> The two parchment leaves are believed to contain parts of Suras (chapters) 18 to 20, written with ink in an early form of Arabic script known as Hijazi.
Give it time, I'm sure it'll be released. Though being in Hijazi script might make it somewhat more difficult to compare with modern Arabic versions anyway
It's from the Surat Taha (found from simple Google search, but also indicated by the first two Muqattaat letters), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta-Ha.
"None of Our revelations do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but We substitute something better or similar: knowest thou not that Allah hath power over all things?"
Given the context, and the concept of abrogation itself, doesn't the quran pretty much says about itself that it was changed. And this verse itself is inconsistent since it both says it was changed and not changed.
And of course one can easily find examples of changes. And if you want to laugh about the whole thing :
"Wahadi says that this verse was sent down because the associators said, "Do you not see Muhammad, how he commands
his people to do something, then forbids them to do it and commands them to do its opposite? Today he says one thing and
tomorrow he changes his mind regarding it. The Qur'an is no more than the words of Muhammad, which he utters from
himself. It is composed of words which contradict one another." Thus says Wahidi, God sent down verse 101 of al-Nahl
(Q. 16), and this verse (Wahidi, p. 32: see also Zamakhshari, I. p. 303). Tabari interprets abrogation
(naskh) broadly as "what we [that is, God] abrogate regarding the precept of a verse which we change, or for
which we substitute another, so that what is lawful may become unlawful and what is unlawful may become lawful;
what is permitted may become prohibited and what is prohibited may become permitted. This however, can only be
done with regard to commands and prohibitions... but as for reports or narratives, they can neither be abrogated
nor can they abrogate" (Tabari, II, pp. 471-472; see also Shawkani, I, pp. 125-126)."
really surprised that they did not test for any previous washed text underneath since this is both common and the test quite simple and easy to perform
Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.
He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said.
"Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.
He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said."
Parenthetically, the "dots" mentioned were a later diacritical feature added to Qur'anic texts to mark the placement of short vowels; since Arabic, like Hebrew, elides short vowel sounds in the written text, Muslims without Arabic fluency need markers to show them how to verbalize the Qur'an. (Arabic is seen in Islam as a particularly holy language, and while the Qur'an is widely translated, it is considered especially pious to recite and memorize the text in the original Arabic, even if one does not know the language.) I believe diacritics were introduced some 250 years after Muhammad, as they were only needed as Islam expanded beyond the Arabic-speaking world.
Yes, it would seem so. Not an expert but my guess is the earliest use of diacritics appeared around 100 years after Mohammad's death. So even, being generous the claims they make in the article don't hold water.
The probability is fairly high that this is a very old piece of animal skin with some Quranic text written about 100 years or so after his death (being generous).
It should also be noted that there is absolutely zero contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Mohammad. Zero.
We have piles and piles of contemporary historical evidence in multiple forms (statues, tablets, pottery, artwork, etc.) for many important and lesser important persons in history both much more ancient and equally ancient, but for him, nothing. It is only after a significant time gap after his death that we find a trickle of evidence and then a torrent. Exact same thing for Jesus.
If anyone is interested, Tom Holland's "Islam the untold story" is a fascinating introduction to this sacrilegious line of thought.
"It is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography."
I believe both Jesus and Mụhammad existed and both were just humans, the former just a prophet who managed to be ingloriously killed, the later just a military leader who invented a surprisingly effective ideology for his bloody conquests (or the prophet who had the "luck" to live his bloody character, whatever). How these things develop can be easily seen on the more recent and good documented example of
It's funny how Muslims claim it's a "miracle" of Koran that it hasn't changed since it was published. Of course it hasn't changed, technology was at a point that it was possible to keep a book from forgers but publishing it heavily and also, there were many muslims trying to protect Koran from day one.
P.S. I born Muslim so I get to be critical about Islam and I think everyone should be able to do so.
Actually, it's quite explainable. Unlike the Bible, the "official" version of the Koran has always been the original text in the original version of Arabic spoken in the 7th century. Since it was written down at the time without having to rely on decades or even centuries of oral tradition, as was the case with the Christian and Hebrew scriptures, it's understandable that the text has remained unchanged.
Once you start translating something into different languages, that's when the unavoidable changes start working their way in. So, I agree with you that it's not "miraculous" in any way, but it is a fascinating and important archaeological find.
