Comments by "" (@sura_65.4) on "Perfect Preservation Of The Quran? Or Contradictions? Discussion with Fadel Soliman" video.
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Scholar Marijn van putten doesn't believe the qurans are perfectly preserved:
What do you mean by "The Quran today"? There are 10 different reading traditions with 20 sub-narrations adhered to today. They are different from one another.
About 500 years ago, yes we more-or-less have the same 10 readers with 2 transmissions each.
But go back a little further, to al-Qabāqibī who dies 849 AH/1445 CE we have fourteen reading traditions, 4 of which have completely fallen out of use.
Go even further back to al-Huḏalī's al-Kāmil (he dies 465 AH/1072 CE), and he has 50 reading traditions, forty of which are no longer in active use. And of the ten the he has, there are countless sub-narrations that are no longer adhered to today.
This problem really only compounds the further you go back. If you include manuscripts from before Ibn Muǧāhid (d. 324/936), you will find countless readings that do not fit with any of the canonical ten and not even with any of al-Huḏalī's fifty... None of these traditions are in living use, many of them have wordings that are unique to them and no longer present in any of the recited forms of the Quran.
And of course, ultimately, the text of Uthman is a bottleneck for most of these traditions. Uthman commissioned his standard text about 20 years after the death of the prophet. We know for a fact that the companions of the prophet had version of the Quran that differed much, much more than the amount of variation that you find in Uthmanic text. Whole words and phrases replaced and added or reordered, in codices such as those of Ibn Masʿūd and ʾUbayy.
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@lorenzochimelis7359
Scholar Marijn van putten doesn't believe the qurans are perfectly preserved:
What do you mean by "The Quran today"? There are 10 different reading traditions with 20 sub-narrations adhered to today. They are different from one another.
About 500 years ago, yes we more-or-less have the same 10 readers with 2 transmissions each.
But go back a little further, to al-Qabāqibī who dies 849 AH/1445 CE we have fourteen reading traditions, 4 of which have completely fallen out of use.
Go even further back to al-Huḏalī's al-Kāmil (he dies 465 AH/1072 CE), and he has 50 reading traditions, forty of which are no longer in active use. And of the ten the he has, there are countless sub-narrations that are no longer adhered to today.
This problem really only compounds the further you go back. If you include manuscripts from before Ibn Muǧāhid (d. 324/936), you will find countless readings that do not fit with any of the canonical ten and not even with any of al-Huḏalī's fifty... None of these traditions are in living use, many of them have wordings that are unique to them and no longer present in any of the recited forms of the Quran.
And of course, ultimately, the text of Uthman is a bottleneck for most of these traditions. Uthman commissioned his standard text about 20 years after the death of the prophet. We know for a fact that the companions of the prophet had version of the Quran that differed much, much more than the amount of variation that you find in Uthmanic text. Whole words and phrases replaced and added or reordered, in codices such as those of Ibn Masʿūd and ʾUbayy.
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Islamic tradition argues that the Qur’an’s transmission was firmly controlled by the practice of oral recitation; the revelations received by Muhammad were learned from him as recitations by his followers, and were sometime later written down to form the Qur’an text we have today… Doubts have been shed, however, on this traditional view…Moreover, there is mounting evidence that the Qur’an text, or parts of it at least, must at some stage in its history have been transmitted in purely written form, without the benefit of a controlling tradition of active recitation.” -Fred M. Donner,
“…the standard Egyptian edition of the Qur’an, first published on July 10, 1924…in Cairo [is] now widely seen as the official text of the Qur’an.” -Gabriel Said Reynolds
“In the early twentieth century…the shape of the Qur’an would have seemed anything but clear. In fact, the Egyptian government was motivated to begin the project that would lead to the Cairo Qur’an edition due to the variations (or “errors,” as an appendix to the Cairo edition describes them) found in the Qur’anic texts that they had been importing for state schools.” -Gabriel Said Reynolds,
However, the Cairo [standardized] text is often at odds with manuscript evidence.” -Gabriel Said Reynolds
The common belief that the Qur’an has a single, unambiguous reading is due in part to the bravado of translators, who rarely express doubt about their choices.” -Gabriel Said Reynolds,
“In response [to the variant Quranic texts], the [Egyptian] government destroyed a large number of such [variant] texts by sinking them in the Nile River and issued its own text.” -Gabriel Said Reynolds,
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@lorenzochimelis7359 Scholar Marijn van putten doesn't believe the qurans are perfectly preserved:
What do you mean by "The Quran today"? There are 10 different reading traditions with 20 sub-narrations adhered to today. They are different from one another.
About 500 years ago, yes we more-or-less have the same 10 readers with 2 transmissions each.
But go back a little further, to al-Qabāqibī who dies 849 AH/1445 CE we have fourteen reading traditions, 4 of which have completely fallen out of use.
Go even further back to al-Huḏalī's al-Kāmil (he dies 465 AH/1072 CE), and he has 50 reading traditions, forty of which are no longer in active use. And of the ten the he has, there are countless sub-narrations that are no longer adhered to today.
This problem really only compounds the further you go back. If you include manuscripts from before Ibn Muǧāhid (d. 324/936), you will find countless readings that do not fit with any of the canonical ten and not even with any of al-Huḏalī's fifty... None of these traditions are in living use, many of them have wordings that are unique to them and no longer present in any of the recited forms of the Quran.
And of course, ultimately, the text of Uthman is a bottleneck for most of these traditions. Uthman commissioned his standard text about 20 years after the death of the prophet. We know for a fact that the companions of the prophet had version of the Quran that differed much, much more than the amount of variation that you find in Uthmanic text. Whole words and phrases replaced and added or reordered, in codices such as those of Ibn Masʿūd and ʾUbayy.
