Every once in a while Al Fadi likes to bring Jay into his studio to interview him on his newest research concerning the historical origins of Islam. He did this again just a few days ago.

Jay went into 3 different areas of research which he was currently working on with other scholars.

The first had to do with some new findings concerning the Qira'at Qur'ans which were first brought to light back in 2016 by Jay's colleague, Hatun Tash.

By 2016 she had discovered 26 different Qira'at readings, as well as Riwayats, of the 30 possible readings of the Qur'an which can be procured in different parts of the Muslim world today. These 26 she brought and showed the world in June of 2016, which began the process of destroying any notion that the Qur'an had been perfectly preserved (As Muslims constantly say: "every word and every letter exactly the same as that which is preserved in heaven and that which was sent down to Muhammad by 632 AD").

New research suggests that there are many more of these different Qira'at Qur'ans; possibly as many as 150 in total, which include the Qira'ats, the Riwayats and the subsequent Tariqs, most of whom were students of students of students, of the initial 10 Qira'at readers.

This new material opens up a flood-gate of new questions concerning why haven't these later derivations of the Qur'an in Arabic been made known to the public at large, and where can we find examples of them today?

After introducing the problems with the Qira'ats, Jay then referred to the comparisons between the early Biblical manuscripts, which include 8,500 Greek Manuscripts, coupled with 10,000 Latin Vulgates, as well as 2,135 early 6th century Lectionaries, and the 86,000 early church father's quotations of the Bible, 36,000 of them which predate any of the earliest manuscripts!

Note that all of these are completely different genres of the Biblical text; in other words they are examples of the Bible in completely different sets of writings, independent of each other, yet they all agree within 99,99 percent of the time.

In comparison we can only find about 6-10 early Qur'anic manuscripts which only begin to appear in the 8th century and continue to be written up to the 10th century, usually only employing a crude un-dotted and un-vowaled consonantal text (i.e. without any of the 5 dots and 3 vowels needed so that Arab readers could read the script).

When we compare the wealth we have of early Biblical manuscripts with the dearth which exists of early Qur'anic manuscripts, we come away wondering why Muslims even bother to claim that what they have in their hands today could have ever come from the Caliph Uthman in 652 AD, or from Muhammad in 632 AD, or even from any "preserved manuscript" which supposedly exists in heaven?

Where is there even ONE of these supposed "perfectly preserved" manuscripts from the 7th century, which includes all 114 Surahs, without "one word or one letter" different from the Hafs an-Assim Qur'an which is considered the standard text used by 93% of the Muslim world toay?

Al Fadi ended this section by noting an article which was written in July 2020 by a Saudi Arabian journalist named Ahmed Hashim entitled "Amending the Qur'an". In this article Hashim admitted that there were around 2,500 mistakes in the current Qur'an which needed to be corrected by scholars in Saudi Arabia.

What an admission by an honest journalist in one of the strictest Islamic societies today, Saudi Arabia.

In the next episode Jay will go into what we know about this name "Muhammad" from the 7th century, and then continue with some new research which confronts the notion that the earliest Islamic Traditional writers created their compilations in the 7th - 9th centuries. This third area will be new material which has never been covered by anyone on the Internet yet, so hold this space!

© Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, March 10, 2024
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