>it's understandable that the text has remained unchanged //
Understandable but not true. There are, currently extent, versions of the text with variations. There was a significant effort made to create a single authoritative version to enforce the narrative of the text being a perfect copy of one in heaven.
"When the task was finished Uthman kept one copy in Medina and sent others to Kufa, Baṣra, Damascus, and, according to some accounts, Mecca, and ordered that all other variant copies of the Quran to be destroyed. This was done everywhere except in Kufa, where some scholars argue that, Ibn Masʿūd and his followers refused."
Thousands of people claim below:
The famous ten People who form the chains of narration regarding the Quran are as follows.
Umar ibn al Khattab [26]
Uthman bin Affan[27]
Ali ibn abi Talib[28]
Abu Musa al Ash'ari[29]
Ubay Ibn Ka'b[30]
Abdullah ibn Masood[31]
Zayd Ibn Thabit[32]
Abu Hurairah[33]
Abdullah Ibn Abbas[34]
Abu al-Darda[35]
Amongst those ten the two most important people were zayd ibn thabit the personal scribe of Muhammad and Ubay ibn Ka'b who was the foremost authority on the Quran after zaid.[36][37]
So 12 people were essentially responsible for Quran, mostly through hearsay.
"The Quranic canon is the form of the Quran as recited and written in which it is religiously binding for the Muslim community. This canonical corpus is closed and fixed in the sense that nothing in the Quran can be changed or modified. The process of canonization ended under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (r. 23/644–35/655), which was about twenty years after the death of the Muhammad"
Edit, most of it is hearsay any way:
Zaid ibn Thabit, Muhammad's primary scribe, was assigned the duty of gathering all of the Quranic text. He gives an insight into what happened during the meeting between Abu Bakr, Umar, and himself:
"Abu Bakr sent for me at a time when the Yamama battles had witnessed the martyrdom of numerous Companions. I found 'Umar bin al-Khattab with him. Abu Bakr began, Umar has just come to me and said, 'In the Yamama battles death has dealt most severely with the qurra',[Reciters of the Quran] and I fear it will deal with them with equal severity in other theatres of war. As a result much of the Quran will be gone. “ 'I am therefore of the opinion that you should command the Quran be collected.'" Abu Bakr continued, "I said to 'Umar, 'How can we embark on what the Prophet never did?' 'Umar replied that it was a good deed regardless, and he did not cease replying to my scruples until Allah reconciled me to the undertaking, and I became of the same mind as him. Zaid, you are young and intelligent, you used to record the revelations for the Muhammad, and we know nothing to your discredit. So pursue the Quran and collect it together." By Allah, had they asked me to move a mountain it could not have been weightier than what they requested of me now”. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih,Jam'i al-Qur'an, hadith no. 4986; see also Ibn Abu Dawud, al-Masahif, pp. 6-9)"
The person ordered to compile the Quran by Abu Bakar said:
...By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Quran... So I started locating the Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leafstalks of date palms and from the memories of men.[Bukhari Sahih al-Bukhari, 6:60:201]
"So I started looking for the Holy quran and collected it from (what was written on) palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones, and also from men who knew it by heart, until I found the last verse of Surat at-Tauba (repentance) with Abi Khuzaima al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p. 478).[23]
Indeed, so compared to the Bible there is small room for argument against canonization. It is still there, but the textual evidence (what would be necessary for this) vanishes abruptly before the Uthman version.
I assume you mean "hearsay" ("information that was heard by one person about another"), rather than "heresy" ("A doctrine held by a member of a religion at variance with established religious beliefs")? Use of the latter term by accident might be a little unfortunate given the nature of the topic :)
Ok, we edited it for you to correct "heresy" to "hearsay". Seems like an important correction in a thread about religious text. (If you don't want this change, let us know and we'll revert it.)
Thousands of people had the entire Quran committed to memory during the lifetime of Mohammad. The standardization of the written Quran, and the many "versions" you speak of, deal essentially with dialect and the addition of symbols that guide pronunciation. As far as I know it is generally agreed that the standardization process was carried out in an unbiased mechanical way.
By the way, it is relatively easy to memorize the Quran, because it is in verse form. You can go to any mosque and find children from the age of ten who has it memorized.
