The awakening of Europe from the Dark Ages and the subsequent
intellectual enlightenment of the 1600s-1800s was one of the most
powerful movements in modern history. It brought to Europe a dedication
to empirical science, critical thinking, and intellectual discourse.
Much of this was imported from the Muslim world’s intellectual history,
through Muslim entry points into Europe such as Spain, Sicily, and
Southeast Europe.
This rise in intellectual work coincided with a period of European
imperialism and colonialism over the Muslim world. European nations such
as England, France, and Russia slowly conquered portions of the Muslim
world, dividing it among themselves. Thus the intellectual
enlightenment, coupled with imperialism over the Muslim world, led to
what the Europeans saw as a critical study of Islam, its history,
beliefs, and teachings. This movement is known as Orientalism. One of
the greatest shortcomings of Orientalism, however, is the analysis of
Islamic history on European terms, discarding the centuries of academic
work put in by great Muslim minds since the time of the Prophet
Muhammad ﷺ.
One of the most dangerous aspects of Orientalism was the European
study of the origins of the Quran. Since it is well accepted in academic
circles that both the Torah of the Jews and the New Testament of the
Christians have changed over the centuries, European academics
erroneously believed the same must be true about the Quran. Their
efforts to prove their belief that the Quran has been changed and is not
authentic led to studies and works of questionable intention and low
scholarly merit. This article will critically analyze the origins of the
Quran, its transmission, and its compilation, to understand why Muslims
accept the copies of the Quran they have in their homes to be the exact
same words that were spoken by Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in the early 600s AD.
The Promise to Protect
Muslims believe that Allah has already promised to protect the Quran
from the change and error that happened to earlier holy texts. Allah
states in the Quran in Surat al-Hijr, verse 9:
إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ
“Indeed, it is We who sent down the Quran and indeed, We will be it’s guardian.”
For Muslims, this verse of promise from
Allah is enough to know that He will indeed protect the Quran from any
errors and changes over time. For people who do not accept the
authenticity of the Quran in the first place, however, clearly this
verse cannot serve as proof of its authenticity, since it is in the
Quran itself. It is from here that the academic discussion begins.
Narration of the Quran to the Companions
The revelation of the Quran was not an isolated event in time. It was
a constant stream of verses descending to Muhammad ﷺ throughout the 23
years of his prophethood in Makkah and Madinah. The Prophet ﷺ appointed
numerous Companions of his to serve as scribes, writing down the latest
verses as soon as they were revealed. Mu’awiya ibn Abu Sufyan and Zaid
bin Thabit were among the scribes who had this duty. For the most part,
new verses would be written on scraps of bone, hide, or parchment, since
paper had not yet been imported from China. It is important to note
that Muhammad ﷺ would have the scribes read back the verses to him after
writing them down so he can proofread and make sure there were no
errors.
1
To further ensure that there were no errors, Muhammad ﷺ ordered that no one records anything else, not even his words,
hadith,
on the same sheet as Quran. Regarding the sheets that the Quran was
being written down on, he stated “and whoever has written anything from
me other than the Quran should erase it”
2. This was done to ensure that no other words were accidentally thought to be part of the text of the Quran.
It is important to understand, however, that physical writing down of
the Quran was not the main way that the Quran was recorded.
Arabia in the 600s was an oral society.
Very few people could read and write, thus huge emphasis was placed on
ability to memorize long poems, letters, and other messages. Before
Islam, Makkah was a center of Arabic poetry. Annual festivals were held
every year that brought together the best poets from all over the
Arabian Peninsula. Exuberant attendees would memorize the exact words
that their favorite poets recited and quote them years and decades
later.
Thus, in this type of oral society, the vast majority of the
Companions learned and recorded the Quran by memorization. In addition
to their natural ability to memorize, the rhythmic nature of the Quran
made its memorization much easier.
