This post looks at whether Quran manuscripts perfectly preserve what Muhammad recited.
My conclusion is that today's Quran seems to faithfully preserve what Uthman collected, but significant textual variants exist between the time of Muhammad to the time of Uthman.
Appreciating the textual tradition of the Quran should open doors for Muslims to understand that the textual tradition of the Christian and Jewish Scriptures does not invalidate them from being the Word of God.
What does the Quran teach about its preservation?
Devout Muslims believe the Quran is the Word of God, unchanged and unalterably transmitted from the time of Muhammad.1"The text of the Qur'an is entirely reliable. It has been as it is, unaltered, unedited, not tampered with in any way, since the time of its revelation" (Fethullah Gülen, Questions this Modern Age Puts to Islam).
It is "flawless" and fixed by an "imperishable tablet" and "not to be doubted." To question otherwise is like "telling a Christian that Jesus was gay" as Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan scholar, put it.2Andrew Higgins, "The Lost Archive," Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120008793352784631.html; accessed August 11, 2012.
Are there any textual variants in Quran manuscripts?
I heard Hisham bin Hakim reciting Surat-al-Furqan during the lifetime of Allah's Apostle, I listened to his recitation and noticed that he was reciting in a way that Allah's Apostle had not taught me. I was about to jump over him while He was still in prayer, but I waited patiently and when he finished his prayer, I put my sheet round his neck (and pulled him) and said, "Who has taught you this Sura which I have heard you reciting?" Hisham said, "Allah's Apostle taught it to me." I said, "You are telling a lie, for he taught it to me in a way different from the way you have recited it!" Then I started leading (dragged) him to Allah's Apostle and said (to the Prophet), " I have heard this man reciting Surat-al-Furqan in a way that you have not taught me." The Prophet said: "(O 'Umar) release him! Recite, O Hisham." Hisham recited in the way I heard him reciting. Allah's Apostle said, "It was revealed like this." Then Allah's Apostle said, "Recite, O 'Umar!" I recited in the way he had taught me, whereupon he said, "It was revealed like this," and added, "The Quran has been revealed to be recited in seven different ways, so recite of it whichever is easy for you ." (Bukhari, Book 9, Volume 93, Hadith 640; also Hadith No. 514, Vol. 6); see Frederik Leemhius, "Readings of the Qur'an." Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān; Michael Cook, "The Stemma of the Regional Codices of the Koran," Graeco-Arabica, in Festschrift in Honour of Vasilios Christides, ed. by G.K. Livadas, vol.9-10 (Athends, 2004), p. 89-104.
For a Muslim account of Uthman's collection of the Quran see Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami, The History of the Quranic Text from Revelation to Compilation, 87-97.
The King Fahad Quran Complex in Saudi Arabia prints two different readings: the Hafs and Warsh versions of the Quran.5Other versions include "a 1964 mushaf from Algeria in the Warsh riwāya and another version from Morocco. A Tunisian edition of the Qālūn riwāya was published by al-Dār al-Tūnisiyya lil-Nashr. In the Sudan the Dūrī reading was printed in 1989 by the Department of Religious Affairs and Endowments (awqāf)" (Michael W. Albin, "Printing of the Qur'an." Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān. General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005], CD-ROM version).
For a more extensive list of differences see "The Different Arabic Versions of the Quran" by Samuel Green.
Since different readings are part of Uthmanic text tradition, it is counterproductive to insist that these invalidate what the Quran says about its preservation (Quran 15:9; 85:21-22).
However, Christians should use the qira'at to explain that differences between the Gospels do not invalidate them from being the Word of God.7Jesus would have preached similar, but not the exact same, sermons in different places which can explain many differences in the Gospels.
What can also be productive, as we will see below, is comparing copyist mistakes in Quran manuscripts and pre-Uthmanic Quran variants with similar kinds of variants in biblical manuscripts to show that variants do not invalidate a text from being the Word of God.
