In answer to the video "Miraculous Preservation of the Quran: Burying the Myth"
Authenticity of the Quran isnt contingent on whether we have in our hands manuscripts written or approved by Uthman. The authentification and transmission of the Quran was always, since the time of the prophet, primarily oral. The Quran allows such endeavour because it isnt a text whose meaning and applicability is locked in time. And that is why the Muslims have not attached much importance to transmitting the minute detailed meaning of every passage, from the prophet and his companions, but they have instead focused on transmitting the text of the Quran itself. It was always the purpose of the Quran and its sharia to be adaptable accross time and space.
That is why we have very few reports by the prophet giving his interpretation of the Quran. We are not talking of the core messages which are agreed upon, but of passages with multilayered meanings and implications, whose interpretations are open depending on the socio-cultural background or even the scientific knowledge of its contemporaries. These passages are open to many interpretations so long as they do not contradict the firm and unambiguous verses, which the Quran calls muhkam. It is these supposedly "obscure" parts of the book, that most modern critics of Islam use to build their theories on the origins of the Quran. They begin by discrediting the oral transmission process of the Quran based on the presence of these "blind spots" of Quranic exegisis. They think this constitutes proof that the oral transmission chain was broken, hence the absence of a consensus on the meaning of these passages.
These critics then dismiss centuries of accumulated Muslim scholarship, debates on all levels of the religion, textual, historical, sectarian, juristic, exegetical, theological, that led to the conclusions Muslims hold today as regards the Quran's authenticity, and all this, despite their awareness of various layers of meaning to certain passages. The critics then propose readings based on emendation of the text, changing letters and words so as to prove that "their" reading is more in line with what they individually think the message of a specific passage should be. The effortless cohesive theological structure of the text, the intricate connections between all of its passages and words is irrelevant and not worth considering. What is primordial is that their "improved" reading be violently forced into the text so as to integrate the Quran in the wider socio-religious context in which they suppose it came. The main purpose being the find their holy grail, to reveal the underlying sources that inspired it. The end result is an incoherent new book that has nothing to do with the original, with sometimes theological implications that Muslims of the past and today would never agree with. But in their minds, the purpose has been accomplished.
The uniqueness of the Quran as a religious text orally transmitted, is now a pious legend, regardless of the thousands around the world in our own time doing just that, emulating their predecessors. The reality of the matter is that as a result of that revisionist approach to the Quran, all these critics converge on the same grounds; they do not know how the Quran originated, where it came from, and when it first appeared, how and in what language it was written, what form it first took, who was the first audience, how was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years, when, how, and by whom it was codified.
These are all basic issues taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts, much older than the Quran. Muslim tradition has for long resolved all these issues. Recent critical scholarship will eventually go back to the initial, much more constructive approach of pionneers in the field, by considering the historicity of the events agreed upon over the centuries by the Muslim scholars, and then try and build up their claims, whatever these might be. The Quran in many places is like a live transcript of a religious community being established. It reflects the context in which it was revealed and that is why the controversial methodology of stripping it from the historical context that the authentic Muslim sources have described for it results in inability to ascertain its context of revelation.
Another similar helpless situation in which the revisionists have put themselves in, but are now progressively back pedaling from, is due to the dismissal of the near totality of the pre-Islamic poetry corpus as unreliable. This left scholars virtually nothing with which to compare the Quran. Western Islamicists were then left with the limitation of etymological studies in order to derive the original, more proper, and of course extremely biased meaning of its words. They began digging for cognates from common Semitic languages like Hebrew or Syriac, presuming that the vocabulary of the Quran is misused and derivative. Its theology too was seen as defective, due to borrowing from Judaism and Christianity, and was thus similarily in need of reinterpretation.
The strong oral tradition is the reason why we find reports stating that the process of compilation was never a priority until memorizers started dying out in battles. The priority given to oral transmission is a phenomenon ongoing today and will remain so. It is irrelevant to Muslims whether we have many or few manuscripts attesting to our Quran, even if those few are found to be filled with errors and differences in comparison to what we have today.
Neither would the availability of early manuscripts confirming the written text we have today, constitue strong proof for the Quran's authenticity. Someone with enough power and authority could have decided to write the first Quran compilation and disseminate it as the original left by the prophet. This however would have only been possible if the Muslim tradition, like the Judeo-Christian one, had neglected its strong oral tradition.
So what would really challenge the Quran's authenticity is whether we have a variety of conflicting and competing traditions, primarily oral. Assuming for argument's sake that there are textual variations among manuscripts, or that we have no manuscripts belonging to Uthman, who by the way wasnt the first but the second compiler of the Quran into book form, is irrelevant, even laughable to a Muslim audience when trying to undermine the Quran's preservation. Because again, that preservation was, is and always will be, primarily oral. Trying to criticize the Quran from that angle is thus a fruitless effort, especially when the critic is coming from a background whose religious texts have a known history of neglectfulness or total loss of textual tradition. Such criticism only is valid from the view point of these critics because in the transmission process of their own tradition, they have entirely disregarded the oral aspect. Written texts and manuscripts thus become crucial to them in order to validate and authenticate their current scriptures and beliefs, even though such attestation in and of itself isnt strong proof of authenticity.
So, coming from such a poor background in terms of oral tradition, it is thus but natural for these critics to boast of their numerous manuscripts in comparison to the Quran, even though these early manuscripts of theirs contradict one another and sometimes are very damaging to their current pillars of faith. To this we may add the revisions and corruptions of the text, unknown or confused authorship, broken transmission chain, or even loss of the language of the person to whom the text is ascribed.
All these, and other issues are problems that plagued the Biblical traditions, even to the point that the majoritarily accepted canons was different throughout the ages, even today with different Judeo-christian traditions having their own canon as God's word. Nothing even remotely similar happened to the Quran.
Again, we are comparing an oral society that made the progressive transition towards written with its first ever book, the Quran, of which we have abounding 1st and 2nd century Hijra manuscripts, comparing it with a well established written society. This Graeco-Roman written civilization is expected to have abounding written evidence for its central scriptures. Yet its manuscript attestation, the earlier we go back to the source, the more scant, obscure and inconsistent it becomes. The theory of late (post 200AH) composition of the Quran has been discarded even among the most hardened revisionists and orientalists, in light of the substantial and constantly increasing discoveries of 1st century hijri (622-719CE) Quranic manuscripts. The total texts extracted from these early manuscripts amount for over 90% of the current Quranic text. Contrast this with the single credit card size manuscript remnant of the NT whose dating is disputed somewhere along the 1st century CE. The issue of individual scribal errors is natural, to anyone who knows the various difficulties of copying a lengthy text prior to the printing era. The more essential question would be whether these individual errors were reproduced on a large enough scale so as to corrupt the majority of the transmitted text. This of course never occurred with the Quran, due to its dual, oral/written, mode of transmission. Even the variant readings, approved by the prophet, recorded and attested in books of tafsir, even those readings that change the skeletal Uthmanic text (a tiny minority of all variants and which are not contradictory), were never scripturally transmitted on a scale that would alter the majority of manuscripts throughout time. This again, attests to the well known and established phenomenon of mass oral transmission, as is done to this very day. These textual variations were for the most part restricted to companion codices, meant for the companions' personal use, hence their label by the scholars as companios' readings.
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