curiousgirl81

Arabic is surely an ancient tongue with a beautiful history but to think they were like that from the beginning of time... come on. It makes sense to believe that it has been alter over the centuries along with hebrew and aramaic/greek.
"Originally, the short vowels were not written; nor were the pronunciation marks, such as the shadda, the sign for doubling a consonant. As Islam spread to non-Arabic speakers, however, this writing system was revised. Dots, or diacritical marks, were added to distinguish different letters that use the same shape, and pronunciation marks and short vowels began to be used consistently to avoid ambiguity. By 750, the script had been forged into an accurate writing tool and had already acquired aesthetic associations."
If you want to read more here's the link

http://www.zakariya.net/resources/music.html

Now don't get me wrong i'm not trying to bad mouth your religion or anything I'm just trying to get something straight here. No religion is 100% right just like neither are 100% wrong. God send us messages perfectly but we're not

Casper

Before the quran they had the pentateuch. So what are you asking? Not quite sure from your quaestion.

Lugubert

Casper,

What do you mean by "had the pentateuch"? Islam started when Muhammed wrote down the Qur'an; the Pentateuch has nothing to do with the Qur'an, besides the Muslim belief that the Bible is a corruption of the heavenly Qur'an.

curiousgirl,You haven't even mentioned religion in your OP, so how could it be an attack on religion?

Both of you,

If there are some hidden meanings in your posts, they are too subtle for me

Clivedurdle

Isn't it quite a simple point?

Muslims I believe claim the Koran was given to Mohammed in perfect condition. If it is correct punctuation was added about 750 the Koran is not a frozen in time perfect word of Allah but a human construction that has evolved.

This should be a simple point to prove either way - do Moslems use an unaltered text from Mohammed or not?

andrewcriddle

Moslems regard the consonants of the Koran as unaltered from the time of Mohammed. Because the original script lacked any vowels or diacritical points a number of variant readings concerning vowels and diacritical points are recognised by Moslem scholars as of equal authority. This is only rarely a cause of uncertainty as to the Koran's meaning.

Andrew Criddle

Lugubert

The only perfect Qur'an is in heaven. I think that it is recognized that it is written down by error-prone humans. This means of course also that no translation can be perfect, so "translations" by Muslims are called "interpretations".

The problem is, however, much smaller than that of the OT/TaNaK. In the first place, there is a much shorter timespan between the revelation and the pointing. Tradition would be easier to preserve for the Qur'an. In the second place, there are only three vowel point to choose from. In Hebrew, a consonant can be pointed in about a dozen ways.

DaninGraniteCity

http://debate.org.uk/topics/history/debate/part2.htm#C3

Net2004

the qur'aan is recited in variant reading even in this day and age.no muslim considers this to be a reading other than the qur'aan but a different way of pronouncing the words which do not affect the meaning at all. for those who are interested can listen to the qur'aan being recited in various qiraa here : http://www.islamophile.org/spip/rubrique2.html

Net2004

http://debate.org.uk/topics/history/debate/part2.htm#C3

as if there aren't any muslim apologists who haven't responded to the authour of that article

Casper

Muhammed was illiterate. The Suras were written by others, and the Hadith of course is not first person. The Shia-Sunni split has much to do with the argument over who was charged with writing it all down and keeping it from interpolation or redaction. And this much later than Muhammed's death. For a hundred or more years, "The Way" was primarily the Hebrew law. You could say that the "canonization" of the Quran has some parallels with the canonization of the Catholic bible.