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@aaronmusa234
Taqi-yya exposed
Scholar Marijn van putten doesn't believe the qurans are perfectly preserved:
What do you mean by "The Quran today"? There are 10 different reading traditions with 20 sub-narrations adhered to today. They are different from one another.
About 500 years ago, yes we more-or-less have the same 10 readers with 2 transmissions each.
But go back a little further, to al-Qabāqibī who dies 849 AH/1445 CE we have fourteen reading traditions, 4 of which have completely fallen out of use.
Go even further back to al-Huḏalī's al-Kāmil (he dies 465 AH/1072 CE), and he has 50 reading traditions, forty of which are no longer in active use. And of the ten the he has, there are countless sub-narrations that are no longer adhered to today.
This problem really only compounds the further you go back. If you include manuscripts from before Ibn Muǧāhid (d. 324/936), you will find countless readings that do not fit with any of the canonical ten and not even with any of al-Huḏalī's fifty... None of these traditions are in living use, many of them have wordings that are unique to them and no longer present in any of the recited forms of the Quran.
And of course, ultimately, the text of Uthman is a bottleneck for most of these traditions. Uthman commissioned his standard text about 20 years after the death of the prophet. We know for a fact that the companions of the prophet had version of the Quran that differed much, much more than the amount of variation that you find in Uthmanic text. Whole words and phrases replaced and added or reordered, in codices such as those of Ibn Masʿūd and ʾUbayy.
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@chrisatspeakerscorner
Marijn van putten:
Most academics actually just assume that the reading of Ḥafṣ is the only version of the Quran. Many out of actual ignorance, and some just using it as a simplifying assumption.
Those doing so as a simplifying assumption can be forgiven somewhat for that: it's true that the differences in meaning of the text at a low resolution are really minor. But when one focuses on a specific verse and specific difficulties within it, one better make sure that there aren't other readings in that place.
Whether readings are "equally accurate" is indeed the wrong question. There are tens of thousands semantically completely empty linguistics differences between canonical readers. There's enough of those that it is exceedingly difficult to believe that the prophet literally said all of those in all situations.
When it comes to the variants that are not semantically empty, we're talking about much fewer variants, and it becomes more realistic that the prophet could have taught them all himself personally in terms of a numbers game. But the problem with the ones that are not semantically empty is that they will sometimes become semantically irreconcilable. They can't both be true at the same time.
Take Q17:102 for example, where there is disagreement between whether Moses said laqad ʿalimtu 'I have already known' or laqad ʿalimta 'you have already known'. Which of the two did Moses say? They can't logically both be literally true at the same time. (which does not necessarily mean that the prophet can't have taught both of course, academics don't necessarily require of someone to be logically consistent).
Ultimately these are questions of **textual criticism**. When you have two competing readings, you rely on context and interpretation to see which of those two makes the most sense. Scholars will of course have different intuitions about this from time to time, and will often conclude that it's somewhat impossible to tell which is more likely, or might even conclude that it is likely both forms were in circulation early on.
But ultimately focusing on Ḥafṣ and Warsh is a red herring: both are transmitters of canonical readers who lived over a century after the death of the prophet. They both follow the ʿUthmānic text, which was only composed about two decades after the death of the prophet. We know that before the canonization of the ʿUthmānic text there was much more variation in the recitation of the text (Sanaa palimpsest & reports of companion codices show this). Ḥafṣ and Warš agree upon a lot (as do the other readers and transmitters), and even at a fairly high resolution I think they give us a decent insight into the general understanding and meaning of the Quran up until quite minute details, but they are not a verbatim reflection of how Muhammad or his earliest companions would have recited the Quran, and it's often impossible to tell with any one place of disagreement which reading is more likely original, or whether maybe even a now non-canonical reading was more original.
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@chrisatspeakerscorner
There is one more caveat I forgot to mention. Namely, while the ten canonical readings are largely dependent on the canonized rasm or skeletal text and more or less simply dots it, there are a few cases where the readers actually change the skeletal text. Marijn van Putten published a whole paper on this in 2022 titled "When the Readers Break the Rules: Disagreement with the Consonantal Text in the Canonical Quranic Reading Traditions". The reader who most consistently deviated from the rasm was ʾAbū ʿAmr, often on the basis of him having believed that the consonantal text contained grammatical errors. That such an attitude and deviation existed among one of the ten readers opens up its own can of worms when it comes to complicating the concept of preservation.
Nota bene: that paper is just about the Canonical readings, which are canonical because they agree with the Uthmanic text. And even those deviate from it from time to time.
There are readings that come down to us that follow the Uthmanic text much more loosely (and are considered non-canonical for that very reason), such as the reading of al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (Basra, teacher of ʾAbū ʿAmr), al-ʾAʿmaš (Kufa, teacher of the canonical Ḥamzah) and Ibn Muḥayṣin (Mecca, contemporary with the canonical Ibn Kaṯīr). We have their full reading, and people were clearly still teaching their readings centuries after the canonization of the seven by Ibn Mujāhid.
The companion readings of Ibn Masʿūd and ʾUbayy clearly deviated much more radically from the Uthmanic text (for the obvious reason that the Uthmanic text did not exist to deviate from). But neither reading has come down to us in a complete description. You could not recite the Quran today according Ibn Masʿūd. But we nevertheless have many plausible reports of specific readings attributed to them that do not follow the Uthmanic text.
Just like the "two lost Surahs", there is really no good objective way to reject those readings as also Quran. But they are nevertheless, definitely not preserved in their entirety.
- Scholar Marijn Van Putten
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