The Qur’an has had NO proper TEXTUAL ANALYSIS!

We are adding to a new set of videos here about the question concerning why no Textual analysis has ever been done on the Qur'an, to ascertain whether our present Qur'an is the same textually as that which is eternal, or that which was supposedly revealed to Muhammad between 610-632 AD? This series dovetails with a previous set of episodes which Al Fadi and I did earlier concerning the 'Corrections in Early Qur’an Manuscripts', the title of a book published by Dr Dan Brubaker in May 2019, based on Dr Brubaker’s PhD thesis. These corrections are extremely damaging to the theology of Islam which supports the belief that the Qur’an is un-created and eternal (Surah 85:21-22), that there have been no corrections by human hands for 1400 years, that not one word or one letter has been changed (Surahs 10:15; 18:27), and that the Qur’an we have today is exactly the same as that which is in heaven, and that which was sent down to Muhammad between 610 – 632 AD, and that which was then finally written down by Uthman in 652 AD (Sahih al-Bukhari, vol 6, book 61, hadith 510), because Allah has guarded it (Surah 15:9). In order to know whether a book is historically accurate and authoritative one needs first to carry out a Critical analysis of that book’s earliest manuscripts, which has not been done for the Qur’an. Dr François Déroche, possibly the greatest scholar of the historicity of the Qur’an, says this, “When the al-Azhar specialists convened to produce a reliable edition of the Qurʾan towards 1920, they never thought of looking for the earliest written witnesses, had they known how to identify them, but used in the course of their work the specialized literature on the qirāʾāt or the orthography which developed in Muslim scholarly circles from the second [AH] eighth century [AD] onwards” (François Déroche, Qurʾans of the Umayyads: A First Overview, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 14-15). Essentially, what Déroche is saying, is that when choosing a canonical text in 1924 there was no textual critical analysis done on the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts at all. Instead, the Qur’an we have today was chosen using 8th – 9th century Qira’at 'readings' of the Qur’an which were based on how someone pronounced certain words. Initially a scholar named Ibn Mujahid in 936 AD (300 years after the Qur’an was supposedly written down) chose 7 different Qira’at readings of the text, which was followed in 1194 AD by Al Shatibi who chose another 14 different Qira’at readings, which was then followed in 1429 AD by Al Jazari who added another 9 different Qira’at readings; so that by the 15th century, which is almost 800 years after the Qur’an was supposedly written down by Uthman, a total of 30 different Qira’at readings of the Qur’an were made official, no two of which were the same! And how were these 30 Qira’at readings chosen? They chose those which were the most popular in the 8th – 9th centuries; in other words, those which had the largest number of students who followed a particular reading (i.e. pronunciation). No one actually looked at these Qira’at Qur’ans to read the texts, nor did they do the same for the earliest manuscripts. They weren't interested to see which script was the earliest or most complete, or which was the most grammatically correct, or even whether the scripts of the different manuscripts were in agreement! In fact, we don’t even know if they even opened the books to read them; they simply chose those readings which had the greatest number of disciples who followed after them, nothing more. It was a popularity contest! That is not how you do a textual critical analysis of any ancient book! Take, for instance, the earliest Biblical manuscripts, such as the Sinaiticus, the Vaticanus, and the Alexandrinus, the three oldest Biblical manuscripts in Greek. We know they are the earliest Biblical manuscripts, because they all employ the early Greek ‘Uncial Majuscule’ script, which was replaced in the 4th century by the Greek ‘minuscule’ script. By textually analyzing each new manuscript which was discovered, the scholars could know if it was authoritative or not, and they only kept those which were. That is why we can trust the Biblical manuscripts, because a proper forensic textual analysis has been carried out on all the earliest manuscripts. This has yet to be carried out on any of the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts, or the earliest Qira'at Qur'ans. Therefore, until it is done, Muslims can continue to make claims for their authenticity, but no one will really listen, because they haven’t yet put their manuscripts or their Qira'ats under any valid textual critical scrutiny, like the Christians have with their earliest Biblical manuscripts. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2021 (46,190) Music: 'happy child', by Aleksound, from Filmmusic-io