The Quran was not narrated to just a few select Companions. It was
heard and memorized by hundreds and thousands of people, many of
them travelers to Madinah. Thus, chapters and verses of the Quran
quickly spread during the life of the Prophet ﷺ to all corners of the
Arabian Peninsula. Those who had heard verses from the Prophet ﷺ would
go and spread them to tribes far away, who would also memorize them. In
this way, the Quran achieved a literary status known among the Arabs as
mutawatir. Mutawatir means
that it was so vastly disseminated to so many different groups of
people, who all had the same exact wording, that it
is inconceivable that that any one person or group could have falsified
it. Some sayings of the Prophet ﷺ are known to be authentic through it
being
mutawatir, but the entire Quran itself is accepted as being
mutawatir, because of its wide spread during the life of the Prophet ﷺ through oral means.
Collection After the Death of the Prophet ﷺ
We have thus far seen that the way the Quran was taught to the
numerous Companions of the Prophet ﷺ prevented it from being subject to
the protection of a few people. As verses became widespread across the
Islamic world, it was impossible for those verses to be changed without
Muslims in other parts of the world noticing and correcting them.
Furthermore, during the life of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the angel Jibreel
would recite the entire Quran with him once a year, during Ramadan. When
the Quran was finished being revealed near the end of the Prophet ﷺ’s
life, he made sure that numerous companions knew the entire Quran by
heart.
During the reigns of the first caliphs, however, a need to compile
all the verses into a central book arose. Taking preemptive action, the
caliphs who ruled the Muslim world after the death of the Prophet ﷺ
feared that if the number of people who had the Quran memorized dipped
too low, the community would be in danger of losing the Quran forever.
As a result, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, who ruled from 632 to 634,
ordered a committee be organized, under the leadership of Zaid bin
Thabit, to collect all the written pieces of Quran that were spread
throughout the Muslim community. The plan was to collect them all into
one central book that could be preserved in case the people who had the
Quran memorized died out.
Zaid was very meticulous about who he accepted verses from. Because
of the enormous responsibility of not accidentally altering the words of
the Quran, he only accepted pieces of parchment with Quran on them had
to have been written down in the presence of the Prophet ﷺ and there had
to be two witnesses who can attest to that fact.
3 These
fragments of Quran that he collected were each compared with the
memorized Quran itself, ensuring that there was no discrepancy between
the written and oral versions.
When the task was completed, a finalized
book of all the verses was compiled and presented to Abu Bakr, who
secured it in the archives of the young Muslim state in Madinah. It can
be assumed with certainty that this copy that Abu Bakr had matched
exactly the words that Muhammad ﷺ had spoken because of the numerous
memorizers of Quran present in Madinah, coupled with the disseminated
pieces of parchment on which it was recorded. Had there been
discrepancies, the people of Madinah would have raised the issue. There
is, however, no record of any opposition to Abu Bakr’s project or its
outcome.
The Mus’haf of Uthman
A copy of Uthman’s Mus’haf, kept in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul
During the caliphate of Uthman, from 644 to 656, a new issue
regarding the Quran arose in the Muslim community: pronunciation. During
the life of the Prophet ﷺ, the Quran was revealed in seven different
dialects -
qira’as. The dialects differed slightly in
their pronunciation of certain letters and words, but the overall
meaning was unchanged. These seven dialects were not an innovation
brought in by corruption of the Quran in later years, as it was
mentioned by the Prophet ﷺ himself, and there are numerous sayings of
his describing the authenticity of all seven dialects that are recorded
in the hadith compilations of Bukhari and Muslim. The reason for there
being different dialects for the Quran was to make it easier for
different tribes around the Arabian Peninsula to learn and understand
it.
During Uthman’s reign, people coming into the Muslim world at its
periphery, in places like Persia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and North Africa
were beginning to learn the Quran. An issue arose for them when it came
to pronunciation of words, as they would hear different Arabs
pronouncing the same verses differently. Although the
different pronunciations were sanctioned by the Prophet ﷺ and there was
no inherent harm in people reciting and teaching them, it led to
confusion among new non-Arab Muslims.
