We can still see on social media the claim that there are 30 qurans in existence or there are many
many qurans we don't have a single Quran that goes back to the time of the companions and the prophet
and I thought I'd just briefly share with you two views one from a top Islamic scholar who lives
in the West, and secondly from to share with you the consensus of western orientalist specialists
on the Quran just to see if this is really true is it the case as missionaries and atheists at
speaker's corner and online claim that there are many many qurans and and this is just a myth that
there's a single Quran that Muslims still have today from the from the beginning so I just wanted
to share with you some words from Abdul Haleem his book understanding the Quran themes and style,
he is professor of Islamic Studies at SOAS, that's the School of Oriental and African Studies at the
University of London. He's one of the world's top Arabic specialists in the Arabic Quran
and he produced the a wonderful translation into English of the Quran for Oxford University Press
which I highly recommend. So he gives a bit of background to how we got the what's called the
earth manic codex the authentic book how did that come about and then I'm going to go on to western
orientalist scholars to see if they agree with the Muslim position so he says on page four during the
second year after the prophet's death in 633 and following the battle of umama in which a number of
those who knew the Quran by heart had died it was feared that with the gradual passing away of such
men there was a danger of some Quranic material being lost therefore the first caliph Abu Bakr
ordered that the Quran should be collected in one written copy which was kept with him
this copy remained locked away until the time of Uthman the third caliph when a problem arose and
this is a key point the urgency is summarized in the appeal of Huzaifa Bin Yaman who demanded
of Uthman on returning from battles in Azerbaijan in 645 quick help the muslims before they differ
about the text of the Quran as the Christians and Jews differed about their scriptures Huzaifa had
become perturbed when he saw Muslim soldiers from different parts of Syria and Iraq meeting together
and differing in their readings of the Quran each considering his reading to be the correct one the
only full origin official written copy had been kept first with Abu Bakr and then with Omar and
after his death with his daughter Hafsah, a widow of the Prophet responding to the urgent demand for
help Uthman sent word to Hafsa asking for the copy in her possession to be sent to him he ordered
that a number of copies be made and distributed to different parts of the Muslim world as the
official copy of the Quran says really important point he ordered that a number of copies be made
and sent to different parts of the world as the official copy and he sent reciters by the way
with them we know from the sources so it wasn't just the text it was how to recite it as well
this prevented the possibility says the author of different versions evolving in time as Hudayfa had
originally feared this prevented the possibility of different versions evolving in time as was
the fear the Uthmanic codex or book has remained the only canonical text of the Quran that exists
recognized by Sunnis and Shia alike throughout the Muslim world for the last
14 centuries so there is only one Quran it's accepted by everyone. Okay that's
the claim and this guy is I say is a top expert a professor of Islamic Studies University of London,
he's a Muslim so maybe he's a bit biased maybe other scholars who are not Muslim will give a
different a picture so let's turn to them uh and back to this the Cambridge companion to the Quran
now I mentioned this bef book before in a previous video is published by Cambridge University Press
and you can see on the back cover in the contents some of the West's leading uh experts on the Quran
all professors at universities have contributed to this volume so if you're interested in the
western scholarly position and view on the Quran this is worth reading these are not believers of
course they don't believe the Quran is the word of God so in a chapter by Angelica Newworth page
100 she gives the western uh academic consensus on this subject and she says in quite academic
language the theories of the so-called skeptic or revisionist scholars who arguing historically
make a radical break with the transmitted picture of Islamic origins shifting them in both time and
place from the 7th to the 8th or 9th century and from the Arabian peninsula to the fertile
crescent have now by now been discarded though many of their critical observations remain
challenging and still call for investigation so the radical views are from the 1970s and 80s
really uh which challenged the traditional picture which uh I've quoted from the Muslim scholar there
um have now been discarded they're no longer accepted they've been tested and tried and found
wanting she continues new findings of Quranic text fragments fragments in other words manuscripts
moreover can be a juice to a firm rather than calling to question the traditional picture of
the Quran as an early fixed text composed of the Surahs we have so she's making an interesting
point that we have especially in recent years uh discovered a wealth of earlier and earlier
Quranic manuscripts famously of course the one in Birmingham uh university or the Quranic manuscript
there which is dated by scholars to the time of the sahabah themselves so this is within the
lifetime of people who knew Muhammad and that manuscript is the same as today's manuscript
it's this one Quran and finally she says nor have scholars trying to deconstruct that image
through linguistic arguments succeeded in seriously discrediting the genuineness of
the Quran as we know it end quote so there we have it both the traditional muslim view
but represented in a way by Abdul Haleem and western scholars now agree that there is one Quran
we have it today it's the same Quran as we find in the earliest muslim community
so the arguments on the arguments the the dogmatic hysteria and attempts to destroy
islam by missionaries and some atheists is without foundation if you look at the
scholarly and academic research um so I just thought I'd share that with you. Until next time