Sunday, March 15, 2020

dontconvert2islam tries textual criticism, what is hafs?

In answer to the video "100% Proof the Quran is False!"

As regards to "hafs" or "warsh", Warsh is an offshoot of the Hafs, which as anybody familiar with the Quran recognize, is the Qurayshi dialect of the Prophet, meaning the original transmission of the Quran. They are both recitations, not Quran "versions", with Hafs being today the most common type of recitation used in the Muslim world, the authenticated way in which the prophet himself recited the Quran. 

The "Quran of Cairo" uses an elaborate system of modified vowel-signs and a set of additional symbols for minute details and is based on that reading. This edition has become the standard for modern printings of the Quran, since 1924 when the printing house was established in Cairo. Before that point, the Quran was printed in Istanbul until it ceased being the capital of the caliphate. Again, this is not a different Quran, but one whose Uthmanic rasm was improved over several years until 1924, so as to minimize scribal errors. Many such errors were detected in Quran copies which the Egyptian government used to import prior to 1924. These errors, in modern copies -not in ancient manuscripts-, are irrelevant in determining the authenticity of the Quranic text since they were pointed, and the copies destroyed by sinking them in the Nile river. 

There are no differences between the Quran printed in Cairo and the ones printed all over the Muslim world. The Cairo edition is based on the well known hafs reading of the prophet himself. There was never any canonization process and debates, revisions over what the Quran's contents had to be. This is exactly what occured with the Bible with different canons over time. Nothing in the history of the Quranic text, even by the furthest stretch of imagination and revisionist fantasies, can be compared to the tumultuous 400 years following Jesus' death, which marked the canonization process of the Bible.

The hafs reading is named after Hafs ibn Sulaymaan not because he initiated it or transmitted it, but because he recited best and in a most outstanding way one of the authentic qiraat traced back to the prophet. His qiraa/recitation is the one he learned from Aasim ibn Abi an-Najud, a tabi'ee, meaning the generation that met the prophet's companions but not the prophet himself. Aasim learned his recital from Abu abd al Rahman al Sulami who learned from the Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib. 

Aasim had several students reciters and Hafs was but one of them who excelled most. Although Hafs was rejected as a hadith narrator, a science that is completely unrelated to the art of Quran recitation or capacity to memorize, he was however never questioned in the field of recitation itself, neither by those who deemed him untrustworthy in hadith nor by his fellow students. 

As to the fact that Hafs would borrow books to copy them without returning them, with the only specific case mentionned being a book from his contemporary student colleague Shu'bah, what is important to mention firstly is that only Shu'bah made that claim, which is why no other explicit example of borrowing and not returning exists. Second, it was nothing strange and in fact the norm back then for even powerful narrators to borrow eachothers' books and copy the narrations they contained into their hadith collection. As to not returning Shu'bah's book, this could have been due to many things other than "stealing". Nobody ever accused Hafs in that context of being a book thief!

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