arthra,
A few points I'd also like to mention is that Yemen was not the center of developement for the Qur'an but rather Mecca and Medina...
Yemen itself was a later in coming under the new revelation. According to the Kitab al-Irshad by al-Mufid, the Prophet sent Khalid b. Walid to Yemen to call them to the new revelation. Yemen had Christian and even some Zoroastrian influences
Yes but the oldest quran we have happens to have been found in Yemen so that's all we've got to go on. Doesn't matter what tradition teaches, all that matters is the hard evidence.
The verbal tradition of Qur'an was a definite reality I believe as we know that many of the Companions of the Prophet had memorized Qur'an and that one of the reasons for setting it down in a standardized form was because some of these Companions were dying and it was feared what they knew could be lost.
Yes, many of the companions who had memorised the Quran had died. So many were dying, in fact, that this is what prompted Uthman to make his "final" copy, before it was lost forever.
Maybe he didn't quite save it in time. Maybe too many companions had died to make a safe copy. Or maybe the memories of those that survived were not entirely perfect. However it happened, it definitely happened - the quran we have now is different to (at least one version) of the quran they had then.
And this quran that they were using then had been around for a long time. We know this because the earliest Yemeni manuscripts were overwritten over earlier versions.
People in this thread keep talking about about how tradition dictates that the quran was memorised and that therefore it is safe. This argument doesn't work. Tradition becomes irrelevant when you have contradictory hard evidence. Regardless of what tradition says, the oldest quran we have found says different. And we should always follow hard evidence over the anecdotal.
Another point that I think is important to note here is that there were many letters and speeches recorded of Ali b. Abi Talib where you can verify the actual verses of Qur'an so this can serve if you will as a backup and support to the actual text itself.
Again this is not really important. All we are interested in is actual hard copies of the quran not other peoples opinions. There are loads of opinions. Clint Eastwood (as Dirty Harry) once said "Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one".
I think that the oldest evidence of the quran at all is some markings on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Some verses of the quran were etched into the rock walls. These etchings predate even the Yemen manuscripts but they show similarities with the Yemen manuscripts (as far as I'm aware) in that they lack diacritical marks etc.
Another site referred to above is the Derafsh Kaviyani site and has this statement "down with the Islamic regime" on it's Home Page.
So there may be some reasons and motivations here that are well outside the realm of objective scholarship.
Yes but the actual article is copied from the Atlantic Monthly journal which is subscription only. I think that article appears on the web occasionally but gets closed down when Atlantic Monthly learn about it. For copyright reasons they don't want other websites giving it away for free when they charge for it. So it appears every so often when some fringe website or other decides to post it - by the nature of the article it's usually anti-islamic sites that tend to post it (or sites that are anti- the regime in Iran as in this case).
None of this affects the actual article itself though, which is just a discussion of what the guys found when they studied the fragments in Yemen and the potential implications thereof.
Regardless of the biases of the various websites, the facts are still the same:
They found some pieces of the oldest qurans we have, these pieces are different to the current standard quran.
These facts are not in doubt.
35000 photographs were taken of these fragments and are being studied as we speak. So this whole thing is going to be a big news issue at some point in the future (when it all gets published). There's no point in burying your head in the sand and pretending it isn't going to happen. Best to face it now and prepare yourself. This issue is not going to go away quietly and hide.
I never said the Quran does have variations... I said "IF"