*CONTINUATION*
A critic may further ask, “What about the variants?”
The subject of variants is exactly islamoscope’s contention in his/her article mentioned earlier. As an opening to his article he says,
“I have found in my dialogue with Muslims is that they absolutely detest the idea of textual variants in Quranic manuscript.”
Talking to Muslims selling fish in the market does not count. That’s just a joke. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he has had the opportunity to converse with educated Muslims. I would like to know from him if he’s willing to share the names of the scholars he has spoken to or tried to speak to on this very subject(if there were any). In any case, this attitude or approach which is orientalistic in nature is not something new. Th critics or detractors of Islam have been at it since John of Damascus(750 CE). They have time and again tried to dismantle the Qur’an from various different angles and tactics. Early polemicists after John of Damascus (of whom you can read about here) included Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, Philip Melanchthon and even Martin Luther. The Qur’an early appearance in Europe by the hands of Andre du Ryer in his French translation L’Alcoran de Mohamet in 1647; Solomon Schweigger in German called Alcoranus Mahumeticus, das ist: der Turcken Alcoran, Religion und Aberglauben in 1616 just five years after the publication of the KJV; Alexander Ross in the first English translation called The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1648 just one year after du Ryer’s. The interest and sometimes even bordering on obsession of Orientalists on the Qur’an became quite evident with Theodor Noldeke’s Geschichte des Qoranus in 1860 which aimed at dating not just each chapter but also each verse of the Qur’an! Prior to that Gustav Flugel published the Qur’an with a new numbering system of his own called Corani texti Arabicus. Around 1937 to 1939 Richard Bell came to the fold and presumably basing his postulations on “scientific criteria” he published a rearranged version of the Qur’an in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work however did not gain much interest in the wider academic world. Enter Arthur Jeffrey and Otto Pretzl! These two and their cohorts tried to reassemble the Qur’an and come up with a new so called “critical text” of the Qur’an based on around 40 000 bits of Qur’anic fragments. Guess what happened to their courageous enterprise? It literally went up in flames! It was all destroyed during a bombing on Munich in World War 2. This mania if I may describe the phenomenon as such became even more fascinating and honestly downright silly with John Wansborough and his mates from the London School of Oriental and African Studies who produced the book Qur’anic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation which then brought forth others like Michael Cook and Patricia Crone into the picture who proposed the following,
1) The Qur’an did not exist in the 7th century and only came about at the end of it. That is to say the Qur’an did not exist in the Prophet Muhammad’s s.a.w. time.
2) Mecca was never the centre of the Islamic world
3) Arab imperialism and conquest started even before Islam
4) The hijrah did not exist
5) The early Muslims did not call themselves Muslims
These notions were reached by totally omitting all the Muslim sources for Muslim history. You know, that would be like writing Roman history without Roman sources. Can you imagnie that? Can you imagine writing Egyptian history without Egyptian sources? Thank God the sane world has not taken these scholars(if you can even call them that) seriously. They have all been laughed off the stage by academia especially Patricia Crone with her extreme thoughts on Islam. As a reaction to these pathological behaviour against the Qur’an by Orientalists Parvez Mansoor rightly remarks,
“Rarely, if ever, the sacred script of a world religion has been treated with so much “pathological anomosity”.”
However, it’s not all bleak and grim that we see in the world of Orientalism. Despite the seemingly prevalent anti-Islamic sentiments emitting from their ranks there are those that do try to actually understand the Qur’an instead of trying to dismember it. Among them include Neal Robinson in his Discovering Qur’an who actually embraced Islam during his research.
There are some truly dubious propaganda circulating around suggesting that the Catholic church instructed a band of people to create the Qur’an or that a group of heretical Christians came together and composed what we now know as the Qur’an. These are feeble attempts to undermine the credibility of the Qur’an that are in fact hot air. The Qur’an was not revealed mysteriously and in secret and that later a band of unknown people gathered together and assembled a copy and disseminated it around the world so that Muslims believe in a faked Qur’an or a Qur’an that is filled with problems like “variants”. Such conspiracy theories do not stand in light of history.
