4th & 5th STAGES OF CANONIZATION: From 20-30 readings, and then back to ONE!

We now come to the final recording with Dr Rami Halaseh concerning the many readings (Qira'at and Riwayat) of the Qur'an within the last 1400 years, which he refers to as the 5 stages of canonization. 4TH STAGE OF THE QUR'AN'S CANONIZATION: In this episode Dr Halaseh refers to the 15th century, where the scholar Al Jazari (d.1429) was commissioned to choose another 3 Qira'ats (or Eponymous Readers) along with 2 students from each of the 3, who are known as Rawis. Note: An “Eponymous Reader” refers to the canonical Qur’an reciters whose names became attached to a reading tradition. In other words, a qirāʾa is called “the reading of Nafiʿ,” “the reading of ʿAsim,” and so on, not because they invented it, but because later Muslims preserved and organized that recitation under their names. In Islam this term is used to distinguish the named master reciters from their students or transmitters. So, al Jazari added 9 more readings (three masters and 6 students) to the previous 21 chosen in the 10th and 12th centuries. Many would argue that only the students differed from the Eponymous Readers, so it would be a total of only 20 differing readings, rather than the 30 which has been popularized by Jay and others on the Internet. Either way, even one difference destroys the notion that the "Qur'an has always been preserved, every word, every letter, and even the dots"! By the 15th century, there were a total of 10 Eponymous Readers, 7 chosen by Ibn Mujahid in the 10th century, and another 3 chosen by Al Jazari in the 15th century. Concerning how many differences we can find within these 20-30 readings, Dr Halaseh, quoting the ERQur'an.org site, says that they have noted 15,000 variants, but Dr Shady Nasser, his superior, has found over 100,000 variants! 5TH STAGE OF QUR'AN'S CANONIZATION: We now come to the 5th and final stage of the 5 stages of CANONIZATION OF THE QUR'AN. Because of the many readings of the Qur'an, there was a dilemma in the city of Cairo, Egypt, in 1924, as they couldn't have standardized tests for high-school students who were giving 20-30 different answers, depending on which Qira'at they had grown up with. So, the education authorities went to Al-Azhar University and asked Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Husayni al-Haddad to choose one of the 20-30 Readings as the official one for the schools in Cairo, and he chose the 'Hafs an-Assim' (Assim would by the Eponymous Reader, while Hafs was his student and thus his Rawi). Why did he choose that Rawi? Because, according to Dr Halaseh, it was the most popular reading in Egypt at that time, due to the fact that it was the preferred reading of the Ottoman Empire, which was still in control of the Caliphate when he chose. So, it was a political choice. Dr Halaseh noted that there were different geographical variations even within the Hafs an-Assim. Hatun Tash said that she has bought 7 different Hafs an-Assim and has them in her library. Dr Halaseh went on to say that the present Hafs-an-Assim which was finally chosen as the standard text of the Qur'an for the whole world in 1985 by King Fahd has orthographical variations from the earliest 8th - 9th century Qur'anic manuscripts. He opened his book on the Topkapi Manuscript to show what he meant. In his research on that manuscript he has found 2,483 orthographical variants with today's Hafs-an-Assim script (see page 235). More needs to be fleshed out on what these orthographical differences actually are, but that will have to wait until we get Dr Halaseh back to talk about them in a future episode. In Conclusion: The claim by Muslims that the Hafs an-Assim Qur'an we read today is exactly the same as the Qur'an that exists in heaven (the "Al-Lauh Al-Mahfuz", or the 'Preserved Tablet'), "Word-for-word, letter-for-letter, even dot-for-dot", or even the same as that which was revealed to Muhammad between 610-632 AD, or that which was finally written down and codified by Uthman in 652 AD is simply not supported by the evidence we see in these 4 episodes with Dr Rami Halaseh. Dr Halaseh has proven that there are at least 5 different stages of Canonization of the Qur'an, the first with Uthman in 652 AD, the second with Ibn Mujahid in the 10th century, the third with Shatibi in the 12th century, the fourth with Al-Jazari in the 15th century, and the fifth and final with Al-Haddad in the 20th century. So, the Qur'an has been changed and accreted and deleted, and corrupted for the past 1400 years, which is typical of any book written by men, and borrowed from a variety of other sources, proving that it is not a book from God at all! You can buy Dr Rami Halaseh's book "The Topkapi Manuscript H.S. 32" on Amazon: © Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, May 5, 2026 (129,260)