We must nevertheless take into consideration that there are over 250,000 manuscripts of the Qur'an scattered all over the globe. When comparing them it is always possible to find copying mistakes here and there; this is an example of human fallibility, and has been recognized as such by authors who have written extensively on the subject of "unintentional errors." Such occurrences cannot be used to prove any corruption within the Quran (The History of The Qur'anic Text: From Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments [Leicester: UK Islamic Academy, 2003], 13).8"The Islamic scholarly tradition does not purport to have preserved the spelling of every word in the codices sent out by Uthman. Rather, Muslim tradition preserves the original Uthmanic codices at least at the skeletal-morphemic level, that is, with respect to features of the skeletal (unpointed) text that would necessarily change a word or part of word (morpheme) into something else if they were different. Some skeletal variations, such as different spellings of a word are not skeletal-morphemic because they do not necessarily change a word. Moreover, differences in the way consonants are pointed may change a word, but they are not skeletal-morphemic either since they do not change the skeleton. Normally, a reading is said to differ from the standard Uthmanic rasm only if it changes both the skeleton and the word, that is, if the change is skeletal and morphemic. All of this has been well-understood for many centuries and is simply taken for granted in the way most Muslim Quran specialists have written about the different readings (qira'at)" (Sadeghi, Behnam; Mohsen Goudarzi, "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān," Der Islam [March 2012], 2-3]).
This is helpful to understand because Muslims often claim that the Bible has been corrupted (tahrif) and point out that there are hundreds of thousands of variants in biblical manuscripts. But the vast majority of these are unintentional copyist errors, the kind found in Quran manuscripts (e.g. spelling variations).9Arguably, the Quran has a positive view of the Bible (cf. Quran 3:3; 5:44-48, 68-69; 6:115; 10:37,64; 12:111; 18:27; 34:31; 35:31), but many Muslims today say that these Quranic passages refer to Scriptures that no longer exist.
While the alleged corruption of the Christian Scriptures is a central part of Muslim discourse against Christianity, it was not always this way.
In the first five centuries AH (seventh to eleventh centuries ad), Muslim commentators, theologians, and jurists usually dealt with the "previous Scriptures" assuming, on the basis of qur'anic references to these Scriptures, that the Law, Psalms, and New Testament were given by God but misinterpreted by Jews and Christians. Muslim-Christian dialogue during these centuries frequently involved reference to and debate about the proper interpretation of specific passages from the Bible. After the eleventh century, there is a noticeable shift in the character of the dialogue. After this point Muslims began arguing that the actual text of the Bible has been intentionally corrupted and is therefore not trustworthy and cannot provide any basis for dialogue. Martin Accad has argued, 'it can be demonstrated that until the time of Ibn Hazm in the eleventh century, the accusation of tahrif in the sense of 'intentional corruption of the Holy Scriptures' was virtually non-existent. Even where some grave and serious suspicions were raised against the integrity of the text, the accusation can certainly not be considered to have been a central or foundational element of the Muslim discourse against Christianity. If it has become the starting point of that discourse today, it is certainly worth knowing that it has not always been the case, and that it is therefore possible to think otherwise. Even after Ibn Hazm, as late as the fourteenth century, Ibn Taymiyya recognized that the Islamic position towards tahrif as textual corruption was still diverse and ambiguous'. (Martin Accad, "The Gospels in the Muslim Discourse of the Ninth to the Fourteenth Centuries." In A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor. Edited by Miroslav Volf, Ghazi bin Muhammad, and Melissa Yarrington [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010], 59).
Why are there few meaningful and viable variants in Quran manuscripts?
A meaningful variant is something that changes the meaning of the text. A viable variant is one that is plausibly original. For biblical studies, probably less than 1% of New Testament variants are both meaningful and variable.10For a helpful ten minute overview of New Testament variants watch Dan Wallace Explains the New Testament Variants in Ten Minutes. Dan Wallace is founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
The typical answer Muslims give as to why there are few (or no) meaningful and viable Quran manuscript variants is belief that Allah will preserve the Quran in its original form until the Last Day (Quran 15:9; 85:21-22).
…that the virtual absence of real textual variants in the Qur'an is the result of the fact that the transmission of the Qur'an has always been primarily through oral rather than through written tradition. The situation is similar with that of the Vedas, which were composed much earlier than the New Testament or the Qur'an and transmitted for many centuries exclusively orally. In the Vedas there are actually no real textual variants. But this means that the methodology of textual criticism and source-criticism, as applied with such success to the New Testament, cannot be transferred automatically to the Qur'an. A different kind of source requires a different kind of methodology (Francois De Blois, "Islam in Its Arabian Context." In The Quran in Context, edited by Neuwirth, Sinai, and Marx [Brill 2010], pp.618, 619).
