Has the Quran been reliably transmitted ? The answer to that question will depend on whom you ask.
If you ask Christian missionaries and apologists they'll say: NO , the Quran has not been reliably
transmitted. But i want to ask a different group of people, the leading Western Experts on the Quran .
These are not muslims , these are professors at Western Universities , and i want to get their view
on this subject . And to get that answer , i'll turn to "The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'ān"
this is published by Cambridge University Press . It's edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe,
herself a scholar, and she has brought together an international team of scholars
to talk about this subject and others as well , they discuss the formation of the Quranic text .
There's a description and analysis of the contents , transmission and dissemination , interpretations and
intellectual traditions and contemporary readings . In all there are 14 chapters by the West's top
scholars. I think they're all non-muslim maybe one or two judging by their names
might be muslim but i'm not sure about that. Now this is definitely an academic text , it's written
by scholars for students of the subject and i want to read from a chapter by a very distinguished
professor of the Quran from the University of Berlin : Angelika Neuwirth , she's a name that's
very well known to students of the Quran in the West . And she discusses this subject
about the reliability of the text and also she offers her comments on the traditional
story that muslims say about the origins of the Quran , about Uthman and so on . Is that something
we can take seriously anymore or do we have to jettison that traditional muslim narrative
about the reception and the origin of the Quran . Now, iI'm going to read a couple of paragraphs
from this essay of hers: "Structural linguistic and literary features" is the chapter.
It's not very user-friendly , i'll admit that, but i'll try and
make some comments hopefully clarify what she's saying . I had to read it several times myself just
to get the sense of what she's saying , but her conclusions are really important of course
because these are experts , they're not christian missionaries with an axe to grind , to do down
muslims and do down Islam and destroy the Quran basically , the credibility of the Quran in the eyes
of people . So what do the top scholars say? on page 100 Angelika Neuwirth writes: "The presentation
of Quranic development in this chapter presupposes the reliability of the basic data of traditional
accounts about the emergence of the Quran , assuming the transmitted Quranic text to be the genuine
collection of the communications of the prophet as pronounced during his activities at Mecca
about 610 to 22 CE and again at Medina until his death at 632 CE . it is true that the earlier
consensus of scholarly opinion on the origins of islam has since the publication of John Wansbrough's
"Quranic Studies" (this is in 1977 by the way) and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook's "Hagarism"
(also in 1977) this consensus has been shattered (she says)
and that various attempts at a new reconstruction of those origins have been put forward .
as a whole however , 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 by now been discarded . so just to pause there , she's
saying that the radical attacks in the 1970s and people like Patricia Crone , Michael Cook , John
Wansbrough which really criticized the traditional muslims narrative of the origins of the Quran ,
this radical revisionist attack has basically been abandoned by scholars , it's been looked at ,
been analyzed , assessed and it's been found wanting , so it's now been discarded . these radical
theories peddled by certain well-known shall we say missionaries like
i'll mention one name : J. Smith . these have been discarded now by serious scholars .
and then she says : though many of their critical observations remain challenging and still call for
investigation . so they raise interesting questions but their basic theory of rejecting the
traditional account of the origins of the Quran has been discarded (in other words they rejected it) .
then she goes on : new findings of the Quranic text fragments because (just to pause again) there
have been so many earlier and earlier manuscript fragments or whole manuscripts of the Quran have
been found over the recent years , we have a wealth of manuscript evidence now that goes back
within the first century of the time of the prophet and this makes a big difference . she says :
new findings of Quranic text fragments moreover can be reduced 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 saying all these manuscripts confirm the traditional account that the Quran was
fixed in the form we know it very very early on and we now know this because we have the evidence ,
we have empirical evidence , hard facts , the actual manuscripts themselves which prove this (she says).
Nor have scholars trying to deconstruct that image through linguistic arguments (so okay they now turn
to other arguments "the radicals" using clever linguistic arguments), nor have scholars trying
to deconstruct that image through linguistic arguments succeeded in seriously discrediting
the genuineness of the Quran as we now know it. So she's saying that even these attacks have failed
and the genuineness of the Quran that we now have it has been vindicated (to put it in my own words).
Now , she refers to the work of Christoph Luxenberg who views the Quran as an
originally Syriac Arabic melange , later adapted to the rules of classical Arabic .
and Günter Lüling who reads the Quran as a collection of hymns composed in a Christian
(believe it or not) Arabic dialect and later revised to fit the grammatical rules
newly established in the 8th and 9th centuries (so these are some of the crazy ideas that have been
weighed and found wanting and dismissed). Whereas Lüling's reference to the earlier hypotheses of
Karl Vollers, who had identified the original language of the Quran as broadly dialectical
points to a yet unresolved problem, Luxenberg's assumption of a Syriac-Arabic linguistic melange
as the original language of the Quran lacks a methodologically sound basis. (This is a
scholarly way of saying 'it's crap' I mean it just has no basis, there's no evidence for it , it's just
hypothesis and speculation). She continues (to conclude): The alternative
visions about the genesis of the Quran presented by Wansbrough , Cook and Lüling and luxenberg
are not only mutually exclusive (in other words, they all contradict each other) .
but rely on textual observations that are too selective to be compatible with a comprehensive
Quranic textual evidence that can be drawn only from a systematically microstructural reading .
so just to put that into a simpler english , she's saying that the alternative is the revisionist
scholars about the origins of the Quran , from Wansbrough , Crone , Cook , Lüling , Luxenberg .not
only do they contradict each other so they can't all be true any one of them in theory could be
true but they rely on textual observations that are too selective, in other words they don't
use a comprehensive wide basis of evidence , they have very selective and they pick on little things
and make big theories , they're not looking at a comprehensive as she says Quranic textual
evidence , they're not looking at all the evidence. END QUOTE So that's the passage there i just
read in pretty dense academic language . But the conclusion i draw on this
top expert who's not a muslim at the University of Berlin, expert on the Quran is that the traditional
muslim story of the genesis of the Quran , in other words it was given to Muhammad during
his own lifetime codified into one single text if you like just after by Uthman (we all
know the story) , this has not been successfully challenged by radical and skeptical scholars ,
these radical skeptical scholars are now pretty much not accepted as having anything
valid and to say any longer, their theories are discarded. Although some of the questions
she says that they raise are still of interest, so there is that. But she herself
says the beginning of this passage i read that she relies, she assumes the genuineness
of the Quranic text that we have today being the same text that goes back to Muhammad. So that's
her working hypothesis - it's not been successfully challenged by radical skeptic scholars. So there we
have it, we have two very different views, we have the views of Christian missionaries
who say we don't have a reliable text and we have the views of the experts , the scholars , the
people whose who are professors in this subject who say the opposite. So i think that
i just find that very very interesting . this book is worth getting actually ,
against a scholarly text, it's a very advanced text but it provides you with some real
information about actual scholarly research rather than the perhaps the propaganda that
you'll come across from Christian websites and missionaries . Until next time