during the reign of Uthman. Hudhaifah ibn al-Yaman complained that factions in the army were disputing over various Quranic passages and urged him to put an end to it. Unity was being undermined. "The Syrians contended with the Iraaqis, the former following the reading of Ubayy ibn Kab, the latter that of Ibn Masud, each party accusing the other of disbelief." [Ibn Hajr in Fath]

8. The people of Hims, for example, boasted that their way of reciting adopted from al-Miqdad was superior to that of the Basrites, who had learnt from Abu Musa, whose written compilation they acclaimed as "the heart of hearts." [Ibn ul-Athir]

9. Uthman consulted the companions with him who all approved the idea of uniting the community by means of a single text as an excellent idea. [Ibn Hajr in Fath]

10. Why were there different dialectal versions? Because of the inability of certain Arab tribes to master the Quraish dialect.

11. Why reduce to one? Because by the time of Uthman, the Arabs in general had become accustomed to the Quraish dialect. [at-Tahawi]

Ibn-ul-Qayyim suggested the parable: A house may have a number of roads leading to it. If it is in the ruler's judgement that allowing people to use all the roads causes conflict and confusion, then he may decide to permit the use of one road only, forbidding the others. He does not thereby abolish the other roads as such, as they could still lead to the house; he merely forbids their use.

12. Uthman appointed a councl of prominent men for the job. The first members were Zaid, Ibn Zubair, Saeed ibnul-As, Abdur-Rahman al-Harith ibn Hisham. Uthman asked, "Who is the best copyist?" He was told, "The scribe of the Messenger of Allah, namely Zaid ibn Thabit." He then asked, "Who is linguistically more proficient?" The answer was, "Said ibn-ul-As." "Then let Saeed dictate and Zaid write," said Uthman. He further instructed the three Quraish members of the council, "If you differ with Zaid over something, folow the dialect of the Quraish, for the Qura was (first) revealed in their tongue." [Ibn Hajr in Fath]

13. The council followed the following general principles:

a) The original copy was to serve as the principal basis of the new one. [Ibn Hajr in Fath]

b) Additional written material not previously submitted was solicited, so that a wider range of them could be considered. [Ibn Abi Dawud]

c) Variants conforming to the dialect of the Quraish were to be chosen over all others.

d) The entire community was to be apprised of what was submitted, so that the work of final recension would be in effect a collective enterprise, and no one who possessed a portion of the Quran would be passed over. Thus this avoids possible claim that it was an individual effort [Zarkashi].

e) Any doubt that might be raised as to the phrasing of a particular passage in the written text was to be dispelled by summoning persons known to have learned the passage in question from the Messenger. [Suyuti in Itqan]

f) Uthman himself was to supervise the work of the council. [Suyuti in Itqan]

g) Copies were sent to each main division of the Muslim army.

h) All other copies or fragments were ordered to be burnt and a message was conveyed to the major garrison towns to order to emulate the Amir-ul-Mumineen. "I have done away with what is in my vicinity. See that you do away with what is in your vicinity." [Ibn Hajr in Fath]

i) This action was unanimously approved by the companions. Ibn-ul-Qayyim points out it was done for the welfare of the community.

j) Zaid is reported to have said, "I saw the companions of Muhammad (going about) saying, "By Allah, Uthman has done well! By Allah, Uthman has done well!" [Nisaburi]

Ibn Abi Dawud records Musab ibn Sad ibn Abi Waqqas to have testified: "I saw the people assemble in large number at Uthman's burning of the proscribed copies; not a one spoke out against him." Ali commented, "If I were in command in place of Uthman, I would have done the same." [Zarkashi]

p.s. You spelled it Koran-it is spelled like this, Quran.

[Ansar Al-'Adl]

Ibn Syed,
Christians get angry when Muslims prove that the Bible has been changed, so in their fury they try to prove that the Qur'an has been changed, but they fail miserable because God has vowed to preserve the Qur'an, and thus it will always be preserved.

[Ibn Syed]

Okay I got it now. Jazakallah Ansar.