>Thousands of people had the entire Quran committed to memory during the lifetime of Mohammad. //
Your comment doesn't address the claim.
Once the canonical written version of the Koran had been established memorising the entire text is relatively easy. Prior to that you would have had to be present when Mohammed revealed the narrations or had a precise rendition of that oration conveyed to you. At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible. Conveying the general meaning is within the realms of possibility; surahs revealed to large groups might even allow the preservation of some of the actual wording too.
Take an example - Armstrong's speech when stepping on to the moon, was it "one small step for a man" or was the "a" not spoken? This is probably the most pored over of all speeches ever, millions of witnesses. Did no camel ever brae in the tents of the Qureshi tribe in Mohammed's time?
Abrogation causes further problems to this claim as not only do all "thousands" have to remember the exact wording used but the exact order too, and they have only a couple of months from the end of Mohammed's narrations to learn the last of them. Not only do they need to know the order, for abrogation purposes (to learn the way to act) but they have to remember the narrations in the same non-temporal order as everyone else. I can believe even that many of Mohammed's followers remembered surah, mostly that they agreed on wording, but not at all that they remembered it in the "wrong" (ie not the delivered order) and that the order it was remembered in was identical (ie was "the entire Quran").
Doesn't 2:106 say that Allah causes ayats to be forgotten, those ayats must have been in the original - else they wouldn't have been narrated by Mohammed - but aren't now remembered and so are not in the "entire Quran".
Of course if surah 25:32 (http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=25&verse=32) that says the Koran was revealed piecemeal is wrong and surah 2:185 is right then the whole Koran was passed on in one month (including future conversations) which makes it easier to attain unanimous agreement but also means that [if tradition that the Koran was passed on in 10 days is correct] the hearers were remembering > 600 ayats of prose each day for 10 days in a row; quite a feat for illiterate desert tribesmen regardless of whether they had a tradition of oral history or not.
I'm very interested in the Muqatta'at too - how were written character variations conveyed by the "thousands"?
Very fair argument. However there also existed a consistent, full-time effort by significant numbers of people, around 70 in number, (known as Ashab as Suffa or People of The Platform) whose sole job was to memorize the Koran (and learn its interpretations) during the lifetime of Mohammed. They lived in the mosque pretty much all day, and did nothing else. Their learning was regularly checked, and presumably feedback given by Mohammed, until his death. It is not impossible to imagine that they were able to memorize and organize the current canonical text in the right order, even though it was revealed piecemeal. After Mohammed's death, these people went on to travel all over the Islamic world and teach students, giving rise to the "thousands" of memorizers within the 2nd generation of Islam, with no recorded incidents of version conflicts among the 7 established dialects.
However even with that, it is understandably difficult to believe that no mistakes were made in transmission. That's why the Quran calls it a miracle, and calls it Allah's job, to safeguard the integrity the Quran. That fact there is an established canonical version today with zero conflicts among all major prints in all countries is somewhat of a miracle, considering the fact that Muslims across cultures argue and disagree about a lot of other things within the religion.
As for the Muqatta'at, they are a part of regular recitation - they are not simply written characters.
There is an established canonical version today because Uthman set about the task of destroying all texts except the one he preferred. It's obvious why Muslims would wish a standardized text, but from a secular perspective, this was no miracle, but a tragic loss of historical sources and artifacts.
> At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible.
And that's the point of why it is considered a miracle. Transmission of the Quran has always been orally and will continue to be. The general meaning is preserved within the text, however, the correct recitation(s) are not.
You can't pick up the Quran and expect to be reciting it correctly.
Ahh, but did you understand any of it? Many people, particularly Indians/Pakistanis do this without understanding it. It is a very odd thing for me to comprehend.
It's correct. There were thousands of people who memorized the verses at the time of Muhammad(pbuh). Muslims recite the Quran at least 5 times a day in the daily prayers from memory. Even today there are millions of people in all age groups who've memorized the whole Quran in Arabic
All evidence points to the contrary. The need of Uthman to canonize the text was due to the variation that existed. He ordered those variants destroyed, removing all evidence of their content. I even recall from college that the caliph ordered all verses, in any form, to be collected; some of the verse was from scraps of vellum, reed, antler, etc... If thousands of memorizers truly existed, such an exercise wouldn't be needed. He would only need to get a dozen of the people that memorized it to recite the exact verse again.