“The Qur’an is undenibly unique in this tradition, and indeed unique in the entire context of classical sacred tradition throughout the world, in having been revealed in the light of history, through the offices of a Prophet who was well known.” [5]
There are some who try to argue that the Qur’an was only collected and written down after the time of the Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. and this affects the reliability of the text that have been passed down to us.
The scholar Syed Muzafaruddin Nadwi refutes this allegation,
“Some Orientalists, who have translated the Qur’an or written anything concerning it, have asserted that the verses and chapters of the Qur’an remained scattered and disjoinned during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet, and that they were collected after his death on the authority of the vebal evidences of the Companions, and hence its genuineness is liable to question. This assertion only serves to betray the ignorance of those who make it. It is an untruth to say that the verses and chapters of the Qur’an were collected after the Prophet’s death, for there is strong historical evidence to prove that all verses of the Qur’an were collected and all the surahs(chapters) named by the direct instruction of he Prophet himself.” [6]
A Critic may further ask, “But what about people like Prof. James A. Bellamy who says,
“These variants, however – I have counted more than two-hundred that make a difference in the meaning - are important in that they tell us there was no solid oral tradition stemming directly from the prophet to prove which variant was correct”
That’s the source that islamoscope appeals to. What I would like to see are some supporting scholarship. Who else agrees with this? In fact, let us look at the words of Sir William Muir who was a Christin preacher from Oxford University who says,
“The recension of ‘Uthman has been handed down to us unaltered. So carefully, indeed, has it been preserved, that there are no variations of importance, – we might almost say no variations at all, – amongst the innumerable copies of the Koran scattered throughout the vast bounds of empire of Islam. Contending and embittered factions, taking their rise in the murder of ‘Uthman himself within a quarter of a century from the death of Muhammad have ever since rent the Muslim world. Yet but one Koran has always been current amongst them…. There is probably in the world no other work which has remained twelve centuries with so pure a text.” [7]
Adrian Brockett says regarding the preservation of the Qur’an via both memorisation and writing,
“There can be no denying that some of the formal characteristics of the Qur’an point to the oral side and others to the written side, but neither was as a whole, primary. There is therefore no need to make different categories for vocal and graphic differences between transmissions. Muslims have not. The letter is not a dead skeleton to be refleshed, but is a manifestation of the spirit alive from beginning. The transmission of the Qur’an has always been oral, just as it has been written.” [8]
He also says,
“Thus, if the Qur’an had been transmitted only orally for the first century, sizeable variations between texts such as are seen in the hadith and pre-Islamic poetry would be found, and if it had been transmitted only in writing, sizeable variations such as in the different transmissions of the original document of the constitution of Medina would be found. But neither is the case with the Qur’an. There must have been a parallel written transmission limiting variation in the oral transmission to the graphic form, side by side with a parallel oral transmission preserving the written transmission from corruption.” [9] (emphasis added)
Consider the following also,
“The simple fact is that none of the differences, whether vocal or graphic, between the transmission of Hafs and the transmission of Warsh has any great effect on the meaning. Many are the differences which do not change the meaning at all, and the rest are differences with an effect on the meaning in the immediate context of the text itself, but without any significant wider influence on Muslim thought” [10]
Bernard Lewis who was a writer, critic, historian and Orientalist says about the Qur’an,
“From an early date Muslim scholars recognized the danger of false testimony and hence false doctrine, and developed an elaborate science for criticizing tradition. “Traditional science”, as it was called, differed in many respects from modern historical source criticism, and modern scholarship has always disagreed with evaluations of traditional scientists about the authenticity and accuracy of ancient narratives. But their careful scrutiny of the chains of transmission and their meticulous collection and preservation of variants in the transmitted narratives give to medieval Arabic historiography a professionalism and sophistication without precedent in antiquity and without parallel in the contemporary medieval West. By comparison, the historiography of Latin Christendom seems poor and meagre, and even the more advanced and complex historiography of Greek Christendom still falls short of the historical literature of Islam in volume, variety and analytical depth.” [11]
Is there any more doubt? Let us consider the words of my professor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Israr Ahmad Khan from the Department of Qur’an and Sunnah, International Islamic University of Malaysia,
“But the Qur’an was neither lost and retrieved later, nor was it tampered with and manipulated. Almost fifteen centuries have elapsed since it was received by the Prophet to be delivered to mankin. Thi period is more than enough to cause a documet to be easily subjected to changes. History serves as a merciless agent of information, hiding nothing of what takes place in time and space. Had the Qur’an been altered or prepared in more than one version, it would have been on record. What is historically established is the availability of the Qur’an in one single version from the 7th century until today. The Qur’an has withstood the test of the time.