[Ibn Syed]

If the Quran had been corrupted and I knew I wouldn't have memorized any of it. Basically I am saying that the Quran is uncorrupted and in the Quran Allah himself states that the Quran will never be changed. Makes sense because it is his book. If you made a book you wouldn't want someone to come along and change it. So if Allah says nobody will change the Quran nobody will.

[hawk]

I am not sayings it changed, I am just saying that there is a history to the quran.

Its only fanciful imaginings that say that the quran was so thoroughly memorised that its complete.

We know that after a battle so many older muslim men died, that the caliph said that they would never be able to get the quran now.

Its not a matter of the Bible being corrupted. The Bible is a history, that is all.
The Majority of Christians do not subscribe to sola-scriptura.

Muslims cannot understand this since their faith is based on sola-scriptura, or only the scripture.

We base our faith not on the Bible, for what is that but a book, but on the living God that leads us forever.

I know this idea is very hard for muslims to understand since, their next question is,
From where do you know about this God, then?

The answer lies in 2 parts, its in the Bible, but the Bible only teaches you the understanding of God. To build a relationship one must then forget the Bible, and learn God.

Many muslims understand this concept, maybe to suggest to them that they should forget the quran to learn about God is too much for them to bear. Still that is the truth.
A Christian must forget the Bible, a muslim must forget the quran, so long as you hold onto these things, you are an idolator, because you have set up a god (in this book) besides the true God.

Only then can you be a true worshipper of God.

[Ansar Al-'Adl]

Hawk, don't think we'll let you do the same nonsense here that you do on understanding islam. It is disgusting to see the ignorant speak about a subject as though they have authority, when they have no knowledge.

I am not sayings it changed, I am just saying that there is a history to the quran.

And we know the Qur'an's history well and it has been well recorded. They teach it in detail in the Uloom Al-Qur'an courses. What have you studied from the Uloom Al-Qur'an? All you have done is read some orientalist nonsense wihtout consulting the original sources. Can I study astrophysics by star gazing, and then expect to have more authority on the subject than astrophysicists?!

Moreover, you did claim that the Qur'an has been changed by titling this thread "Variant Korans". Yet irrefutable evidence indicates that the Qur'an has been perfectly preserved.

Its only fanciful imaginings that say that the quran was so thoroughly memorised that its complete.

How can you make such a claim when you have no knowledge of the subject? Show me your degree in Uloom Al-Qur'an.

Rather the Qur'an was memorized by every Muslim at the time of the Prophet saws, and preserved in mutawaatir chains.

Memorization
‘In the ancient times, when writing was scarcely used, memory and oral transmission was exercised and strengthened to a degree now almost unknown’ relates Michael Zwettler.(1)
Prophet Muhammad (S): The First Memorizer
It was in this ‘oral’ society that Prophet Muhammad (S) was born in Mecca in the year 570 C.E. At the age of 40, he started receiving divine Revelations from the One God, Allah, through Archangel Gabriel. This process of divine revelations continued for about 22.5 years just before he passed away.
Prophet Muhammad (S) miraculously memorized each revelation and used to proclaim it to his Companions. Angel Gabriel used to refresh the Quranic memory of the Prophet each year.
‘The Prophet (S) was the most generous person, and he used to become more so (generous) particularly in the month of Ramadan because Gabriel used to meet him every night of the month of Ramadan till it elapsed. Allah’s Messenger (S) use to recite the Qur’an for him. When Gabriel met him, he use to become more generous than the fast wind in doing good’. (2)

‘Gabriel used to repeat the recitation of the Qur’an with the Prophet (S) once a year, but he repeated it twice with him in the year he (Prophet) died’. (3)

The Prophet himself use to stay up a greater part of the night in prayers and use to recite Quran from memory.
Companions of the Prophet: The First Generation Memorizers
Prophet Muhammad (S) encouraged his companions to learn and teach the Quran:
‘The most superior among you (Muslims) are those who learn the Qur’an and teach it’. (4)

‘Some of the companions who memorized the Quran were: ‘Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali, Ibn Masud, Abu Huraira, Abdullah bin Abbas, Abdullah bin Amr bin al-As, Aisha, Hafsa, and Umm Salama’. (5)

