Using 5 dots & 3 vowels we get 30 DIFFERENT QUR'ANS!

The official 30 ‘Ahruf’ and ‘Qira’at’ different Qur'ans pose a real 'headache' for modern Muslims because it goes against their previous narrative that there is only "ONE QUR'AN". So, what exactly do we mean by the Qira'at differences? In the modern Arabic language 6 of 28 Arabic letters are Unique. The other 22 letters need dots to distinguish them. This wasn't always the case. Before dots and vowels were introduced in the 8th century, there were around 16 unique letters in Arabic, which when combined together with other letters made it difficult to read, because no one knew which combinations of letters were being used for every word. Thus, dots had to be invented to show the differences between the different letters in a word. So, take the image of a smile. It could be 5 different letters in Arabic. Thus, the 8th century Arabs would add one dot above the smile, and it became a ‘nuun’ (or the 'n' sound in English). Two dots above the smile became the 'taa' (or the 't' sound in English). Three dots above the smile became the 'thaa' (or the 'th' sound in English). One dot below the smile became the 'baa' (or the 'b' sound in English). Two dots below the smile became the 'yaa' (or the 'y' sound in English). So one smiley line could be 5 different letters: either the ‘nuun’, or the 'taa', or the 'thaa', or the 'baa', or the 'yaa', depending on where you put the 5 little dots. Now, if you had three letters made up of 3 smiley lines together, depending on where you put the 5 dots, you could have as many as 19 different words, with most of them meaning completely different things. Can you then understand why it became so confusing when they began to add the 5 dots, and then began to add the 3 short vowels to the Rasm, skeletal text? These vowels included the 'fatah' = the English 'a' vowel, the Dhamma' = the English 'u' vowel, and the Kasrah' = the English 'i' vowel). Depending on how you combined the 5 dots and 3 vowels, you could have a whole rash of different words, which would create different sentences, and different verses within the text. The responsibility to combine these 5 dots and 3 vowels to make sense of the Qur'anic text fell at first to 7 "readers", chosen by a scholar named Ibn Mujahid between 916-936 AD. Al Jazari, another scholar who spent 35 years trying to decide just how many official Qira'ats could be authorized, then added another 3 "readers" between 1409-1429 AD, which gave a total of 10 official Qira'ats by 1429 AD. Following this it was decided (no one seems to know when exactly) that each of the 'readers' could have 2 later "'transmitters" apiece, so that another 20 transmitters with their completely different sets of 5 dots and 3 vowels were added to the list until today we have 30 official Qira'at combinations of Qur'ans. With such a plethora of different combinations for each letter, there must be thousands of different ways to create Qur'ans with 1000s of different meanings. And there are...Hatun Tash's team in London has only looked at 23 of the 30 official Qur'ans and has already found 93,263 differences between them, proving just how much variety one can find when they are given 5 little dots and 3 little vowels to work with! So, with 30 official Qira'at Qur'ans, and 1000s of different meanings, it became impossible to have standardized tests on the Qur'an. Therefore, one standard had to be chosen, out of the official 30, which would then become the official Qira’at which Muslims use today. I'm sure you would like to know which one of the 30 has now been chosen...but you'll just have to wait until we get to that question...because we first need to look at who these 30 official Qira'at writers were, and when they lived, and whether any of them knew Muhammad? Hold this space, for that's for the next video...out soon... © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (34,010) (Music: "small adventure", by Rafael Krux (from filmmusic-io - License CC BY)