Munich University in Germany, at the turn of the current century, embarked on an extensive research project on the reliability of the Qur’an. A large team was involved in obtaining almost all the editions ever published anywhere in the world, including the oldest copy of the Qur’an said to have been used by the third Islamic leader ‘Uthman B. Affan, which was available in the Taskqand library in Uzbekistan. The researchers vetted and tallied the copies with each other and compared them with the oldest one. Their findings were remarkable. The conclusion reached was that no changes ever occured in the Qur’an and the presently available Qur’an is exactly the same as the oldest extant copy.” [12] (emphasis added)
Finally, let us have a look at Bruce Lawrence’s words on this issue,
“Through complex process, the recitations that had been revealed in verses and chapters became over time a book. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘Ali, his close relative and supporter, worked with others to compile them into a written text. Then twenty years later, during the rule of ‘Uthman, the third Caliph or Successor to Muhammad (after Abu Bakr and ‘Umar but before ‘Ali), all extant versions were arranged into one ’standard’ version. This version persists substantially unchanged to the present day.” [13] (emphasis added)
In conclusion, the Qur’an has been thoroughly and completely preserved and remains to this day in its pristine purity. We repeat Allah’s saying,
References:
[1] Prof. Dr. H. Mahmud Yunus. Tafsir Quran Karim(1957). p. 369
[2] Ibn al-Nadim. Al-Fihrist(1997). Beirut: Dar al-Ma’rifah. p. 61
[3] Ibn Hisham. Al-Sirat Al-Nabawiyyah. Beirut: Dar al-Ma’rifah. Vol. 1 and 2, p. 314-315. Muhammad bin Isma’il Bukhari. al-Jami’ al-Sahih. Vol. 3, Kitab al-Tafsir, hadith 4582. Ibid. Kitab Faza’il al-Qur’an, hadith 5004. Ibid. hadith 4999. Ibid. Kitab al-Maghazi, hadith 4088. Ibid. hadith 4078. Ibid. Kitab Faza’il al-Qur’an, hadith 4986. Manna al-Qu’attan. Mabahith fi ‘ulum al-Qur’an. Riyadh. p. 122
[4] Chris Horrie, Peter Chippindale. What is Islam?(1997). London, England: Virgin Publishing Ltd. p. 18
[5] Thomas Cleary. The Essential Koran. HarperOne. p. IX
[6] Syed Muzaffaruddin Nadwi. A Geographical History of the Qur’an(2009). Selangor, Malaysia: Islamic Book Trust. p. 16
[7] William Muir. The Life of Mohammad(1912). Edinburgh. p. xxii-xxiii
[8] Andrew Rippin. Approaches of the History of Interpretation of the Qur’an(1988). Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 34
[9] Ibid. p. 44
[10] Ibid. p. 37
[11] Bernard Lewis. Islam in History(1993). Open Court Publishing. p. 104-105
[12] Israr Ahmad Khan. Qur’anic Studies An Introduction(2000). Kuala Lumpur: Zaman Islam Media. p. 14
[13] Bruce Lawrence. The Qur’an, A Biography(2006). Great Britain: Atlantis Books. p. 6
Other references:
Aijazul Qur’an by Dr. Rafiq Ahmad
Islam & The Qur’an an Introduction by Murad Hofmann
www.islamic-awareness.org
Recommended reading:
The Story of the Qur’an. It’s History and place in Muslim Life by Ingrid Mattson.
A critic may further ask, “What about the variants?”