Uthman responded by commissioning a group to come together, organize
the Quran according to the dialect of the tribe of Quraysh (the
Prophet ﷺ’s tribe), and spread the Qurayshi dialect to all parts of the
empire. Uthman’s team (which again included Zaid bin Thabit) compiled a
Quran into one book (known as a mus’haf – from the word for page,
sahifa) based on first hand manuscripts along with the memories of the
best Quran reciters of Madinah. This mus’haf was then compared with the
copy that Abu Bakr commissioned, to make sure there were no
discrepancies. Uthman then ordered numerous copies of the mus’haf to be
made, which were sent to far off provinces throughout the empire, along
with reciters who would teach the masses the Quran.
Because the Quran was now compiled and being produced on a regular
basis, there was no need for the numerous fragments of verses that
people had in their possession. He thus ordered that those fragments be
destroyed so they cannot be used in the future to cause confusion among
the masses. Although Orientalists use this incident to try to prove the
erroneous claim that there were some discrepancies that Uthman wanted to
eliminate, that is a simplistic way of looking at the event. The entire
community in Madinah, including numerous eminent Companions such as Ali
ibn Abi Talib, willingly went along with this plan, and no objections
were voiced. Had he been eliminating legitimate differences, the people
of Madinah would have surely objected or even revolted against Uthman,
neither of which happened. Instead, the mus’haf of Uthman was accepted
by the entire community as authentic and correct.
The Script of the Quran
Another complaint that Orientalists make deals with the fact that the
Mus’haf of Uthman lacked any diacritical marks (dots that
differentiated the letters and vowel markings). The letters seen in his
mus’haf are thus just the skeletal base of Arabic letters. For example,
the word قيل (he said), without diacritical marks would look like
this: ڡٮل. According to the claims of Orientalists, a reader can then
read the word as فيل (elephant), قبل (before), or قَبّل (he kissed).
Clearly, reading such different words would have a huge difference in
meaning. Orientalists such as the Australian professor of the early
1900s, Arthur Jeffery, claim that Uthman’s copy of the Quran, with its
lack of diacritical marks made it possible for variant readings, and
thus variant meanings to exist, making the Quran today not authentic.
There are numerous flaws in this argument:
First, the fact that Uthman sent reciters with his copies of the
mus’haf is of huge importance. We must remember that the main way the
Quran was preserved was orally, and the written copies were only meant
to be a supplement to oral recitation. If someone already has a verse
memorized, the skeletal letters in a copy of Uthman’s mus’haf served
only as a visual aid when reciting. To illustrate this example, we can
look at the following inscription on the inside of the Dome of the Rock,
in Jerusalem. The building was built in the late 600s and features one
of the oldest calligraphic inscriptions in Arabic on the inside of the
building, written in the same Kufic script as Uthman’s mus’haf:
For someone familiar with the Arabic language and some basic common
phrases regarding the supremacy of Allah, it is easy to make out what
this part of the inscription says:
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم لا اله الا الله وحده لا
شريك له له الملك و له الحمد يحي و يميت و هو
على كل شئ قدير محمد عبد الله و رسوله
In the name of God, the Merciful the Compassionate. There is no god but God. He is One. He has
no associate. Unto Him belongeth sovereignity and unto Him belongeth praise. He quickeneth and He giveth death; and He has
Power over all things. Muhammad is the servant of God and His Messenger.4
In the same way as this passage, the
mus’haf of Uthman could be easily read by someone who was familiar with
the verses and the Arabic script. Thus the claim that the lack of
diacritical marks makes it impossible to know what the original word was
is clearly baseless.
A page from the Uthmani Mus’haf showing part of Surat Muhammad. Note the lack of diacritical marks.