Variations existed in the written form not in the recitation because diacritics (tashkeel) were not standardized. It's a common misconception that the Quran is memorized through the written text. This is not how it is transmitted. Look up Tajweed, which are the rules of pronunciation of the Quran.
Furthermore, memorizers of the Quran can trace the chain of narration back to Muhammad himself. So there couldn't be any forgery or manipulation. Uthman doesn't have the power to erase people's memories.
In Arabic language different dialects/variations have different punctuations and pronunciations which changes how a word is pronounced but not what the word is or what it means.
Shi'a traditions state that Ali had a different recension of the Quran - it contained the same text as the Uthmanic, but the Surahs were arranged in chronological order. So it seems plausible to me that, at least, different versions of the Quran pre-standardisation differed in the order of the Surahs.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. When we look at the actual history of the Quran--and it has one, just like any other book made my human hands--we find that the claims of its unaltered perfection don't look very plausible: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/01/what-is-...
"As Muslims increasingly came into contact with Christians during the eighth century, the wars of conquest were accompanied by theological polemics, in which Christians and others latched on to the confusing literary state of the Koran as proof of its human origins. Muslim scholars themselves were fastidiously cataloguing the problematic aspects of the Koran—unfamiliar vocabulary, seeming omissions of text, grammatical incongruities, deviant readings, and so on. A major theological debate in fact arose within Islam in the late eighth century, pitting those who believed in the Koran as the 'uncreated' and eternal Word of God against those who believed in it as created in time, like anything that isn't God himself. Under the Caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833) this latter view briefly became orthodox doctrine. It was supported by several schools of thought, including an influential one known as Mu'tazilism, that developed a complex theology based partly on a metaphorical rather than simply literal understanding of the Koran."
The claim that thousands of people committed the entire Quran to memory during Mohammad's lifetime--a time when the finished product didn't actually exist by most accounts--and then produced a generally agreed-upon version in an unbiased way is enormously implausible.
Please note clearly: I am not saying that "thousands of people memorizing a book of seventy-odd thousand highly-repetitive words" is particularly implausible. As a feat of memory this is rather modest and uninteresting. That's completely unrelated to my point: as you say, a child of ten could do it. Big deal.
What I'm saying is the claim that the book was complete and that there was unbiased agreement in the production of the written version based on many memorized versions is extremely unlikely given everything we know, and that there were such vigorous debates about the issue amongst early Muslims themselves makes it even more-so. Certainty about historical events rarely increases with time, and Muslims have done very little of the hard scientific work required to plausibly claim they know more about what happened in the 7th century than Muslims of the 8th and 9th did. They have in fact actively attacked and sometimes killed people who have dared to undertake any of that work.
Furthermore, one of the most bizarre aspects of the Quran is the ordering of the suras, which is based on no literary or philosophical or temporal principle but (more-or-less) how long they are. Take the Bible and reorganize it that way and it would become even less coherent than it already is. So Muslims have to claim that the book is perfect, but its organizing principle is completely incoherent. God is supposed to work in mysterious ways, but this kind of incoherence is a good deal more consistent with human agency and the historical development of the final text under the auspices of ignorant men who were guessing at how best to put it all together.
One final note: killing me does not change the truth or falsity of anything written above. Why I feel obliged to say that should be obvious to anyone who is remotely honest and aware, Muslim or non-Muslim. I believe everyone who is critical of Islam or the Quran should include a statement of this nature. It does not reduce the already-small chance any of us will get killed, but it will remind everyone that for every voice that speaks out there are many more that stay silent because they know that some deeply sincere religious person acting...
I am not sure Muslims claim this. Actually it is a well known fact that there were several copies, but they were all gathered and burned after ONE was approved by Usman.
Perhaps coincidentally, on BBC Four tonight a programme was shown which describes vellum (the material on which this manuscript was written) and the process behind creating it.
What does this even mean to find it in the University? This is almost more interesting to me than the text itself, which has been remarkably well attested through the ages (or at least, versions of it have been independently attested).
I vote to burn it...give the radical Islamist some of their own medicine. Two wrongs don't make a right but when you have ISIS exterminating entire villages full of Christians and destroying ancient artifacts for fun, we should see how they like it. I know this will cause a backlash because there is no reasoning with mad men.