The subject of variants is exactly islamoscope’s contention in his/her article mentioned earlier. As an opening to his article he says,
“I have found in my dialogue with Muslims is that they absolutely detest the idea of textual variants in Quranic manuscript.”
Talking to Muslims selling fish in the market does not count. That’s just a joke. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he has had the opportunity to converse with educated Muslims. I would like to know from him if he’s willing to share the names of the scholars he has spoken to or tried to speak to on this very subject(if there were any). In any case, this attitude or approach which is orientalistic in nature is not something new. Th critics or detractors of Islam have been at it since John of Damascus(750 CE). They have time and again tried to dismantle the Qur’an from various different angles and tactics. Early polemicists after John of Damascus (of whom you can read about here) included Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, Philip Melanchthon and even Martin Luther. The Qur’an early appearance in Europe by the hands of Andre du Ryer in his French translation L’Alcoran de Mohamet in 1647; Solomon Schweigger in German called Alcoranus Mahumeticus, das ist: der Turcken Alcoran, Religion und Aberglauben in 1616 just five years after the publication of the KJV; Alexander Ross in the first English translation called The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1648 just one year after du Ryer’s. The interest and sometimes even bordering on obsession of Orientalists on the Qur’an became quite evident with Theodor Noldeke’s Geschichte des Qoranus in 1860 which aimed at dating not just each chapter but also each verse of the Qur’an! Prior to that Gustav Flugel published the Qur’an with a new numbering system of his own called Corani texti Arabicus. Around 1937 to 1939 Richard Bell came to the fold and presumably basing his postulations on “scientific criteria” he published a rearranged version of the Qur’an in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work however did not gain much interest in the wider academic world. Enter Arthur Jeffrey and Otto Pretzl! These two and their cohorts tried to reassemble the Qur’an and come up with a new so called “critical text” of the Qur’an based on around 40 000 bits of Qur’anic fragments. Guess what happened to their courageous enterprise? It literally went up in flames! It was all destroyed during a bombing on Munich in World War 2. This mania if I may describe the phenomenon as such became even more fascinating and honestly downright silly with John Wansborough and his mates from the London School of Oriental and African Studies who produced the book Qur’anic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation which then brought forth others like Michael Cook and Patricia Crone into the picture who proposed the following,
1) The Qur’an did not exist in the 7th century and only came about at the end of it. That is to say the Qur’an did not exist in the Prophet Muhammad’s s.a.w. time.
2) Mecca was never the centre of the Islamic world
3) Arab imperialism and conquest started even before Islam
4) The hijrah did not exist
5) The early Muslims did not call themselves Muslims
These notions were reached by totally omitting all the Muslim sources for Muslim history. You know, that would be like writing Roman history without Roman sources. Can you imagnie that? Can you imagine writing Egyptian history without Egyptian sources? Thank God the sane world has not taken these scholars(if you can even call them that) seriously. They have all been laughed off the stage by academia especially Patricia Crone with her extreme thoughts on Islam. As a reaction to these pathological behaviour against the Qur’an by Orientalists Parvez Mansoor rightly remarks,
“Rarely, if ever, the sacred script of a world religion has been treated with so much “pathological anomosity”.”
However, it’s not all bleak and grim that we see in the world of Orientalism. Despite the seemingly prevalent anti-Islamic sentiments emitting from their ranks there are those that do try to actually understand the Qur’an instead of trying to dismember it. Among them include Neal Robinson in his Discovering Qur’an who actually embraced Islam during his research.
There are some truly dubious propaganda circulating around suggesting that the Catholic church instructed a band of people to create the Qur’an or that a group of heretical Christians came together and composed what we now know as the Qur’an. These are feeble attempts to undermine the credibility of the Qur’an that are in fact hot air. The Qur’an was not revealed mysteriously and in secret and that later a band of unknown people gathered together and assembled a copy and disseminated it around the world so that Muslims believe in a faked Qur’an or a Qur’an that is filled with problems like “variants”. Such conspiracy theories do not stand in light of history.
