In answer to the video "Why are there over 30 different Arabic Qur’ans? - Quranic Corrections Ep. 3"
The Quran was transmitted, learned and passed down both verbally and in script form, on a scale never seen for any document, let alone religious. Any unbiased individual can see this is a process which is still continuing today. But the primary source of transmission was always oral. All written texts were dependent on it and it still is the case today as all written texts must be attested by the oral tradition of transmission through a Hafiz. Again, this simply is a statement of fact. Writing down was only meant to consolidate the process of oral preservation.
This is what the novices to Islam, which is the case of most of its self-proclaimed critics, fail to grasp. They approach Quran authenticity with their own scriptural history in mind, thinking that the Quran was put to writing out of thin air. This dual method of control, textual but mainly oral, which was never practiced by the transmitters of the Bible, made it impossible for any tampering as it would immediately be detected by the thousands of memorizers in all corners of the Muslim territories. The number of people having transmitted the Quran is so vast that any error in the transmission, textual or oral, became impossible.
This is why the Quran is labelled "mutawattir", a level of authenticity attributed to an oral transmission when it has been related exactly the same way by countless independant sources. Extremely few ahadith have been labelled as such or reached the level of multiple independent sources as the Quran. Most ahadith are based ahad reports or singular transmissions. Further and in contrast to the Quran, the ahadith require isnad (detailed chain of transmission) to be validated, because the earliest communities often disputed and argued about the veracity of these statements.
The Quran never required any isnad to gain a sense of credibility and authenticity because the text and veracity of the Quran was agreed to by a consensus of the earliest Islamic communities. Despite the abundance of 1st-2nd century hijra manuscripts, there is zero proof that the Quran was transmitted in anyway other than tawatur. Hence the position of mainstream academia as regards the authenticity of the Islamic narrative of compilation, preservation, transmission of the text and recitals. See further below.
The Quran, contrary to both hadith and sunna does not seek support because it has community consensus or reliable transmission chain. Rather, it requires one to believe in its veracity based on it clear arguments. No scripture can be accepted purely on the basis that the same community profess its Divine origins and have themselves sought to protect it.
When Islam spread to territories where the people hadnt yet received an oral transmission of the Quran, but only the script, they were confused on the proper pronunciation of the words.
But this phenomenon of oral preservation was of course not exclusive to the Quran.
The pre and early post-Islamic culture was predominantly oral. Poets for example extremely rarely compiled their poetry into writing. The Quran was actually the very first Arabic book. Interestingly, the meaning of the word itself reflects that process. Quran, from qara'a means "to read" and in Arabic the term can be used both for reading from a physical text or from memory. The compilation of the Quran, the first Arabic book was a landmark in the history of the language and literature, beginning the transition from an oral to written society.
So, as Muslim territories expanded rapidly just a few decades following the prophet's death, the memorizers of the Quran could not keep up in reaching and educating every new community. It was not possible to send a reciter to every corner of the caliphate, before the need to read and recite the Quran had reached every community and individual. That is why the authorities had to further improve upon that basic orthography, making it easier for someone to read the Quran even if he wasnt fully acquainted with its recital prior. This will be shown later on.
So in 22/642, a little more than 10 years after the prophet's death, the caliph Uthman, in an effort to standardize the script of the Quran so as to allow it to be read the authentic recitations, took the loose pages of the Quran from Hafsa, the prophet's wife after her father Umar's death, for a copying in the form of a book or mushaf. There were no differences between the 2. Uthman simply used AbuBakr's compilation as a blueprint for the multiple copies he later disseminated in the Muslim territories. The process was done in combination with the approval of the best reciters of Medina. This is in keeping with the prophet's own practice of dual authentication and preservation of the Quran since the very first revelation.
Again, Uthman's mushaf was thus nothing but a clean and perfect copy of Abu Bakr's collection of the Quran, when he was the first caliph. Prior to Uthman's compilation efforts, Abu bakr collected the Quran from all the various supports on which it was written and that were found in the prophet's house, then handed it to Umar who left it to Hafsa. This will be detailed a little later.
When Islam spread to territories where the people hadnt yet received an oral transmission of the Quran, but only the script, they were confused on the proper pronunciation of the words.
The basic nature of early scripts was suitable for the memorizers. They knew, through oral transmission the correct pronunciation of each word. Others however werent orally introduced to the Quran, and in addition spoke different dialects. They found great difficulty if they opened the Book and tried to read from such basic script for the first time. The Hebrew Bible was similarly only punctualized in the 9th century CE, hundreds of years after it is believed to have been written, to help the person less familiar with Hebrew.