‘Abu Bakr, the first male Muslim to convert to Islam used to recite the Quran publicly in front of his house in Makka’. (6)

The Prophet also listened to the recitation of the Qur’an by the Companions: ‘Allah Apostle said to me (Abdullah bin Mas’ud): "Recite (of the Quran) to me". I said: "Shall I recite it to you although it had been revealed to you?!" He Said: "I like to hear (the Quran) from others". So I recited Sura-an-Nisa’ till I reached: "How (will it be) then when We bring from each nation a witness and We bring you (O Muhammad) as a witness against these people?"’ (4:41) ‘Then he said: "Stop!" Behold, his eyes were shedding tears then’. (7)

Many Quranic memorizers (Qurra) were present during the lifetime of the Prophet and afterwards through out the then Muslim world.
‘At the battle of Yamama, many memorizers of the Quran were martyred. ‘Narrated Zaid bin Thabit al Ansari, who was one of those who use to write the Divine Revelations: Abu Bakr sent me after the (heavy) casualties among the warriors (of the battle) of Yamama (where a great number of Qurra were killed). Umar was present with Abu Bakr who said: "Umar has come to me and said, the people have suffered heavy casualties on the day of (the battle of) Yamama, and I am afraid that there will be some casualties among the Qurra (those who memorized the entire Quran) at other place…"’ (8)

‘Over the centuries of the Islamic Era, there have arisen throughout the various regions of the Islamic world literally thousands of schools devoted specially to the teaching of the Quran to children for the purpose of memorization. These are called, in Arabic, katatib (singular: Kuttab). It is said that the Caliph ‘Umar (634-44) first ordered the construction of these schools in the age of the great expansion’. (9)

Second Generation Memorizers
"…Quranic schools were set up everywhere. As an example to illustrate this I may refer to a great Muslim scholar, of the second Muslim generation, Ibn ‘Amir, who was the judge of Damascus under the Caliph Umar Ibn ‘Abd Al-Aziz. It is reported that in his school for teaching the Quran there were 400 disciples to teach in his absence". (10)

Memorizers in Subsequent Generations
The Number of Katatib and similar schools in Cairo (Egypt) alone at one time exceeded two thousand. (11)
Currently both in the Muslim and non-Muslim countries thousands of schools with each instructing tens of hundreds of students the art of memorizing the entire Quran. In the city of Chicago itself, there are close to 40+ Mosques, with many of them holding class for children instructing them the art of Quranic memorization.
Further Points of Consideration
- Muslims recite Quran from their memory in all of their five daily prayers.
- Once a year, during the month of Fasting (Ramadan), Muslims listen to the complete recitation of the Quran by a Hafiz (memorizer of the entire Quran)
- It’s a tradition among Muslims that before any speech or presentation, marriages, sermons, Quran is recited.
Conclusion
Quran is the only book, religious or secular, on the face of this planet that has been completely memorized by millions. These memorizers range from ages 6 and up, both Arabic and non-Arabic speakers, blacks, whites, Orientals, poor and wealthy.
Thus the process of memorization was continuous, from Prophet Muhammad’s (S) time to ours with an unbroken chain.
"The method of transmitting the Quran from one generation to the next by having he young memorize the oral recitation of their elders had mitigated somewhat from the beginning the worst perils of relying solely on written records…" relates John Burton (12)

"This phenomenon of Quranic recital means that the text has traversed the centuries in an unbroken living sequence of devotion. It cannot, therefore, be handled as an antiquarian thing, nor as a historical document out of a distant past. The fact of hifz (Quranic Memorization) has made the Qur’an a present possession through all the lapse of Muslim time and given it a human currency in every generation never allowing its relegation to a bare authority for reference alone" reflects Kenneth Cragg (13)

We know that after a battle so many older muslim men died, that the caliph said that they would never be able to get the quran now.

A blatant lie. Go back and re-read the narration.

Its not a matter of the Bible being corrupted. The Bible is a history, that is all.
The Majority of Christians do not subscribe to sola-scriptura.

How many Christians have memorized the Bible in Hebrew, greek, or even English?

