Acts17apologetics scriptural criticism; History of Quran compilation?

In answer to the video "Countering Muslim Claims, Episode 4: The Preservation of the Quran"

The Quran challenges its opponents to find discrepancies in it, or to produce similar verses or suras meaning that these suras were there in the public hands. 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 an ongoing process till this day. 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 to take place 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 independant 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.

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 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.

But this phenomenon 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.