Liam uses current research to prove that the earliest Qur'ans couldn't have been memorized!

Liam from Hertfordshire got up on the ladder with Jay to speak on whether early 7th century Muslims could have memorized the Qur'an accurately (in other words, "Word-for-Word", or even "Letter-for-Letter"), as Muslims constantly claim today. He was nervous since this was the first time on a ladder in the very hostile environment of Speaker's Corner. But it turned out that he was a natural, as you will see when you watch the video. So, why was Liam so interested in arguing against the notion that the Qur'an could have been memorized perfectly in the 7th century? It has to do with the claims Muslims make concerning its authority. They claim that the Qur'an we have today is exactly the same as the "eternal" Qur'an which exists in heaven (Surah 85:21-22); that no man can change even a word of it (Surahs 10:15; 18:27), and that Allah himself guards it from being changed (Surah 15:9). The problem is that there simply are no original Qur'anic manuscripts from the 7th century for anyone to know whether it had been changed or not in the intervening 1400 years. So, Muslims respond that no early manuscripts are needed, since the first and second generation Muslims had memorized it completely, and what they memorized was exactly the same as what we have today, word-for-word and letter-for-letter. Thus due to the amazing ability of people then, it was sent from generation to generation orally, until it was finally written down in manuscript form. Liam has 12 problems and suppositions with these claims: 1) In Al Bukhari 5038 (the most authoritative of the Hadith compilations) it says that when Zaid ibn-Thabit was commissioned to write the Qur'an, there were a number of verses which had been lost, or changed, or even forgotten by those who were Muhammad's companions, so even Al-Bukhari didn't believe that it was written accurately. 2) When recently 10 Hafiz (those who had memorized the entire Qur'an) were asked to compete against other Muslims and non-Muslims to see who could recall 20 Qur'anic verses accurately, the non-believers couldn't recall any, while the believers could recall 5 out of 20, while the Hafiz's only recalled 12 out of 20 verses, so that they know less than 75% of the verses! This proves that even today people can't memorize the Qur'an accurately. 3) In another study of Western "individualists" (those who lived individually) and "collectivists" (those who lived in communities, like most Muslims), the two groups were able to memorize much the same, suggesting that Muslims aren't better at it than others. 4) When a test was done on Malaysian Hafiz's 66% of them were doubtful of the ability to memorize the Qur'an, due to lack of constant practice, and confusing one verse with another. 5) A further problem concerned "group corrections", where anyone with authority can easily dominate a group, demanding acquiescence to favoured reading of the Qur'an. 6) Dr Andy Bannister's PhD on a Formulaic structure within the Qur'an suggests that the Qur'an was created from a borrowing of oral traditional formulas, which would not help memorization. 7) Differing Qur'anic manuscripts suggest differing formulas within the texts themselves. 8) When one compares these problems with the Bible, the first response is that we don't have these problems because we don't make the same claims of "Perfect Preservation", mainly because we have a plethora of manuscript evidence for our early Bible texts. 9) When faced with the "Inter-Testimental" books, Liam's response was that it wasn't our problem, and that people needed to simply ask the Catholics why their canon wasn't the same used by Protestants and Jews. 10) When one compares the enormous number of Biblical manuscripts (over 24,000) with the hopelessly few Qur'anic manuscripts (around 6-10) there simply isn't any comparison. 11) Liam noted that the best study on memorization to date is that of the writing of Homer, which was created in 800 B.C.; yet the oldest manuscript is dated to 300 B.C. It has a variant of 5%, so that 95% of the text was accurate, compared to 99% of the Biblical text, while the Qur'an has 1000s of variants, and even even over 100,000 if we include the Qira'at and Ahruf variants. 12) Finally, pointing to the "Hapax Legomenon" (when a word only appears once in a text), while the Bible only has one or two, the Qur'an has 450! With these 450 abstract words in the text, it would make the Qur'an that much more difficult to memorize them accurately. So, in conclusion, Liam maintains that the notion that the Qur'an was memorized word-for-word accurately, and then passed down for a century or two completely accurately, until it was finally written down in the 8th or 9th centuries, is highly unlikely, as study after study shows that Oral Tradition is open to error, especially when it continues to be sent down from person to person over a period of a few hundred years! © Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, August 25, 2026 (137,560)