1st STAGE OF CANONIZATION: A Qur'anic Scholar, Dr Rami Halaseh, critiques Uthman's Qur'ans!

You can buy Dr Rami Hussein Halaseh's book, "The Topkapı Qurʾān Manuscript H.S. 32: History, Text, and Variants" here: https://www.amazon.com/Topkap%C4%B1-Qur%CA%BE%C4%81n-Manuscript-H-S-32/dp/3111455254/ref=sr_1_1?crid=PFX6BXGRLKDD&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Ue8grS_n8olFqwRepx6-pw.Hm82Zppvn4xcdCRfQCay7czrXBwlK_WSMZR6Ind6QKc&dib_tag=se&keywords=Rami+halaseh&qid=1772328115&sprefix=rami+halaseh%2Caps%2C129&sr=8-1 Hatun Tash and Dr Smith carried out their first Zoom interview with Dr Rami Hussein Halaseh, the author of the new critical book entitled: "The Topkapı Qurʾān Manuscript", which is his PhD dissertation on the same subject. Because of his expertise on early Qur'anic manuscripts, Jay and Hatun had a few questions to pose to him concerning the Islamic Traditional narrative of how the Qu'ran was initially compiled in the 7th century. He began by answering a question by Hatun on whether the blood stains on the Topkapi were authentic, saying that they indeed were not real, but was a later tradition imposed on the manuscript many centuries later to give authority to the notion that this was one of the manuscripts Uthman was reading when he was assassinated in 654 AD. When asked about the date of the Topkapi, he said many scholars were reticent to state any specific date. Nonetheless, he placed it between 767-816 AD. He noted that in order to bring the text upto 99% of what our current Qur'an contained, around five folios with a later styled script were added to the Topkapi codex at a much later date, so that the total genuine text from the 8th-9th centuries was around 97.8% of the total Qur'an. Even if we were to grant that at some point this manuscript contained nearly 100% of today’s Quran, there were significant differences between the official 1924 Hafs an Asim text, which has become our standard today, and the 8th-9th century Topkapi manuscript. What was more damaging was that Halaseh counted 2,483 orthographic variants and 309 variant readings between the Hafs and the Topkapi, of which 63 of these variants affected the consonantal skeletal text. What was significant was that many of these differences changed the meaning of the text and cannot be located in any of the existing Qira’at versions or secondary literature, meaning they fall completely outside of the canonical traditions. Yet, this is likely the best manuscript that Muslim scholars can produce from the first three Islamic centuries. Moving back to the 7th century, Rami supported Jay's notion that the disagreements between the first Qur'anic recension of Abu Bakr's in 634 AD, and the second recension of Uthman's in 652 AD had to be consonantal (Rasm) in nature, due to the fact that the dots (i'jams) and the vowels (Harakats) had not been created or introduced that early, or at least had not been standardized in any uniform way in the Arabic script. So, when Uthman took all the codices which disagreed with his canonical and final codex, and burned them, he was burning manuscripts which contained entire words and phrases whose differences were made up of consonantal letters. This meant that the differences within the codices which were burned had nothing to do with any Dialectical differences at all, because dialects require vowels, which didn't exist this early. This does a lot more damage to the idea which Muslims hold that the Qur'an has always been preserved, every letter and every word, even every dot since the time of Uthman until today! Rami also asked the question concerning why Uthman needed to rewrite a new Qur'an in 652 if they already had Hafsah's copy at their disposal? He then noted that in the 11th century Al-Dani (d.1053 AD) said that there were 44 differences between the companion codices and that of Uthman. Earlier, in the 10th century Ibn Mujahid (d. 936 AD) said that one of the criteria he used for choosing his 7 readings was that they had to agree with Uthman's text, and not any of the others which disagreed. Conclusion: It's obvious from this 30 minute interview that the earliest Uthmanic codices (if indeed they ever existed) had many problems, especially the fact that in the first 20 years after Muhammad's death two different renditions of the Qur'an had to be written, and then re-written, using a different dialect, though no one could do that in the 7th century, because the vowels which are used to delineate dialectical differences hadn't yet been invented. The fact that even after this 2nd recension many other Qur'ans were found which differed with it, so much so that they all had to be burned to retain an official standardized text! So much for a completely preserved Qur'an from the century Muhammad lived. What next will Rami offer us in the next episode? Stay tuned! You can buy Dr Rami Halaseh's book "The Topkapi Manuscript H.S. 32" on Amazon.com © Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, February 28, 2026 (128,320)