The second problem with the claims of
Orientalists like Jeffery deals with the idea of reading a word
completely wrong based on the lack of diacritical marks. Let us assume
for a moment that there are no reciters around to explain how a verse
should be read from Uthman’s mus’haf and someone comes across the
word ڡٮل. As we stated earlier, this can be a number of different words
based on where the diacritical marks are. However, from context clues,
an educated reader can easily figure out what word it is supposed to be.
It is almost impossible for a reader to replace the word “before” with
“elephant” and have the sentence still make sense. While in some cases a
reader may accidentally replace one word with another that still makes
sense, these occasions are rare with the way the Arabic language is set
up, and all that is still assuming there are no Quranic reciters around
to guide the reader.
Over time, during the 700s and 800s,
diacritical marks began being added to the mus’hafs throughout the
Muslim world. This was done as the Muslim world shifted from an oral to a
written society, to further facilitate reading from a copy of the
Quran, and to eliminate errors by people who did not already know the
verses they were reading. Today, almost all modern mus’hafs include
diacritical marks on the skeletal letters along with vowel markings to
make reading easier.
The Isnad System
One of the most pressing issues in the eyes of the early Muslims was
the protection of the sanctity of the Quran. Numerous times throughout
the Quran and sayings of the Prophet ﷺ, the Muslims are reminded that
the Jews and Christians corrupted their texts over time, which now
cannot be taken as authentic. As a result, early Muslims developed a
system for ensuring that the Quran and hadith would not be subject to
change by human error, either intentional or unintentional.
The system that developed is known as the isnad system. The isnad system emphasized the
sanad,
of a particular saying. For example, in the hadith compilation of
Bukhari, each hadith is preceded by a chain of narrators that goes from
Bukhari back to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. This chain is known as a
sanad.
To ensure that the hadith is authentic, each narrator in the chain must
be known to be reliable, have a good memory, be trustworthy, and have
other righteous qualities.
Part of the Arabic inscription in the Kufic script inside the Dome of the Rock, built in 691.
The early Islamic community placed huge emphasis on this system for
determining the authenticity of hadith as well as verses from the Quran.
If someone were to claim to have had a verse that was not in the
canonical text of Uthman’s mus’haf, scholars would look at the chain
that person claimed went back to the Prophet ﷺ and determined from it if
there was a chance that it was authentic. Clearly, anyone forging
verses of the Quran would not be able to connect it to the Prophet ﷺ,
and his/her claim would be discounted according to the isnad system.
The isnad system thus worked to preserve the sanctity of the Quran as
well as the hadith, as it prevented people from making erroneous claims
that could then be accepted as fact. Through the focus on the the
reliability of the
sanad, the reliability of the verses or
hadith themselves could be ascertained. Zaid bin Thabit used a
proto-isnad system in his work compiling the Quran during the caliphate
of Abu Bakr, and the growth of the isnad system in subsequent decades
helped protect the text from being altered in any way.
Conclusions
This article is not meant to be a fully exhaustive study of the
history of the Quran. The scholarship of hundreds of people throughout
Islamic history to ensure the sanctity of the Quran cannot be boiled
down to a few thousand words. However, it is clear through the
introductory issues mentioned here that the text of the Quran clearly
was not altered from the time of Muhammad ﷺ to the present day. The fact
that it was so widespread during his life helped ensure that any
malicious attempts to change the words of the holy book would be futile.
The meticulous compilation of the text by Abu Bakr and Uthman served as
a backup system in case the oral preservation of the Quran was lost.
Finally, the isnad system helped ensure any claims to add to or remove
from the Quran could not pass by a scholarly process that was central to
the preservation of Islam itself.
In conclusion, the claims of Orientalists that the Quran has been
changed overtime as the Bible and Torah have are clearly misleading.
There is no evidence backing up the idea that the Quran has changed, and
attempts to prove that it has are based on rudimentary and uneducated
understandings of the history of the Quranic text.
