Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Clivedurdle · 02-08-2013, 02:50 AM

Fascinating discussion on CEMB that is very appropriate for here.

Quote:

The Quran - Both Altered And Changed

A few days ago we made a statement defending the right of Islamic evangelists to exhibit posters at various London railway stations in the face of what appeared to be a decision to remove them from some sites.

As far as we are aware the billboards are still in situ now.

As ex-Muslims, we believe freedom of conscience and expression of that conscience to be the most important principle of our secular and free society – and we wish for Muslims to understand this principle too. That is why we supported the Quran Project when it seemed their posters may have been removed.

In that spirit we will now repudiate a claim made by the Quran Project in one of their billboards.

In reference to the Quran, the billboard declares that it has ‘Never Changed, Never Altered’

This is a central claim of Islamic apologia. This is understandable, because without this assertion the most basic claim of Islam as to its uniqueness and superiority is undermined and worthless.

Stressing the perfection, flawlessness and unchanged, unaltered nature of the Quran is perhaps the single most important assertion for those engaging in ‘Da’wah’, or Islamic prosletysation.

The problem is, it’s simply untrue.

It seems the Koran may, because possibly one in five verses are unintelligible, be untranslatable!

Quote:

According to Burton in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and the book "Islamic Theories of Abrogation", 564 verses were alleged to have been expunged from the mushaf (Quran), or 1/11th of its total content.

Quote:

According to the traditional Islamic narrative, the Quran was standardized into a single, authorative text for the first time by Caliph Uthman about 30 years after Muhammad died. The way this was done was that Uthman collected all manuscripts of the Quran that had been written down by various people across the Empire, he then selected the "authentic" ones and burned all variant readings.

Here is the Hadith in Bukhari that describes this:

Quote

Bukhari: vol. 6, hadith 510, pp. 478-479; book 61

Narrated Anas bin Malik:
Hudhaifa bin Al-Yaman came to Uthman at the time when the people of Sham and the people of Iraq were Waging war to conquer Arminya and Adharbijan. Hudhaifa was afraid of their (the people of Sham and Iraq) differences in the recitation of the Qur'an, so he said to 'Uthman, "O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Quran) as Jews and the Christians did before." So 'Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, "Send us the manuscripts of the Qur'an so that we may compile the Qur'anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you." Hafsa sent it to 'Uthman. 'Uthman then ordered Zaid bin Thabit, 'Abdullah bin AzZubair, Said bin Al-As and 'AbdurRahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies. 'Uthman said to the three Quraishi men, "In case you disagree with Zaid bin Thabit on any point in the Qur'an, then write it in the dialect of Quraish, the Qur'an was revealed in their tongue." They did so, and when they had written many copies, 'Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa. 'Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt. Said bin Thabit added, "A Verse from Surat Ahzab was missed by me when we copied the Qur'an and I used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it. So we searched for it and found it with Khuzaima bin Thabit Al-Ansari. (That Verse was): 'Among the Believers are men who have been true in their covenant with Allah.' (33.23)

In total there were seven different versions of the Quran according to this Hadith:

Quote

Al-Muwatta Hadith Hadith 15.5 About the Qur'an

Yahya related to me from Malik from Ibn Shihab from Urwa ibn az-Zubayr that Abd ar-Rahman ibn Abd al-Qari said that he had heard Umar ibn al-Khattab say, "I heard Hisham ibn Hakim ibn Hizam reciting Surat al-Furqan (Sura 25) differently from me, and it was the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, who had recited it to me. I was about to rush up to him but I granted him a respite until he had finished his prayer. Then I grabbed him by his cloak and took him to the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and said, 'Messenger of Allah, I heard this man reciting Surat al-Furqan differently from the way you recited it to me.' The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, 'Let him go.' Then he said, 'Recite, Hisham,' and Hisham recited as I had heard him recite. The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, 'It was sent down like that.' Then he said to me, 'Recite' and I recited the sura, and he said, 'It was sent down like that. This Qur'an was sent down in seven (different) ways, so recite from it whatever is easy for you .' "

http://www.councilofexmuslims.com/in...28.0;topicseen

mountainman · 02-08-2013, 06:03 AM

Copy editing <insert your favourite monotheistic figure head here>

We must be mindful that transmission was via "professional transcribers thoroughly practised in their art."

Quote:

Copy editing (also written as copy-editing or copyediting, and sometimes abbreviated to ce) is the work that an editor does to improve the formatting, style, and accuracy of text. Unlike general editing, copy editing might not involve changing the substance of the text. Copy refers to written or typewritten text for typesetting, printing, or publication. Copy editing is done before both typesetting and proofreading, the latter of which is the last step in the editorial cycle.