“The Qur’an is undenibly unique in this tradition, and indeed unique in the entire context of classical sacred tradition throughout the world, in having been revealed in the light of history, through the offices of a Prophet who was well known.” [5]
There are some who try to argue that the Qur’an was only collected and written down after the time of the Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. and this affects the reliability of the text that have been passed down to us.
The scholar Syed Muzafaruddin Nadwi refutes this allegation,
“Some Orientalists, who have translated the Qur’an or written anything concerning it, have asserted that the verses and chapters of the Qur’an remained scattered and disjoinned during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet, and that they were collected after his death on the authority of the vebal evidences of the Companions, and hence its genuineness is liable to question. This assertion only serves to betray the ignorance of those who make it. It is an untruth to say that the verses and chapters of the Qur’an were collected after the Prophet’s death, for there is strong historical evidence to prove that all verses of the Qur’an were collected and all the surahs(chapters) named by the direct instruction of he Prophet himself.” [6]
A Critic may further ask, “But what about people like Prof. James A. Bellamy who says,
“These variants, however – I have counted more than two-hundred that make a difference in the meaning - are important in that they tell us there was no solid oral tradition stemming directly from the prophet to prove which variant was correct”
That’s the source that islamoscope appeals to. What I would like to see are some supporting scholarship. Who else agrees with this? In fact, let us look at the words of Sir William Muir who was a Christin preacher from Oxford University who says,
“The recension of ‘Uthman has been handed down to us unaltered. So carefully, indeed, has it been preserved, that there are no variations of importance, – we might almost say no variations at all, – amongst the innumerable copies of the Koran scattered throughout the vast bounds of empire of Islam. Contending and embittered factions, taking their rise in the murder of ‘Uthman himself within a quarter of a century from the death of Muhammad have ever since rent the Muslim world. Yet but one Koran has always been current amongst them…. There is probably in the world no other work which has remained twelve centuries with so pure a text.” [7]
Adrian Brockett says regarding the preservation of the Qur’an via both memorisation and writing,
“There can be no denying that some of the formal characteristics of the Qur’an point to the oral side and others to the written side, but neither was as a whole, primary. There is therefore no need to make different categories for vocal and graphic differences between transmissions. Muslims have not. The letter is not a dead skeleton to be refleshed, but is a manifestation of the spirit alive from beginning. The transmission of the Qur’an has always been oral, just as it has been written.” [8]
He also says,
“Thus, if the Qur’an had been transmitted only orally for the first century, sizeable variations between texts such as are seen in the hadith and pre-Islamic poetry would be found, and if it had been transmitted only in writing, sizeable variations such as in the different transmissions of the original document of the constitution of Medina would be found. But neither is the case with the Qur’an. There must have been a parallel written transmission limiting variation in the oral transmission to the graphic form, side by side with a parallel oral transmission preserving the written transmission from corruption.” [9] (emphasis added)
Consider the following also,
“The simple fact is that none of the differences, whether vocal or graphic, between the transmission of Hafs and the transmission of Warsh has any great effect on the meaning. Many are the differences which do not change the meaning at all, and the rest are differences with an effect on the meaning in the immediate context of the text itself, but without any significant wider influence on Muslim thought” [10]
Bernard Lewis who was a writer, critic, historian and Orientalist says about the Qur’an,
“From an early date Muslim scholars recognized the danger of false testimony and hence false doctrine, and developed an elaborate science for criticizing tradition. “Traditional science”, as it was called, differed in many respects from modern historical source criticism, and modern scholarship has always disagreed with evaluations of traditional scientists about the authenticity and accuracy of ancient narratives. But their careful scrutiny of the chains of transmission and their meticulous collection and preservation of variants in the transmitted narratives give to medieval Arabic historiography a professionalism and sophistication without precedent in antiquity and without parallel in the contemporary medieval West. By comparison, the historiography of Latin Christendom seems poor and meagre, and even the more advanced and complex historiography of Greek Christendom still falls short of the historical literature of Islam in volume, variety and analytical depth.” [11]
Is there any more doubt? Let us consider the words of my professor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Israr Ahmad Khan from the Department of Qur’an and Sunnah, International Islamic University of Malaysia,
“But the Qur’an was neither lost and retrieved later, nor was it tampered with and manipulated. Almost fifteen centuries have elapsed since it was received by the Prophet to be delivered to mankin. Thi period is more than enough to cause a documet to be easily subjected to changes. History serves as a merciless agent of information, hiding nothing of what takes place in time and space. Had the Qur’an been altered or prepared in more than one version, it would have been on record. What is historically established is the availability of the Qur’an in one single version from the 7th century until today. The Qur’an has withstood the test of the time.