Uthman replied, "I wanted nothing else to exist except what had been written in front of the Messenger of God, and was contained in the pages (suhuf) of Hafsa" (Al-Baladhuri, Ansab, vol.4.1, 550ff. quoted by Gregor Schoeler, "The Codification of the Qur'an." In The Quran in Context. Edited by Neuwirth, Sinai, Marx [Brill, 2010], p.787.
But if any scrap of parchment falls into our inquisitive hands and, despite our best allowance for orthographic differences, fails to slip comfortably into the Uthmani skeleton, then we must cast it out as distorted and void (The History of The Qur'anic Text: From Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments [Leicester: UK Islamic Academy, 2003], 205).13Interestingly, "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. In response, the government destroyed a large number of such texts by sinking them in the Nile River and issued its own text. The Cairo project thus followed in the spirit of the caliph 'Uthman, and the governor al-Hajjaj b. Yusuf (d. 95/714), who are reported to have destroyed competing versions and distributed their own text of the Qur'an in the first Islamic century" (Gabriel Said Reynolds, "Introduction," in The Qurʾān in its Historical Context, ed. Gabriel S. Reynolds [London, Routledge, 2008], p.3).
The great bulk of the Quranic manuscript tradition contains the same basic form of consonantal text, even in the great majority of the very earliest manuscripts. For instance, aside from early orthography issues, the consonantal text one finds in the oldest Quran in the British Library which dates to the early to mid 700's is basically the same as the consonantal text in current printed Qurans. One does not find variant phrases, verses, or portions in the great majority of the earliest manuscripts. Only occasionally does one find a variant word. In fact, the degree of the lack of variant readings in these manuscripts is an evidence for a major editing/standardization project taking place within the first Islamic century, as one finds claimed in the Hadith ("A Quranic Window onto New Testament Textual History." Journal of the Institute of Islamic Studies, Number 1, 2011, p.34).
Adding to the confusion is that a critical edition of the Quran has never been published.
This is important to understand because critical editions of the Bible (e.g. the Nestle-Aland edition of the New Testament) are viewed by many Muslims as evidence that the Bible is "corrupt;" when in fact, a critical edition of the Quran has not yet been accomplished.15"While the classical literature records thousands of textual variants, the task of reconstructing the history of the Qur'an is complicated because the variants are not found in any extant manuscripts known to Western scholars. Several valuable works on the history of the Kur'an were written during the 4th/10th century, but later Muslim scholars, with just a few exceptions, have shown little interest in the problem of reconstructing the history of the canon" (Alford T. Welch, "Al-Kur'an." In The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. P. Bearman et al. [Leiden: Brill, 1986-2004], CD-ROM version).
Are there any meaningful and viable variants in the Yemeni Quran manuscripts?
In 1972, some 12,000 Quranic parchment fragments were discovered in the Great Mosque in the Yemeni capital Sana'a. These fragments consist of tiny snippets of the Quran to whole folios belonging to some 926 copies of the Quran. To date, only a small portion of the fragments have been published, and it is unknown when the rest will be published.
Picture of Quran (2:191-96) from Sana palimpsest fragment (Sadeghi and Bergman, 351).
Though certainly a great treasure containing a wealth of orthographic oddities, the Mushafs in Sana do not add anything new or substantial to the body of proof which already demonstrates the Quran's completion within the first decades of Islam.17The History of the Quranic Text from Revelation to Compilation, 318.
More recently however, Behnam Sadeghi, Mohsen Goudarzi, and Uwe Bergmann have written about a palimpsest found at Sana'a.18Sadeghi, Behnam; Mohsen Goudarzi, "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān," Der Islam (March 2012); Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010 , pp. 343-436. It dates from the the first half of the seventh century AD; it does not belong to the Uthmanic textual tradition;19All known Quran manuscripts—with the exception of one, the lower writing of Sanʿāʾ 1—"belong to the standard textual tradition, called ʿUtmānic in accordance with the traditional account of its origin, which traces it to the recension promulgated by ʿUtmān b. ʿAfān, the Companion of the Prophet Muhammad who ruled the Muslim empire as the third caliph during 23-35/644-56." (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, 364). and it contains textual variants from the Uthmanic tradition.
