From 1 Qur'an to 7, to 1, to 10, to 30, to 1 Qur'an again!

How does 1 Qur'an become 7, then 1, then 10, then 30, and then back to 1 again? "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start". According to Dr Shabir Ally there were only 10 approved recitations, and Muslims were not permitted to go beyond these 10 Qur'ans. So, how do we make sense when they continually tell us that there is only one Qur'an? Well, it was that way at the very beginning... 1 Qur'an (Eternally): According to Dr Yasir Qadhi, when Muhammad received his 'Quraishi' revelation from the angel Jibril, that was the only Qur'an in existence. We can assume that this Quraishi Qur'an must be the one which therefore eternally existed in heaven; because, if there has always been only one Qur'an, that must be it. 7 Qur'ans (632 AD): Muhammad, however, realized that there were people in Arabia who spoke Arabic differently than he did, so he asked Jibril for 6 more dialects to be revealed, which Jibril agreed to, bringing the total to 7 'holy' recitations of the Qur'an at the time of his death in 632 AD. So, now there were 7 Qur'ans. 1 Qur'an: Then in 652 AD, at the battle of Azerbaijan, Meccan and Medinan fighters heard the Qur'an being recited in different dialects (Iraqi and Syrian), derived from the Qur'an of Ibn Mas'ud, who was an Iraqi from Kufa (just south of Baghdad). So, Hudaifa, angered that there would be different Qur'ans, came back to Medina and demanded that the Caliph Uthman have just one Qur'an compiled, which would be in the language of the Quraish, Muhammad's dialect; which Uthman did, and he then had all the other dialects which disagreed with it burned and destroyed. So, now we are back to 1 Qur'an. To make sure that no other Qur'ans were written, Uthman sent 5 copies of this Quraishi Qur'an to 5 cities (Medina, Mecca, Basra, Kufa, and Damascus), accompanied by a reader with each, to make sure no other Qur'ans would be written which differed with this 1 Quraishi Qur'an. 7 Qur'ans: Unfortunately, it didn't work, because all of the 5 Uthmanic Qur'ans seemed to have been lost (and to date they still haven't been found). So, around 80 years later, beginning with 734 AD and continuing up to 805 AD, 7 different reciters wrote down their own Qur'ans, all in different dialects, though, oddly enough they all lived in the 5 cities where the 5 earlier Uthmanic Qur'ans were sent, in order that this very thing would not happen! Even stranger, the man who chose these 7 readers, Ibn Mujahid, lived even later, in the 10th century, and died in 936 AD, a good 300 years after Muhammad! 10 Qur'ans: In the 15th century, in 1429 AD to be exact, another scholar named Al-Jazari decided to add another 3 Qir'a'at Qur'ans to the previous 7 chosen by Ibn Mujahid, which now made it 10 Qur'ans, yet, this was decided almost 800 years after Muhammad had died! 30 Qur'ans: Unfortunately, 10 Qur'ans still weren't enough, as there was an enormous proliferation of Qira'at reciters after the 8th century, each writing their own Qur'ans. For instance, the reader Ibn Kathir (d. 738 AD), from Mecca, had around 37 different Qira'at transmitters who followed after him. Because there were so many of these transmitters, each with their own renditions of the Qur'an, it was decided that only 2 of the 10s of transmitters would be chosen from the 8th-9th century reciters, adding another 20 Qira'at Qur'ans. This then brought a total of 30 different Qira'at Qur'ans, by the time of the 15th century. A team in London has looked at just 23 of these 30 Qur'ans and has noted 93,236 differences between them! 1 Qur'an: With so many different Qur'ans competing for the Muslims attention, it was inevitable that something needed to be done. So, in 1924, in order to standardize the Qur'an for the tests for high school students in the city of Cairo, the department of educations asked a scholar from Al Azhar University, Muhammad ibn al Husayni al Haddad to choose just one Qur'an from among the 30 available, and he chose the Qur'an of a transmitter named 'Hafs' (d.796 AD), who was in the tradition of Aasim ibn Abi al-Najud (d.745 AD), both of them from Kufa, in Iraq. This Hafs Qur'an was then chosen for all of Egypt in 1936, and for the whole world in 1985 as the official and canonical Qur'an for everyone, everywhere. Ironically, Hafs was from Kufa, in Iraq, the very place that Hudaifa did not want the official Uthmanic Qur'an to come from, because his dialect was not Quraishi, the dialect of heaven, and the dialect of Muhammad, and of Uthman, and the same dialect which was sent to 5 cities, each with a reader, so that no other dialect would supplant it... Yet, the one chosen for all Muslims today, and read by 90% of the Muslim world is the very dialect they weren't to choose! In conclusion, while this may all seem confusing, the next time a Muslim asks how 1+1+1=3? Ask them how can 1+7+3+10+30=1 © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (34,770) (Music: "small adventure", by Rafael Krux (from filmmusic-io - License CC BY)