I would also like to point out amongst Muslims there is a concept of multiple Qira'aat(readings) where there are multiple dialects in which the Quran is read. These readings may differ by a couple of letters for a specific word every so often. This was the reason the Quran was compiled into one form during the time of 'Uthmaan, to prevent confusion amongst the common Muslims.
Nevertheless these "readings" did not die, but rather continue to thrive to this day. This allows for a broader range of meanings, so it is not something avoided by Muslims rather accepted openly as a part of what they believe was revealed.
Is it just me or is there something strange about the way this piece is written. Feels like it is written by an bot or somehow optimized for search.
The manuscript, written in "Hijazi script", an early form of written Arabic, becomes one of the oldest known fragments of the Koran.
Because radiocarbon dating creates a range of possible ages, there is a handful of other manuscripts in public and private collections which overlap. So this makes it impossible to say that any is definitively the oldest.
But the latest possible date of the Birmingham discovery - 645 - would put it among the very oldest.
65 comments
[ 250 ms ] story [ 1617 ms ] threadToo bad.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/22/europe/uk-quran-birmingham-man...
> The two parchment leaves are believed to contain parts of Suras (chapters) 18 to 20, written with ink in an early form of Arabic script known as Hijazi.
BTW, the search for the meaning of these letters that appear in a small percentage of suras is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqatta%27at
Here's the digitized version: http://vmr.bham.ac.uk/Collections/Mingana/Islamic_Arabic_157...
In case you know how to read arabic: https://www.facebook.com/yasir.qadhi/photos/a.10150091939643...
"Truly, We have revealed this remembrance, and We shall, for sure, preserve it." (The Holy Qur'an, Al-Hijr; 15:9)
Digitized version: http://vmr.bham.ac.uk/Collections/Mingana/Islamic_Arabic_157...
In case you know how to read arabic: http://tinyurl.com/nr5gvz9
Given the context, and the concept of abrogation itself, doesn't the quran pretty much says about itself that it was changed. And this verse itself is inconsistent since it both says it was changed and not changed.
And of course one can easily find examples of changes. And if you want to laugh about the whole thing :
Confused little god you have there, no ?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
really surprised that they did not test for any previous washed text underneath since this is both common and the test quite simple and easy to perform
EDIT: [1] my mistake, it was in the NYT article on the same topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/world/europe/quran-fragmen...
Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.
He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said.
"Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.
He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said."
The probability is fairly high that this is a very old piece of animal skin with some Quranic text written about 100 years or so after his death (being generous).
It should also be noted that there is absolutely zero contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Mohammad. Zero.
We have piles and piles of contemporary historical evidence in multiple forms (statues, tablets, pottery, artwork, etc.) for many important and lesser important persons in history both much more ancient and equally ancient, but for him, nothing. It is only after a significant time gap after his death that we find a trickle of evidence and then a torrent. Exact same thing for Jesus.
If anyone is interested, Tom Holland's "Islam the untold story" is a fascinating introduction to this sacrilegious line of thought.
Yes there is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Muhammad#Non-Mu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Muhammad#Views_...
"It is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography."
I believe both Jesus and Mụhammad existed and both were just humans, the former just a prophet who managed to be ingloriously killed, the later just a military leader who invented a surprisingly effective ideology for his bloody conquests (or the prophet who had the "luck" to live his bloody character, whatever). How these things develop can be easily seen on the more recent and good documented example of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith
One of the most interesting parallels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_wives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Joseph_Smith%27s_wives
P.S. I born Muslim so I get to be critical about Islam and I think everyone should be able to do so.
Once you start translating something into different languages, that's when the unavoidable changes start working their way in. So, I agree with you that it's not "miraculous" in any way, but it is a fascinating and important archaeological find.
Understandable but not true. There are, currently extent, versions of the text with variations. There was a significant effort made to create a single authoritative version to enforce the narrative of the text being a perfect copy of one in heaven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quran#Uthman_ib...
"When the task was finished Uthman kept one copy in Medina and sent others to Kufa, Baṣra, Damascus, and, according to some accounts, Mecca, and ordered that all other variant copies of the Quran to be destroyed. This was done everywhere except in Kufa, where some scholars argue that, Ibn Masʿūd and his followers refused."
Thousands of people claim below:
The famous ten People who form the chains of narration regarding the Quran are as follows.