In the U.S. and Canada, an editor who does this work is called a copy editor. An organization's highest-ranking copy editor, or the supervising editor of a group of copy editors, may be known as the copy chief, copy desk chief, or news editor. In book publishing in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world that follow British nomenclature, the term copy editor is used, but in newspaper and magazine publishing, the term is sub-editor (or the unhyphenated subeditor), commonly shortened to sub. The senior sub-editor on a title is frequently called the chief sub-editor. As the "sub" prefix suggests, British copy editors typically have less authority than regular editors.

Clivedurdle · 02-08-2013, 07:20 AM

It is amusing to ask what the brain does to the words of Jibreel being whispered into the Prophet's Ear to start with!

First, is Jibreel accurately reporting Allah? Is that possible?

Next, Uncle Mo has to take the holy words and recite them! Did he pick up all the influences, inflexions, nuances?

And then the act of writing it down - turning voices in one's head into words, no matter how holy the specific dialect being used.

Was the process similar to that of automatic writing, which anyone can learn with practice!

Some of the sayings do sound like stuff straight out of a self help book!

Are we actually looking at a record of how something was changed from something in one's head into writing, a possibly quite interesting neurological history?

Clivedurdle · 02-08-2013, 09:35 AM

The whole process needs looking at in detail.

Allah has a thought. That is already a process of distilling everything into some form of conclusion. This must then be communicated to Gabriel, what evidence is that the angel has "got" the message, then to Mohammed, then to the followers.

The Islamic chains of passing something on seem to be problematic from the beginning!

Huon · 02-08-2013, 12:20 PM

Here is an interesting paper by Toby Lester in the Atlantic Monthly :

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-koran/304024/

In 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers found tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran, the Muslim holy scripture.

Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries—they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.

The first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany.

The prospect of a Muslim backlash has not deterred the critical-historical study of the Koran, as the existence of the essays in The Origins of the Koran (1998) demonstrate. Even in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair the work continues: In 1996 the Koranic scholar Günter Lüling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism about "the wide extent to which both the text of the Koran and the learned Islamic account of Islamic origins have been distorted, a deformation unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamicists until now." In 1994 the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam published a posthumous study by Yehuda D. Nevo, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, detailing seventh- and eighth-century religious inscriptions on stones in the Negev Desert which, Nevo suggested, pose "considerable problems for the traditional Muslim account of the history of Islam." That same year, and in the same journal, Patricia Crone, a historian of early Islam currently based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, published an article in which she argued that elucidating problematic passages in the Koranic text is likely to be made possible only by "abandoning the conventional account of how the Qur'an was born." And since 1991 James Bellamy, of the University of Michigan, has proposed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society a series of "emendations to the text of the Koran"—changes that from the orthodox Muslim perspective amount to copyediting God.

Huon · 02-08-2013, 12:51 PM

Two early Kufic manuscripts survive.

One is a codex popularly known as the "Samarqand" codex as it is said to have first come to this city about 1485 AD and to have remained there until 1868. It was removed to St. Petersburg and in 1905 fifty facsimile editions were prepared by one Dr. Pisarref at the instigation of Czar Nicholas II under the title Coran Coufique de Samarqand, each copy being sent to a distinguished recipient. In 1917 it was taken to Tashkent where it now remains.

Not more than about a half of this manuscript survives. It only begins with the seventh verse of Suratul-Baqarah and many intervening pages are missing. The whole text from Surah 43.10 has been lost. What remains, however, indicates that it is obviously of great antiquity, being devoid of any kind of vocalisation although here and there a diacritical stroke has been added to a letter. Nonetheless it is clearly written in Kufi script which immediately places it beyond Arabia in origin and of a date not earlier than the late eighth century. No objective scholarship can trace such a text to Medina in the seventh century.

Its actual script is very irregular. Some pages are neatly and uniformly copied out while others are distinctly untidy or imbalanced. On some pages the text is fairly smoothly spread out while on others it is severely cramped and condensed.

The other famous manuscript is known as the "Topkapi" codex as it is preserved in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul in Turkey. Once again, however, it is written in Kufi script, giving its date away to not earlier than the late eighth century. Like the Samarqand codex it is written on parchment and is virtually devoid of vocalisation though it, too, has occasional ornamentation between the surahs. It also appears to be one of the earliest texts to have survived but it cannot sincerely be claimed that it is an `Uthmanic original.

The Topkapi codex has eighteen lines to the page while the Samarqand codex has between eight and twelve. The whole text of the former is uniformly written and spaced while the latter, as mentioned already, is often haphazard and distorted. They may well both be two of the oldest sizeable manuscripts of the Quran surviving but their origin cannot be taken back earlier than the second century of Islam.

The oldest surviving texts of the Quran, whether in fragments or whole portions, date not earlier than about a hundred and fifty years after the Prophet's death.

mountainman · 02-12-2013, 01:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

The whole process needs looking at in detail.

