Ep.2: Will the ORIGINAL QUR'AN please 'stand up'?

Western scholars like Marijn Van Putten and Hythem Sidky try their damnedest to support the Standard Islamic Narrative concerning the creation of the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts, possibly because their paymasters are Muslim institutions giving out large amounts of oil money with vested interest in preserving the 'Standard Islamic Narrative' at any cost. As a result, the scholars are forced to mimic the story of how the Qur’an was compiled in 652 AD, taken from Al Bukhari’s 870 AD Hadith (Sahih Al Bukhari, volume 6 hadith numbers 509-510), written almost 240 years after the fact; so hundreds of years too late and hundreds of miles too far north, and with absolutely no historical support. This creates numerous problems for the modern Western scholars who are indebted to Muslim institutions for their financial bursaries. According to Al Bukhari’s 'Standard Narrative' account, in 652 AD Udaifa, a friend of Uthman, the Caliph in Medina at that time, goes with a contingent of men north to fight the Azerbaijanis and is joined by Muslims from Iraq and Syria. After the battle these Muslims retire to a local mosque to pray, where Udaifa hears the Qur’an being recited differently from what he memorized, and he begins a fight with the other northern Muslims. Deeply disturbed by what he heard, he immediately goes back south to Uthman in Medina and demands that he command Zaid ibn Thabi (Muhammad’s secretary, who was responsible for writing the original Qur’an under Abu Bakr 20 years earlier) to rewrite the Qur’an a second time, but this time in the local 'Quraishi Dialect'; which he does, and gives the finished copy to Uthman. Uthman then has every other Qur'an which disagrees with this finalized, and thus "original text" be burned. Note, Muslims today say that he only burned dialectical differences, which are nothing more than differences in pronunciation. The problem with that excuse is that in order to have dialectical differences in a written Arabic text, you need dots and vowels, which didn't exist that early, and were only invented in the 8th and 9th centuries, so this could not be the reason these earliest written Qur'ans disagreed. They indeed must have had consonantal differences, all of which would have changed the meaning for each verse substantially. No wonder Uthman had to destroy those which disagreed. To make sure there would be no more different Qur'ans, Uthman then had a copy of Zaid ibn Thabit's final recension sent to 5 cities (Mecca, Medina, Basra, Kufa and Damascus) to be the standard for all subsequent Qur'ans. Unfortunately, it didn't work, as within a few years a Qur'an written by Ubay ibn Ka'ab (a companion of the prophet) appeared in Damascus with 116 Surahs (today's Qur'an only has 114 Surahs). Another Qur'an written by Ibn Masu'd (another of Muhammad's companions) appeared in Kufa/Baghdad, which had only 110 Surahs, and a third yet different Qur'an written by Ibn Musa appeared in Basra. So, by the end of the 7th century there were at least 4 different Qur'ans in existence in 5 different cities. Note, we don't have any of these variant Qur'ans in our possession today in order to see just how different they were. In fact, we don't even have the original text written by Zaid ibn Thabit in existence today either. Rather clumsy of the Muslims to have conveniently lost all 5 of the original Qur'ans as well as the 3 other variant Qur'ans, don't you think? Even more troubling, Dr Arthur Jeffery in the 1930s, by perusing the 9th and 10th century Islamic Traditions concerning these variant Qur'ans, was able to find 15,000 differences which the compilers had described in their writings. So much for early standardization! This makes Van Puten and Sidky's job even more precarious, as they can only referance a possible proto-Qur'an (or as they call it an "archetype"), but cannot produce any manuscript to support their claims, since there simply is not any original 7th century Qur'an for us to look at. Unlike our Biblical manuscripts of the new Testament, where we can point to the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus Codexes (dated to the 4th century) as well as the Alexandrinus (dated to the 5th century), all 200-300 years before the Qur'an was supposedly written, Muslims cannot even find ONE manuscript of their original Qur'an from the 7th century, a mere 1400 years ago. So, what do Muslim scholars do in response to this problem? Stay tuned for the next episode to find out... © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2022 (66,430) Music: "Feeling the Caribbean Sun" by Horst Hoffman, from filmmusic-io