Compare that with the millioms of Huffadh who have memorized the entire Qur'an in the original arabic in which it was revealed.

We base our faith not on the Bible, for what is that but a book, but on the living God that leads us forever.

You know that true Christians would attack you for such deviant ideas. The notion of following whatever thoughts in your head you believe to be from God, is so blasphemous that you would be regarded as non-Christian.

Rather this is simply a poor excuse on your part to escape the glaring contradictions between a Christian's belief and the commands of the Bible. You turned your back on what God sent you in the book. Those were the words of God and you corrupted them, and today you discard them.

Your claim of following God's 'inspiration' is nothing more than placing your religion upon the subjective calls of your desires. And the Qur'an says to the People of the Book:

2:145 Verily, if you follow their desires after that which you have received of knowledge (from Allah), then indeed you will be one of those in darkness.

[hawk]

MODERATOR'S COMMENT: YOU WERE WARNED THAT WE WOULD NOT TOLERATE YOUR POSTING LONG ANTI-ISLAMIC ARTICLES TO ESCAPE A DEBATE.

ENJOY YOUR VACATION.

[Ibn Syed]

Ooooh! Burned up. Do you get kicked off the site if you are banned?

[Danish]

u can goto Turkey, Istanbul museum, they have the an early quran there...and its absolutely 100% copy of it

[Ibn Syed]

What does that have to do with the topic brother? And Ansar could you close this thread? hawk has been refuted and is done so there is no point in this now.

[Ansar Al-'Adl]

What does that have to do with the topic brother?

Br. Danish is showing that even the oldest Qur'ans are identical to the ones that we have today - so it is proof that there is no changes in the Qur'an.

And Ansar could you close this thread? hawk has been refuted and is done so there is no point in this now.

I don't think there is any need for that, because other members may have more useful information to post here.

[Ibn Syed]

I got it now Ansar.

[Preacher]

I am not sayings it changed, I am just saying that there is a history to the quran.

Its only fanciful imaginings that say that the quran was so thoroughly memorised that its complete.

We know that after a battle so many older muslim men died, that the caliph said that they would never be able to get the quran now.

Its not a matter of the Bible being corrupted. The Bible is a history, that is all.
The Majority of Christians do not subscribe to sola-scriptura.

Muslims cannot understand this since their faith is based on sola-scriptura, or only the scripture.

We base our faith not on the Bible, for what is that but a book, but on the living God that leads us forever.

I know this idea is very hard for muslims to understand since, their next question is,
From where do you know about this God, then?

The answer lies in 2 parts, its in the Bible, but the Bible only teaches you the understanding of God. To build a relationship one must then forget the Bible, and learn God.

Many muslims understand this concept, maybe to suggest to them that they should forget the quran to learn about God is too much for them to bear. Still that is the truth.
A Christian must forget the Bible, a muslim must forget the quran, so long as you hold onto these things, you are an idolator, because you have set up a god (in this book) besides the true God.

Only then can you be a true worshipper of God.

Hawk

I know that you have been banned, and you might have joined this forum under another id. But that is beside the point, having said that the cockamamie stories that your kind concoct may work with ignorant and naive. But they don't fly with the leraned. Had you or whoever wrote the absurd claims known the "definition of the Qur'an", he or she might have avoived putting his/her foot in mouth.

Please read The Definition of Qur’aan!

Needless to point out that your claims are contrary to all known facts.

[Bittersteel]

wasn't the Quran perfectly narrated by Muslims and written down throughout the ages?

Was the Quran narratted and written and copied down by scholars who wrote the hadiths?is there a chance about those scholars making a mistake while copying the Quran even a minor mistake?I am mainly talking about during the middle ages and after the daeth of the Caliphs.

Can someone explain me shortly whatever the hell happened in Yemen?Were the Qurans that were found there totaly different from our Qurans of today's?


.

[Khattab]

I may be wrong here may Allah forgive me if I am but are you by any chance hawk under a new username (doubt ou will admit it), Im sure he had something like Abdul Aziz under his username.

[Khattab]

As for your question I have a direct answer from the Islam-Online team but my computer is playing up so when it is fixed I will inshallah get it for you.