Allah has a thought. That is already a process of distilling everything into some form of conclusion. This must then be communicated to Gabriel, what evidence is that the angel has "got" the message, then to Mohammed, then to the followers.

The Islamic chains of passing something on seem to be problematic from the beginning!

OMG.

Big E. had the same problem.

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2006/01/16/word/

02-08-2013, 12:51 PM	#6
Huon Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Bordeaux France Posts: 2,796	The oldest known manuscripts Two early Kufic manuscripts survive. One is a codex popularly known as the "Samarqand" codex as it is said to have first come to this city about 1485 AD and to have remained there until 1868. It was removed to St. Petersburg and in 1905 fifty facsimile editions were prepared by one Dr. Pisarref at the instigation of Czar Nicholas II under the title Coran Coufique de Samarqand, each copy being sent to a distinguished recipient. In 1917 it was taken to Tashkent where it now remains. Not more than about a half of this manuscript survives. It only begins with the seventh verse of Suratul-Baqarah and many intervening pages are missing. The whole text from Surah 43.10 has been lost. What remains, however, indicates that it is obviously of great antiquity, being devoid of any kind of vocalisation although here and there a diacritical stroke has been added to a letter. Nonetheless it is clearly written in Kufi script which immediately places it beyond Arabia in origin and of a date not earlier than the late eighth century. No objective scholarship can trace such a text to Medina in the seventh century. Its actual script is very irregular. Some pages are neatly and uniformly copied out while others are distinctly untidy or imbalanced. On some pages the text is fairly smoothly spread out while on others it is severely cramped and condensed. The other famous manuscript is known as the "Topkapi" codex as it is preserved in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul in Turkey. Once again, however, it is written in Kufi script, giving its date away to not earlier than the late eighth century. Like the Samarqand codex it is written on parchment and is virtually devoid of vocalisation though it, too, has occasional ornamentation between the surahs. It also appears to be one of the earliest texts to have survived but it cannot sincerely be claimed that it is an `Uthmanic original. The Topkapi codex has eighteen lines to the page while the Samarqand codex has between eight and twelve. The whole text of the former is uniformly written and spaced while the latter, as mentioned already, is often haphazard and distorted. They may well both be two of the oldest sizeable manuscripts of the Quran surviving but their origin cannot be taken back earlier than the second century of Islam. The oldest surviving texts of the Quran, whether in fragments or whole portions, date not earlier than about a hundred and fifty years after the Prophet's death.

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02-08-2013, 07:20 AM	#3
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	It is amusing to ask what the brain does to the words of Jibreel being whispered into the Prophet's Ear to start with! First, is Jibreel accurately reporting Allah? Is that possible? Next, Uncle Mo has to take the holy words and recite them! Did he pick up all the influences, inflexions, nuances? And then the act of writing it down - turning voices in one's head into words, no matter how holy the specific dialect being used. Was the process similar to that of automatic writing, which anyone can learn with practice! Some of the sayings do sound like stuff straight out of a self help book! Are we actually looking at a record of how something was changed from something in one's head into writing, a possibly quite interesting neurological history?

02-08-2013, 09:35 AM	#4
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	The whole process needs looking at in detail. Allah has a thought. That is already a process of distilling everything into some form of conclusion. This must then be communicated to Gabriel, what evidence is that the angel has "got" the message, then to Mohammed, then to the followers. The Islamic chains of passing something on seem to be problematic from the beginning!

02-08-2013, 12:20 PM	#5
Huon Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Bordeaux France Posts: 2,796	Here is an interesting paper by Toby Lester in the Atlantic Monthly : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-koran/304024/ In 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers found tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran, the Muslim holy scripture. Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries—they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God. The first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany. The prospect of a Muslim backlash has not deterred the critical-historical study of the Koran, as the existence of the essays in The Origins of the Koran (1998) demonstrate. Even in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair the work continues: In 1996 the Koranic scholar Günter Lüling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism about "the wide extent to which both the text of the Koran and the learned Islamic account of Islamic origins have been distorted, a deformation unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamicists until now." In 1994 the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam published a posthumous study by Yehuda D. Nevo, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, detailing seventh- and eighth-century religious inscriptions on stones in the Negev Desert which, Nevo suggested, pose "considerable problems for the traditional Muslim account of the history of Islam." That same year, and in the same journal, Patricia Crone, a historian of early Islam currently based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, published an article in which she argued that elucidating problematic passages in the Koranic text is likely to be made possible only by "abandoning the conventional account of how the Qur'an was born." And since 1991 James Bellamy, of the University of Michigan, has proposed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society a series of "emendations to the text of the Koran"—changes that from the orthodox Muslim perspective amount to copyediting God.

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