Munich University in Germany, at the turn of the current century, embarked on an extensive research project on the reliability of the Qur’an. A large team was involved in obtaining almost all the editions ever published anywhere in the world, including the oldest copy of the Qur’an said to have been used by the third Islamic leader ‘Uthman B. Affan, which was available in the Taskqand library in Uzbekistan. The researchers vetted and tallied the copies with each other and compared them with the oldest one. Their findings were remarkable. The conclusion reached was that no changes ever occured in the Qur’an and the presently available Qur’an is exactly the same as the oldest extant copy.” [12] (emphasis added)
Finally, let us have a look at Bruce Lawrence’s words on this issue,
“Through complex process, the recitations that had been revealed in verses and chapters became over time a book. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘Ali, his close relative and supporter, worked with others to compile them into a written text. Then twenty years later, during the rule of ‘Uthman, the third Caliph or Successor to Muhammad (after Abu Bakr and ‘Umar but before ‘Ali), all extant versions were arranged into one ’standard’ version. This version persists substantially unchanged to the present day.” [13] (emphasis added)
In conclusion, the Qur’an has been thoroughly and completely preserved and remains to this day in its pristine purity. We repeat Allah’s saying,
It is We Who have sent down the Reminder (Qur’an) and We Who will preserve it. (al-Qur’an 15:9)
References:
[1] Prof. Dr. H. Mahmud Yunus. Tafsir Quran Karim(1957). p. 369
[2] Ibn al-Nadim. Al-Fihrist(1997). Beirut: Dar al-Ma’rifah. p. 61
[3] Ibn Hisham. Al-Sirat Al-Nabawiyyah. Beirut: Dar al-Ma’rifah. Vol. 1 and 2, p. 314-315. Muhammad bin Isma’il Bukhari. al-Jami’ al-Sahih. Vol. 3, Kitab al-Tafsir, hadith 4582. Ibid. Kitab Faza’il al-Qur’an, hadith 5004. Ibid. hadith 4999. Ibid. Kitab al-Maghazi, hadith 4088. Ibid. hadith 4078. Ibid. Kitab Faza’il al-Qur’an, hadith 4986. Manna al-Qu’attan. Mabahith fi ‘ulum al-Qur’an. Riyadh. p. 122
[4] Chris Horrie, Peter Chippindale. What is Islam?(1997). London, England: Virgin Publishing Ltd. p. 18
[5] Thomas Cleary. The Essential Koran. HarperOne. p. IX
[6] Syed Muzaffaruddin Nadwi. A Geographical History of the Qur’an(2009). Selangor, Malaysia: Islamic Book Trust. p. 16
[7] William Muir. The Life of Mohammad(1912). Edinburgh. p. xxii-xxiii
[8] Andrew Rippin. Approaches of the History of Interpretation of the Qur’an(1988). Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 34
[9] Ibid. p. 44
[10] Ibid. p. 37
[11] Bernard Lewis. Islam in History(1993). Open Court Publishing. p. 104-105
[12] Israr Ahmad Khan. Qur’anic Studies An Introduction(2000). Kuala Lumpur: Zaman Islam Media. p. 14
[13] Bruce Lawrence. The Qur’an, A Biography(2006). Great Britain: Atlantis Books. p. 6
Other references:
Aijazul Qur’an by Dr. Rafiq Ahmad
Islam & The Qur’an an Introduction by Murad Hofmann
www.islamic-awareness.org
Recommended reading:
The Story of the Qur’an. It’s History and place in Muslim Life by Ingrid Mattson.
