What is really the Qur'an?

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 19, 2008 at 20:48

RF wrote

>The earliest Koran was written over 80 years

No, that is not true. The story of the collection of the Qur'an as transmitted to us by the Muslim tradition is nothing but a confused and confusing allegations that were written by the Muslim 3Ulama some 300 years after the death of Muhammad in distant Mesopotamia and there is no reason for us to believe such sources

Now if we mean by the Qur'an a copy of the Cairo 1923-1924 edition or the 1969 Tunisian edition of the Qur'an (and they are really different) , then we have a problem. One can find for sure circulating Quranic pericopes and logias as early as 72 years after the death of Muhammad albeit not similar to what we have in the Cairo edition or the Tunisian edition ( see the inscriptions at al-masjad al-Aqsa in Jerusalem circa 690-705CE and compare them with the copy of the canonized Qur'an and for this see Hoyland survey)

Most significant is that the earliest fragments of the Qur'an were written in very defective Arabic with missing long vowels (alif, waw and yeh) and no short vowels (fatha, damma and kasra) and a total confusion about the alif maksura and the end result is that the 3Ulama had no clue of what is really written in the Qur'an and they had to guess eg: the rasm of the word MLK in Surat al-Fatiha and is it Maaliki or is it Maliki (the king of or the owner of) and the rasm QTLULU in the infamous Qur'an 9:5 and is it Qatiloo or iqtoloo (fight or kill) and you must agree with me that either Muahmmad heard it as the king of or the owner of and it could not have been both.

Most amazing about the Qur'an is that it has many words that no one have a clue of what they really mean not back then and not even now: eg: Ilaf in Surat Quraish, Ababeel wa sijeel in Surat al-Feel and those strange letters at the begining of some chapters.

And do you know what this means? It means that (see Michael Cook)

1. The Quranic pericopes and logias already predated Muhammad and by the time the 3Ulama had to guess what the Qur'an was really saying no one had a clue what all these strange words mean.

2. The other possibility is that the Qur'an was not canonized until the 3Ulama in Mesopotamia in the 3rd century of Islam collected such Quranic pericopes and logias (and this is indeed the period of the masoritic exegesis of the Qur'an) and tried to understand what they really mean!

But do you know what this really means? This would detach Islam from Arabia and Muahmmad from the Qur'an (see Wansbrough).

Now in the 3rd century of Islam the Muslim masorites indeed seemed to be working on stabilizing such collection of logias and pericopes that no one had any idea where they came from (see "variant traditions) or what they even mean and the end result was a confused and cofusing book and in the words of Peters "text with no context."

So the Qur'an we have now could not have been available (in the way we have it now ) before the 3rd century of Islam and indeed Wansbrough was correct.

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