This basic Quranic script was meant to keep it locked in its original double security system, textual/oral. Any one trying to bypass the established oral tradition and recite or read the Quran on his own would instantly be detected. Just as happens nowadays with critics trying to approach that basic script and suggest multiple possible readings, thinking they are discrediting it while they are in fact confirming the very purpose of those that compiled the Quran in this manner. The kind of recital and textual variants we see, either in the ancient manuscripts or as reported in Quran commentaries, testify to the early fixation of the text. Had the transmission only been oral there would have been variants the likes we have in the hadith literature when the earliest ahadith were strictly passed on orally for many decades prior to being written. This original, defective script of the Quran implies that written copies were only intended as memory aid. This is all the more true if one considers that the Arabic script had already stabilized even prior to Islam, and that Arabs already used diacritical marks. Yet the first official copies did not.
Papyri dated to 22AH contain dotting on several letters (PARF 557/558). A Quran manuscript, the Birmingham manuscript, radio carbon dated with high probability to the lifetime of the prophet's time or at most a few years after his death, has a partially dotted script. The lower script of the Sanaa manuscript is equally dotted in some instances. All the Hijazi manuscripts available, which are the earliest, are partially dotted.
Thus, this purposeful omission by the scribes, writing in a defective script, meant that it would have been impossible to read the Quran accurately strictly using the text. This reinforces the notion that an oral tradition was well established prior to the compilation effort. This by the way is one of the aspects of Muslim tradition confirmed by the Sanaa manuscripts. The authors of these texts made use of near-synonyms with certain passages from the Uthmanic recension. These near synonyms, known and listed in the Islamic tradition as parts of the prophetic approved readings, have led scholars that do not give much weight to the Muslim tradition, to actually confirm it once more as truthful. Commenting on various studies of the Sanaa manuscripts, Nicolai Sinai says
"The phenomenon (that is, of near symonyms) does, however, shed valuable light on the initial stage of the Quran’s transmission history, insofar as it suggests some degree of oral transmission in which transmitters were forced to rely on their memory of the gist of what was being said, rather than being able to check a written original. As Sadeghi has highlighted, the fact that an examination of the lower layer of the palimpsest yields a fair number but not a downright overabundance of such synonymic substitutions is best explained by an admixture of oral and written transmission. One may accordingly follow him in conceiving of the Quran’s textual transmission as being ultimately rooted in the transcription of oral proclamations recited at speed, thus accounting for the original transcribers’ occasional disagreement about whether a given verse employed, say, alnār or jahannam. The fact that Islamic works ascribe similar synonymic substitutions to some of the non-ʿUthmānic codices of the Quran reportedly com- piled by certain companions of the Prophet adds further weight to this hypothesis".
But this phenomenon of oral preservation was of course not exclusive to the Quran.
The pre and early post-Islamic culture was predominantly oral. Poets for example extremely rarely compiled their poetry into writing. The Quran was actually the very first Arabic book. Interestingly, the meaning of the word itself reflects that process. Quran, from qara'a means "to read" and in Arabic the term can be used both for reading from a physical text or from memory. The compilation of the Quran, the first Arabic book was a landmark in the history of the language and literature, beginning the transition from an oral to written society.
So, as Muslim territories expanded rapidly just a few decades following the prophet's death, the memorizers of the Quran could not keep up in reaching and educating every new community. It was not possible to send a reciter to every corner of the caliphate, before the need to read and recite the Quran had reached every community and individual. That is why the authorities had to further improve upon that basic orthography, making it easier for someone to read the Quran even if he wasnt fully acquainted with its recital prior. This will be shown later on.
So in 22/642, a little more than 10 years after the prophet's death, the caliph Uthman, in an effort to standardize the script of the Quran so as to allow it to be read the authentic recitations, took the loose pages of the Quran from Hafsa, the prophet's wife after her father Umar's death, for a copying in the form of a book or mushaf. There were no differences between the 2. Uthman simply used AbuBakr's compilation as a blueprint for the multiple copies he later disseminated in the Muslim territories. The process was done in combination with the approval of the best reciters of Medina. This is in keeping with the prophet's own practice of dual authentication and preservation of the Quran since the very first revelation.
Again, Uthman's mushaf was thus nothing but a clean and perfect copy of Abu Bakr's collection of the Quran, when he was the first caliph. Prior to Uthman's compilation efforts, Abu bakr collected the Quran from all the various supports on which it was written and that were found in the prophet's house, then handed it to Umar who left it to Hafsa. This will be detailed a little later.
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