(Behnam and Goudarzi, 21)20Behnam Sadeghi plans a future article with a systematic textual analysis of all the variants.
This is strong manuscript evidence that differences in the Quran are more than just dialect and pronunciation. The Sana Quran is evidence for non-Uthmanic versions of the Quran to which literary sources also give evidence.21Literary sources also indicate different text traditions from the Companions of Muhammad: Ibn Masud and Ubay ibn Ka'b; however, these rescensions are only known from descriptions in literary sources (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, 344).
Before the establishment of a canonically closed book, Muslim scripture was open to invasive procedures and strategic re-workings…the Qur'an, just like Jewish and Christian scripture, was a battleground for interpretive traditions. An important difference seems to be that the process leading up to a textus receptus was much shorter than the parallel processes for Jewish and Christian scriptures (Wild, "Why Self-referentiality?" In Self-referentiality in the Qur'an; Diskurse der Arabistik 11. Edited by Stefan Wild [Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2006], 17).
Textual history, contrary to what many Muslims believe, is not reason for dismissing the Christian and Jewish Scriptures as corrupt. For Muslims to argue otherwise would be to argue against the Quran.22I leave it to Muslims to decide whether the Sana Quran disproves Quran 15:9; 85:21-22.
The real corruption, comment below if you think otherwise, is that the Quran does not preserve what God revealed because the Quran omits the books of Moses, Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels. Furthermore, many Muslims have resorted to arguing that the Gospel of Barnabas was an authentic Gospel. Adding to and subtracting from Scripture is undoubtedly corruption (tahrif).
Does your Muslim friend know that there are unintentional copyist errors in Quran manuscripts? The point of this question is not to denigrate the Quran, but to help Muslims understand that copyist errors in biblical manuscripts—the vast majority of which are similar to the unintentional copyist errors in the Quran—do not invalidate the Bible from being the Word of God. Invite your Muslim friend to read the Gospels.
Does your Muslim friend know that there are textual variants in Quran palimpsest fragments found in Sana'a? The point of this question is that the existence of textual variants in the biblical tradition does not automatically disqualify the Bible from being the Word of God. Again, invite your Muslim friend to read the Gospels.
Islamic tradition has recognized different readings of the Quran.23Ibn al-Jazari, a distinguished scholar in the field of the qira'at of the Qur'an, noted that in his time (1350 AD/751 AH – 1429 AD/833 AH) "important and unimportant scholars alike believed that seven modes (ahruf ) in which the Qurʾān was revealed went well beyond the ʿUtmānic text. He quotes one authority to the effect that other modes can include additions, omissions, substitutions, and transpositions of words" (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, 346). This can be pointed out for the purpose of explaining that differences between the Gospels do not mean they are corrupt.
Explain why Christians include the Jewish Scriptures in their Bible, and ask your Muslim friend why Uthman omitted both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.
Watch, Is the Bible Reliable?
1. ↥ "The text of the Qur'an is entirely reliable. It has been as it is, unaltered, unedited, not tampered with in any way, since the time of its revelation" (Fethullah Gülen, Questions this Modern Age Puts to Islam).
2. ↥ Andrew Higgins, "The Lost Archive," Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120008793352784631.html; accessed August 11, 2012.
5. ↥ Other versions include "a 1964 mushaf from Algeria in the Warsh riwāya and another version from Morocco. A Tunisian edition of the Qālūn riwāya was published by al-Dār al-Tūnisiyya lil-Nashr. In the Sudan the Dūrī reading was printed in 1989 by the Department of Religious Affairs and Endowments (awqāf)" (Michael W. Albin, "Printing of the Qur'an." Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān. General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005], CD-ROM version).
7. ↥ Jesus would have preached similar, but not the exact same, sermons in different places which can explain many differences in the Gospels.
