Memorization, Muslims believe, is superior to writing!

A viewer named Azedine Benammar has this to say about Qur'anic memorization: “Hatun, the word added or inserted is" بمثل" with the same ink. Even if it's added much later is no big deal because it's hand written and human errors are natural and words could be omitted. The thing that you stubbornly refuse to explain to your followers is that Quran is memorized since childhood by hundreds of million people”. Another viewer, @richardokeefe7410 had a great response to Azedine, where he wrote: "But when Zayd ibn Thabit was ordered to collect the Quran, he was unable to get it entirely from the memories of men, but had to use scraps written on stones and palms leaves and hides, and he still was not able to collect all of it. Back then, when it is relevant, there were no “hundreds of millions of Muslims”. And that is why `Abdullah b. `Umar reportedly said, 'Let none of you say, "I have got the whole of the Qur'an." How does he know what all of it is? MUCH OF THE QUR'AN HAS GONE. Let him say instead, "I have got what has survived."' Jay Hatun and others do not refuse to say that the Quran is memorised today. They take that for granted. They don't mention it because it simply is not relevant. It only matters whether there were hundreds of millions of people memorising the Quran at the time of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, who added points to the text, and according to Ibn Abi Dawud made many changes, and whether their memories agreed, which they did not, and whether their memories were complete, which again they were not”. Our response is this: Take a closer look, and you will see that the word بمثل is not only written with a different nib, it was written with both dottings, and with vowellization, which is not found anywhere else in the text, proving that it was added in at a much later date after dottings and vowels were created. What’s more, the original verse made perfect sense without the بمثل, so why did they even add it? The fact that they added it proves they were trying to conform this text to another later standard text, which shows human manipulation. If you say it was memorized, and that memorization is better than anything written down, then: 1) why did both Abu Bakr and later Uthman order it to be written down in 632 AD and 652 AD (Al Bukhari 6:509-510) if memory was so superior? Why didn’t they just continue to let the memorized text be the official canonical text? 2) Why don’t Muslims today work on that basis, without any written Qur’ans, trusting purely on everyone’s memory? You know very well that the only way any Muslims can know that they have memorized it correctly, is to have a written record of it alongside them, otherwise anyone can memorize anything they want, and call it the official Qur’an…even you can. 3) Why don’t we work by that principle today? Let’s stop all written contracts, simply memorize everything we are taught, stop all written books, all receipts, and trust in the memories of “hundreds of millions of people”, as you say. 4) ZoneFighter1quote: “Narrated by, narrated by, narrated by…Thus, in other words you are quoting X who is quoting Y who is quoting Z, so that it becomes utterly meaningless. Because you have to believe that the 3rd person remembered correctly what the 2nd person told them, who in turn has to have remembered correctly what the first person told them, who has to have remembered exactly, what was told them by Muhammad”. And I would add, all without once writing one word of it down. It’s just like ‘Chinese whispers’…and this is the problem with “oral tradition”. 5) Finally, the fact that you have now given up on supporting any Qur’anic text of the Qur’an from the time of Uthman, and have moved to your desperate argument for memorization, suggests that we really have won this debate, and you have finally conceding that there really was no complete written Qur’an in 652 AD. Game…set…match! © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (27,360)