Amongst those ten the two most important people were zayd ibn thabit the personal scribe of Muhammad and Ubay ibn Ka'b who was the foremost authority on the Quran after zaid.[36][37]So 12 people were essentially responsible for Quran, mostly through hearsay.
The entire muslim community contributed their memorized Quran together with written parchments (to double check) in the making of the "official" copy.
Making this into a community-wide project and hence nobody could say that the Quran was incorrect.
Thereafter unreliable parchments were destroyed.
"The Quranic canon is the form of the Quran as recited and written in which it is religiously binding for the Muslim community. This canonical corpus is closed and fixed in the sense that nothing in the Quran can be changed or modified. The process of canonization ended under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (r. 23/644–35/655), which was about twenty years after the death of the Muhammad"
Edit, most of it is hearsay any way:
Zaid ibn Thabit, Muhammad's primary scribe, was assigned the duty of gathering all of the Quranic text. He gives an insight into what happened during the meeting between Abu Bakr, Umar, and himself:
"Abu Bakr sent for me at a time when the Yamama battles had witnessed the martyrdom of numerous Companions. I found 'Umar bin al-Khattab with him. Abu Bakr began, Umar has just come to me and said, 'In the Yamama battles death has dealt most severely with the qurra',[Reciters of the Quran] and I fear it will deal with them with equal severity in other theatres of war. As a result much of the Quran will be gone. “ 'I am therefore of the opinion that you should command the Quran be collected.'" Abu Bakr continued, "I said to 'Umar, 'How can we embark on what the Prophet never did?' 'Umar replied that it was a good deed regardless, and he did not cease replying to my scruples until Allah reconciled me to the undertaking, and I became of the same mind as him. Zaid, you are young and intelligent, you used to record the revelations for the Muhammad, and we know nothing to your discredit. So pursue the Quran and collect it together." By Allah, had they asked me to move a mountain it could not have been weightier than what they requested of me now”. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih,Jam'i al-Qur'an, hadith no. 4986; see also Ibn Abu Dawud, al-Masahif, pp. 6-9)"
The person ordered to compile the Quran by Abu Bakar said:
...By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Quran... So I started locating the Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leafstalks of date palms and from the memories of men.[Bukhari Sahih al-Bukhari, 6:60:201]
"So I started looking for the Holy quran and collected it from (what was written on) palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones, and also from men who knew it by heart, until I found the last verse of Surat at-Tauba (repentance) with Abi Khuzaima al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p. 478).[23]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hearsay https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heresy
By the way, it is relatively easy to memorize the Quran, because it is in verse form. You can go to any mosque and find children from the age of ten who has it memorized.
Your comment doesn't address the claim.
Once the canonical written version of the Koran had been established memorising the entire text is relatively easy. Prior to that you would have had to be present when Mohammed revealed the narrations or had a precise rendition of that oration conveyed to you. At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible. Conveying the general meaning is within the realms of possibility; surahs revealed to large groups might even allow the preservation of some of the actual wording too.
Take an example - Armstrong's speech when stepping on to the moon, was it "one small step for a man" or was the "a" not spoken? This is probably the most pored over of all speeches ever, millions of witnesses. Did no camel ever brae in the tents of the Qureshi tribe in Mohammed's time?
Abrogation causes further problems to this claim as not only do all "thousands" have to remember the exact wording used but the exact order too, and they have only a couple of months from the end of Mohammed's narrations to learn the last of them. Not only do they need to know the order, for abrogation purposes (to learn the way to act) but they have to remember the narrations in the same non-temporal order as everyone else. I can believe even that many of Mohammed's followers remembered surah, mostly that they agreed on wording, but not at all that they remembered it in the "wrong" (ie not the delivered order) and that the order it was remembered in was identical (ie was "the entire Quran").
Doesn't 2:106 say that Allah causes ayats to be forgotten, those ayats must have been in the original - else they wouldn't have been narrated by Mohammed - but aren't now remembered and so are not in the "entire Quran".
Of course if surah 25:32 (http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=25&verse=32) that says the Koran was revealed piecemeal is wrong and surah 2:185 is right then the whole Koran was passed on in one month (including future conversations) which makes it easier to attain unanimous agreement but also means that [if tradition that the Koran was passed on in 10 days is correct] the hearers were remembering > 600 ayats of prose each day for 10 days in a row; quite a feat for illiterate desert tribesmen regardless of whether they had a tradition of oral history or not.