8. ↥ "The Islamic scholarly tradition does not purport to have preserved the spelling of every word in the codices sent out by Uthman. Rather, Muslim tradition preserves the original Uthmanic codices at least at the skeletal-morphemic level, that is, with respect to features of the skeletal (unpointed) text that would necessarily change a word or part of word (morpheme) into something else if they were different. Some skeletal variations, such as different spellings of a word are not skeletal-morphemic because they do not necessarily change a word. Moreover, differences in the way consonants are pointed may change a word, but they are not skeletal-morphemic either since they do not change the skeleton. Normally, a reading is said to differ from the standard Uthmanic rasm only if it changes both the skeleton and the word, that is, if the change is skeletal and morphemic. All of this has been well-understood for many centuries and is simply taken for granted in the way most Muslim Quran specialists have written about the different readings (qira'at)" (Sadeghi, Behnam; Mohsen Goudarzi, "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān," Der Islam [March 2012], 2-3]).
9. ↥ Arguably, the Quran has a positive view of the Bible (cf. Quran 3:3; 5:44-48, 68-69; 6:115; 10:37,64; 12:111; 18:27; 34:31; 35:31), but many Muslims today say that these Quranic passages refer to Scriptures that no longer exist.
10. ↥ For a helpful ten minute overview of New Testament variants watch Dan Wallace Explains the New Testament Variants in Ten Minutes. Dan Wallace is founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
11. ↥ "[T]he ʿUthmānic text itself still left room for different readings. The codices of Medina, Mecca, Damascus, Kūfa and Baṣra are said to have presented some slight differences in a number of places, mainly concerning an extra wāw or alif, or a dhī instead of dhū or dhā. The chapter about the differences among these codices in Ibn Abī Dāwūd al-Sijistānī's (d. 316/929) book on the ancient codices (Jeffery,Materials, 39-49 of the Arabic text) sums them up in lists that appear to have been well established by then" (Frederik Leemhius, "Readings of the Qur'an." Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān. General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005], CD-ROM version).
13. ↥ Interestingly, "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. In response, the government destroyed a large number of such texts by sinking them in the Nile River and issued its own text. The Cairo project thus followed in the spirit of the caliph 'Uthman, and the governor al-Hajjaj b. Yusuf (d. 95/714), who are reported to have destroyed competing versions and distributed their own text of the Qur'an in the first Islamic century" (Gabriel Said Reynolds, "Introduction," in The Qurʾān in its Historical Context, ed. Gabriel S. Reynolds [London, Routledge, 2008], p.3).
15. ↥ "While the classical literature records thousands of textual variants, the task of reconstructing the history of the Qur'an is complicated because the variants are not found in any extant manuscripts known to Western scholars. Several valuable works on the history of the Kur'an were written during the 4th/10th century, but later Muslim scholars, with just a few exceptions, have shown little interest in the problem of reconstructing the history of the canon" (Alford T. Welch, "Al-Kur'an." In The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. P. Bearman et al. [Leiden: Brill, 1986-2004], CD-ROM version).
17. ↥ The History of the Quranic Text from Revelation to Compilation, 318.
18. ↥ Sadeghi, Behnam; Mohsen Goudarzi, "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān," Der Islam (March 2012); Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010 , pp. 343-436.
19. ↥ All known Quran manuscripts—with the exception of one, the lower writing of Sanʿāʾ 1—"belong to the standard textual tradition, called ʿUtmānic in accordance with the traditional account of its origin, which traces it to the recension promulgated by ʿUtmān b. ʿAfān, the Companion of the Prophet Muhammad who ruled the Muslim empire as the third caliph during 23-35/644-56." (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, 364).
20. ↥ Behnam Sadeghi plans a future article with a systematic textual analysis of all the variants.
21. ↥ Literary sources also indicate different text traditions from the Companions of Muhammad: Ibn Masud and Ubay ibn Ka'b; however, these rescensions are only known from descriptions in literary sources (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, 344).
22. ↥ I leave it to Muslims to decide whether the Sana Quran disproves Quran 15:9; 85:21-22.
23. ↥ Ibn al-Jazari, a distinguished scholar in the field of the qira'at of the Qur'an, noted that in his time (1350 AD/751 AH – 1429 AD/833 AH) "important and unimportant scholars alike believed that seven modes (ahruf ) in which the Qurʾān was revealed went well beyond the ʿUtmānic text. He quotes one authority to the effect that other modes can include additions, omissions, substitutions, and transpositions of words" (Behnam Sadeghi; Uwe Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur'ān of the Prophet," Arabica, Volume 57, Number 4, 2010, 346).