Hazeleyed Honey wrote:
Sorry guys for my following essay, but I had quite a bit to explain in replying to this post.
Quest4Glory wrote:
I will just chime into this thread as I see it very interesting and beneficial. In regards to the compilation of the Quran and the fact that it has never been altered, not even a letter, has been confirmed through historical text by many scholars. Of course, you have others who will refute such claims because this is one of the miracles of the Quran as Allah (God) says in his holy book that he himself is responsible for preserving his final revelation. I could write on and on explaining how the Quran was compiled and completed by the Prophet's (peace be upon him) death, but it is more beneficial to watch a clip that I'll post if you are further interested.
Those are the claims that I have an issue with, because facts and history say otherwise. Verses were extracted, added, edited throughout until when that council happened where the Caliph Uthman took the different codified versions of the Qur'an, burned them all, and decided to stick to that one version he compiled to unify all Muslims.
This is what the mainstream Muslim scholars claim:
After the death of Muhammad, the text of the Qur'an was written down in the caliphate of Abu Bakr. Until 'Uthman, one and only one written text existed. For over a decade after the death of Muhammad, the Qur'an remained primarily an oral text in the memories of the faithful. In Islamic accounts of the history of the Qur'an , this oral text was entirely faithful to the original verses—this is entirely possible, but Western historians generally agree that some corruptions must have produced slight variations throughout the Islamic world. Nevertheless, the military expansion of Islam led to two direct consequences concerning the integrity of the Quranic text. First, large numbers of the faithful were dying out in the various military expeditions. Each time someone died who had the Quranic text memorized, that meant that one copy of the Qur'an disappeared forever. Second, the expansion of Islam swelled the ranks of the faithful. Many of these new converts spoke other langagues and the original Arabic of the Qur'an began to corrupt. Faced with these two threats to the integrity of the Qur'an , 'Uthman orderd a rescension of the text to be made and to serve as the definitive written version of the text. A rescension is a version of a text that is assembled from all the variant versions of that text. 'Uthman, however, relied on two sources: the written text that had been ordered by Abu Bakr and that still existed, and the various oral texts of Muslims who memorized it during the lifetime of Muhammad. In Islamic history, there is no variation between these two sources, so the Uthmanic "rescension" is largely a codifying of a single version of a text. This version, the 'Uthmanic rescension, is the version of the Qur'an that has remained, unchanged, the central holy text of Islam.
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ISLAM/QURAN.HTM
There are so many historical tidbits left out in these assertions. So many obvious historical events I can say also happened during those times which also would show how the Qur’an could not have been preserved to one original and pure copy (ie. the fact Qur’an was compiled a decade after Prophet Mohammed’s death, some of those who had it memorized died, many different versions existed with different text and Arabic dialect, etc.)An important historical fact which always remains unmentioned in this mainstream Islamic thought are the traditions that report that Uthman destroyed by fire all variant readings and texts that did not conform to his Qur’anic compilation.
Tangible evidence of textual and archeological evidences shut down these traditional mainstream views about the formation and preservation of the Qur’an that it has never been altered or ever changed. For example, there are quite a few of different variations that exist such as between the Samarkand codex version of the Qur’an and the “standard