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WillowOne's Positions

Preservation of the Quran

Form

  1. God promised to preserve the Qur'an (15:9).
  2. The Qur'an has been transmitted unchanged, letter for letter, since the time of the Prophet, unlike the Bible, which is corrupt.
  3. A text perfectly preserved for fourteen centuries bears the mark of divine protection.
  4. Therefore the Qur'an is the word of God and the Bible is not.

My Positions

  1. The Qur'an has not been preserved unchanged. The tradition's own sources record a standardisation under the caliph Uthman, the burning of rival codices, companions' versions that differed, verses said to be lost, and seven to ten canonical "readings" that differ in wording to this day.
  2. Even if the text were perfectly preserved, preservation is evidence of good copying, not of truth. A perfectly preserved book can be perfectly wrong.
  3. The contrast with the Bible is fair as far as it goes, and it cuts the other way: the Bible's textual history is messy because scholars were allowed to study it. The Qur'an's looks clean because the variants were burned.

Notes

  1. What the Islamic sources say. Around 650 the caliph Uthman had a standard copy compiled and ordered all other copies burned (Bukhari 4987). One does not burn alternatives to a text that has none. The companion Ibn Mas'ud's codex, by the tradition's own account, lacked three chapters and had different wording elsewhere; Ubayy ibn Ka'b's had two extra. A hadith has Umar insisting that a verse prescribing stoning for adultery had been revealed and recited but was not in the written text (Bukhari 6829). Another has Aisha reporting that a page containing verses on suckling and stoning was under her bed and was eaten by a sheep after the Prophet's death (Ibn Majah 1944). These are not sceptics' inventions; they are canonical hadith.
  2. The manuscripts. The Sana'a palimpsest, discovered in 1972 and dated by radiocarbon to the first decades of Islam, carries a lower text, scraped off and overwritten, whose readings differ from the standard text in dozens of places. Early manuscripts lack the vowel marks and most of the dots that distinguish Arabic consonants, so the same skeleton supports different words. The reading systems that resolve this ambiguity were canonised at seven in the tenth century and at ten later; the Hafs and Warsh readings, both printed and recited today, differ in several hundred places, some of them in meaning.
  3. Preservation proves preservation. Grant, for argument's sake, that the text is letter-perfect from 632. That would show that Muslims copied carefully, which they did, and nothing about whether what they copied was true. The Iliad is well preserved. So are the works of Euclid, and the Book of Mormon, whose 1830 text can be compared with the printer's manuscript. A claim's survival is not its verification; the argument quietly swaps the two (Equivocation).
  4. The Bible comparison. The New Testament has thousands of manuscripts and hundreds of thousands of variants because scholars have catalogued them in the open for three centuries (Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy). The Qur'an has fewer catalogued variants in part because the early ones were destroyed by decree and in part because critical study of the text is, in most Muslim countries, a crime (Blasphemy). A text that no one is allowed to examine does not thereby become reliable.
  5. The promise in 15:9. The verse in which God promises to guard the Qur'an is in the Qur'an. A book that certifies its own preservation is doing what every book could do, and the argument that relies on it is Circular Reasoning.

Sources

  • Sadeghi, B. and Goudarzi, M., "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān", Der Islam 87 (2012)
  • Déroche, F., Qur'ans of the Umayyads: A First Overview (2014)
  • Sahih al-Bukhari 4987 (Uthman's recension) and 6829 (the stoning verse); Sunan Ibn Majah 1944
  • Small, K. E., Textual Criticism and Qur'an Manuscripts (2011)

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