not "kept unmolested" Raqib

Submitted by Lactantius Jr. (United Kingdom), Dec 13, 2006 at 11:33

To Raqib

Your comment Raqib to "See, the original Arabic verses of The Holy Qur'an kept unmolested from the day it has been revealed," claims, like most Muslims, that the Qur'an today, is identical to that recited by Muhammad. This is an oft-repeated mantra, but is it true? There is overwhelming evidence that it is not:

Abu Bakr, the first Caliph of Islam following Muhammad's death, started the first collection of the Qur'anic text by Zaid ibn Thabit, one of Muhammad's sahaba or companions, and this collection became the standard text of the Qur'an during the Caliphate of Uthman, the third Caliph of Islam. But why did 'Uthman feel it necessary to destroy other copies of the Qur'an by burning them!!! unless they contained variants? Why did Ibn Ma'sud refuse to hand over his copy for destruction? Why did Uthman choose Zaid's codex as the basis on which the Qur'an text was to be standardized, how do we know that this was better than any of the others?

There is also evidence that changes to the Qur'an continued after the time of 'Uthman, with both the Qur'an and the Sunnah providing evidence that some of the Qur'an was lost, forgotten, or abrogated, with some Muslims of the conviction that spurious verses have been added, there being Hadith referring to surah which are not in the modern Qur'an, indicating that the Qur'an has changed since the time of these Hadith.

By simply comparing existing manuscripts of the Qur'an, it can be shown that they are not all the same. Therefore, the Qur'an has not been perfectly preserved or "kept unmolested" as you claim Raqib. If the Qur'an truly is uncorrupted, why does the Muslim world not publish the oldest Qur'an manuscripts? What is there to hide?

Even if the text of the Qur'an had been perfectly preserved for the last 1400 years since the death of Muhammad, that would not of itself make it the word of God, if it was not the Word of the true God in the first place.

To avoid making the foregoing comments excessively lengthy with references, I haven't quoted them, but they are all available online at:-

http://www.answering-islam.org/Quran/Text/index.html

under the heading "Textual Variants of the Qur'an" which is a massive collection of data from Islam's most authoritative documents, there being no other authoritative records available.

"Kept unmolested" just doesn't line-up with the evidence Raqib.

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