oldest Qur'an

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Apr 13, 2008 at 17:39

Jennifer wrote

"Thank you for your reply! Very interesting!

I do not speak Arabic at all, but I could follow your explanation - and it seems these Quranic pericopes and logias were circulating around for centuries, never uniformly translated from the various sources of the "rasm".

I did some checking around on the internet (your letter got me curious) and the more I found, the more I think the history of the Qur'an shows that it is one truly messed-up book.

Look what I found on this site - http://www.submission.org/quran/protect.html

It states, "The most standardized edition of the Quran in the world today is the one printed in Cairo, Egypt in 1924......Comparing the Egyptian edition to the oldest available Quran, the Tashkent Quran, will show that there have been many human errors in the Tashkent Quran that has to be corrected when the Egyptian edition was made."

I looked up the Tashkent Qur'an - it's dated around 651 A.D., just 19 years after Mohammed died (but only one-third of it survives)."

DNM: No that is not true. The Tashkent Qur'an is dated around 900CE and not any ealrier

Jennifer: The above website goes on to say - "The errors (in the Tashkent Qur'an) were obvious because the Quran has always been completely memorized and kept in it's oral transmission to these days and can be verified against any written book. It is impossible to consider that God meant to preserve and protect the written books for example by Uthman (the Tashkent), or any other human being for this matter when they are full of human errors. God's promise is to provide the mean to verify any written Quran against what He has in the Master tablets as we see in 85:21-22. God's promise to preserve the correct Quran was proved when the written manuscript of the Tashkent manuscript can be verified against the memorized Quran.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Are these guys actually saying that -

1. For over fourteen-hundred years, the "memorized" version of the Qur'an is/has been the accurate one?

2. The "oral transmission" of the Qur'an over the centuries is the accurate version?

3. The "oral transmission" of the "memorized" version of the Qur'an is all that's needed to prove the oldest (partial) form of the Qur'an, the Tashkent, written 19 years after Mohammed's death in 651, has "human error"?!

4. "Master tablets"?!!!!

The oldest "complete" Qur'an known in existance is the "kufic" Qur'an, written in 1203 - it was sold at Christie's Auction in London for over 2 million dollars, in 2007 -

http://www.iranunited.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-5056.html

How closely, dhimmi no more, does this usage of "kufic" script resemble "rasm" Arabic?

DNM: well kufic is a different morphology of the arabic alphabet and it would be considered the rasm of such text

I was looking up "rasm"- Arabic when I came across your comment -

http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/64641

I read in your comment that it took 600 years for Arabic to become the language we know as Arabic, 600 years from the time of the death of Mohammed.

So, my question now is, even if there WAS a complete cannon of the Qur'an, written in the original language - "original" meaning the language that the Qur'an first appeared in, this "rasm" Arabic - would the religion of Islam care?

DNM: good point.

Or would they say it was "full of human error"?

DNM: there is a famous saying by 3Aisha the 6 year old wife of Muhammad where she is quoted as saying: hadha 3amal al-kuttab 'ikhtauu fi al-kitab or this work of the scribes who erred in writing the book (Qur'an) and it is very clear that such saying was made up to cover the fact that the Qur'an is really full of mistakes in Arabic garmmar and syntax

Would any of them even be able to read it?

DNM: No you cannot read Kufic without commentaries from the masorites

Is this Egyptian Qur'an of 1924 actually the FIRST - COMPLETE - Qur'an that Muslims all agree is the ACCURATE one, one-thousand, two-hundred ninety-two YEARS after Mohammed last graced us with his presence?!!

Geez, no wonder they're screwed up.

Thanks, dhimmi no more, you've opened my eyes!

DNM: I hope that I helped

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