I'm very interested in the Muqatta'at too - how were written character variations conveyed by the "thousands"?
However even with that, it is understandably difficult to believe that no mistakes were made in transmission. That's why the Quran calls it a miracle, and calls it Allah's job, to safeguard the integrity the Quran. That fact there is an established canonical version today with zero conflicts among all major prints in all countries is somewhat of a miracle, considering the fact that Muslims across cultures argue and disagree about a lot of other things within the religion.
As for the Muqatta'at, they are a part of regular recitation - they are not simply written characters.
And that's the point of why it is considered a miracle. Transmission of the Quran has always been orally and will continue to be. The general meaning is preserved within the text, however, the correct recitation(s) are not.
You can't pick up the Quran and expect to be reciting it correctly.
Furthermore, memorizers of the Quran can trace the chain of narration back to Muhammad himself. So there couldn't be any forgery or manipulation. Uthman doesn't have the power to erase people's memories.
"As Muslims increasingly came into contact with Christians during the eighth century, the wars of conquest were accompanied by theological polemics, in which Christians and others latched on to the confusing literary state of the Koran as proof of its human origins. Muslim scholars themselves were fastidiously cataloguing the problematic aspects of the Koran—unfamiliar vocabulary, seeming omissions of text, grammatical incongruities, deviant readings, and so on. A major theological debate in fact arose within Islam in the late eighth century, pitting those who believed in the Koran as the 'uncreated' and eternal Word of God against those who believed in it as created in time, like anything that isn't God himself. Under the Caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833) this latter view briefly became orthodox doctrine. It was supported by several schools of thought, including an influential one known as Mu'tazilism, that developed a complex theology based partly on a metaphorical rather than simply literal understanding of the Koran."
The claim that thousands of people committed the entire Quran to memory during Mohammad's lifetime--a time when the finished product didn't actually exist by most accounts--and then produced a generally agreed-upon version in an unbiased way is enormously implausible.
Please note clearly: I am not saying that "thousands of people memorizing a book of seventy-odd thousand highly-repetitive words" is particularly implausible. As a feat of memory this is rather modest and uninteresting. That's completely unrelated to my point: as you say, a child of ten could do it. Big deal.
What I'm saying is the claim that the book was complete and that there was unbiased agreement in the production of the written version based on many memorized versions is extremely unlikely given everything we know, and that there were such vigorous debates about the issue amongst early Muslims themselves makes it even more-so. Certainty about historical events rarely increases with time, and Muslims have done very little of the hard scientific work required to plausibly claim they know more about what happened in the 7th century than Muslims of the 8th and 9th did. They have in fact actively attacked and sometimes killed people who have dared to undertake any of that work.
Furthermore, one of the most bizarre aspects of the Quran is the ordering of the suras, which is based on no literary or philosophical or temporal principle but (more-or-less) how long they are. Take the Bible and reorganize it that way and it would become even less coherent than it already is. So Muslims have to claim that the book is perfect, but its organizing principle is completely incoherent. God is supposed to work in mysterious ways, but this kind of incoherence is a good deal more consistent with human agency and the historical development of the final text under the auspices of ignorant men who were guessing at how best to put it all together.
One final note: killing me does not change the truth or falsity of anything written above. Why I feel obliged to say that should be obvious to anyone who is remotely honest and aware, Muslim or non-Muslim. I believe everyone who is critical of Islam or the Quran should include a statement of this nature. It does not reduce the already-small chance any of us will get killed, but it will remind everyone that for every voice that speaks out there are many more that stay silent because they know that some deeply sincere religious person acting...
Here is some info in case you are curious [0]. Look for the word "burnt" and read that paragraph. Or simply google "Quran Uthman burnt"
http://www.answering-christianity.com/quran/other_books.htm
A clip is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01pr4ty
A slightly longer clip on the same subject: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00n3rdf
Of course it was coincidental you dolt.
I'm thinking this was probably a joke gone awry, but please don't do this on HN.
[1] http://www.commdiginews.com/world-news/middle-east/worlds-ol...
Nevertheless these "readings" did not die, but rather continue to thrive to this day. This allows for a broader range of meanings, so it is not something avoided by Muslims rather accepted openly as a part of what they believe was revealed.