Welcome back to Variant Qurʾan. I'm Daniel Brubaker. In May of 2019,
I published my book, "Corrections in Early Qurʾan Manuscripts: Twenty Examples."
About six months later, a review appeared in a scholarly journal. It was written by Hythem Sidky,
a molecular engineer at University of Chicago. Hythem had informed me about a week before
the review appeared that he had been asked to write it by some people, and that he had done so,
and that it would be forthcoming. Sure enough, the review did appear in early December, 2019,
as I recall. The review began with various compliments to my book, but then it launched
into a long list of critiques about my methodology and other things. One interesting thing about the
review is that this was a 15-page review of a very small book of about 140 pages.
And, more unusual is the fact that my book is not a scholarly contribution at all, but rather
an introduction for general readers. So, the fact that Sidky considered the book worthy of writing a
15-page response to, and that the journal that published it out of the University of Chicago
felt it worthy to dedicate 15 pages of their publication to my book, tells me something,
and should tell you something, about the perceived importance of what it was that I did. Be that as
it may, I was not initially sure that I needed to write a response to the review. I did contact the
journal and asked them if they would be willing to run a response to it, and they informed me that,
no, it's not their policy to allow responses to book reviews. Initially,
I wasn't sure if I needed to write a response to the review. For one thing, I didn't find the
criticisms leveled at me in most of the review -- the most critical things -- to
be accurately representing what I had said in the book in the first place.
Over the following six to eight months, only a relative few people actually seem to have
noticed Sidky's review. But, something obviously happened early last summer, and that was the
start of my YouTube channel and, you know, all the things that we have witnessed unfolding this year.
And, what happened -- what seems to have happened -- after I went on with my YouTube channel and a
lot of people started paying attention to me, is that people who wished to find a reason to
discredit my work suddenly discovered Sidky's review, and began using it as the as the basis
for a sharp criticism, and a basis for just dismissing me as a scholar. And so,
various people, I noticed, began to rely upon it. So, it was at that time that I realized I did need
to respond to this. After all, it was a review published in a scholarly journal. My review
response has now been published, and there's a link at the bottom of this video where you can
go see it -- two links, in fact. You can go and see it on academia.edu. I also am aware that not
everybody has access to that, so if you don't, there's another link that you can go and download
the pdf for yourself, or read it online. I hope that you will ... I hope that everybody watching
this video will go take a look at that, and see at least the general outlines of what it says.
Now, I'm not going to go into the substance of it in this video,
or spend a lot of time unpacking it, although I do expect that I might do so in upcoming videos.
But the main thing is to let you know that it's there, and ask you to go take a look
at it. It is a fairly strong response, and as you've seen in the past, I don't mean
to harm anyone. I don't mean to to harm Sidky. I wish him well in his academic career,
but the strength of his dismissal of my book and my work did require a fairly firm response back.
And, I hope that you'll find it to be professional and not unfair, and I hope that he'll find it to
be professional and not unfair. In fact, I did send it to him about a week -- a little bit more
than a week -- before I put it up, in order to allow him the opportunity to let me know if I
got anything wrong, if he thought there were any mistakes, or if I had misrepresented him or been
unfair to him. He did not respond to me during that week's time, has not responded to me yet,
and so I assume that he found no problem with what I had written. Of course, that does not mean that
it's necessarily the end of the conversation. There there may be something that comes out,
he may make a response later, and that is entirely up to him if he chooses to do so. These things
sometimes take time to unpack, and they take time to go back and forth. And, there may be some
further back and forth, or this may be just the end of it. So, he's issued a critique of my book,
and I've issued a response, and maybe that'll just be it. Now, as some of you may know,
or some of you may not know, what I have done in my -- with my doctorate, and subsequent years to
my doctorate, is something that nobody else has ever done. It's not necessarily incredibly complex
or difficult ... it does have a certain degree of technical ability that's required to do it, and,
you know. But nobody has ever done it. And so, this is not to say that manuscript studies have
not been done, or textual criticism, even. My own mentor, Keith Small,
did good work, and other people before have done excellent work in critical studies of the Qurʾan,
but what I have done with the cataloging and, you know, tracking down corrections in
early Qurʾan manuscripts, is unique to me. Now, as I said before, I can completely understand
that these things are sensitive for many people, particularly, you know, particularly for many
Muslims. And, there's a sense of wanting to respond back, or or backlash, or something like
that. And, you know, again, I'm not insensitive to the fact that is there. I understand, also, that
everybody wants to get engaged with me, and so forth. I've had many people reach out to me. I've
seen a number of critiques out there that have been published, including one that was 300 pages,
and I just want to let you know that, number one, I am intending to respond to those that are
scholarly in nature. And so, Sidky's review was published in a scholarly journal.
With other things, I have yet to see anything that's really scholarly in nature. And, you know,
quantity -- number of pages -- is admirable, but that does not equate with being scholarly in tone,
or nature, or training, or anything like that. And so, I think in many ways it's unfortunate that
I'm the first person to have done this. And, by no means do I claim that I'm necessarily the the most
incredible person to have ever existed, or to be able to do something like this, and other people,
I'm sure, could have done it much better. But the fact of the matter is that nobody else did do it,
and I did. And so, I'm trying to make these things available to you through these videos, and through
my publications. I hope you enjoy them. Now, you know, I make mistakes from time to time.
I don't dedicate my whole life to producing these videos. I try to do them at least once a week,
or once every couple weeks, but I don't put the same level of review and effort into them that I
would if I was publishing something in a scholarly journal or preparing something for a, you know,
a book chapter or a monograph, and so, obviously, we are human beings and we make mistakes. And
I find it kind of interesting ... I know that people have been criticizing, you know ... the
pattern so far has been that people will find a mistake in my Arabic, and they'll make that,
you know, blow that into a big thing. Of course, the details matter, and I've said that before.
The details do matter. Grammar, Arabic grammar, matters. And so, particularly on the last video,
I put forward something that sprung to my mind immediately, that would have been very obvious to
a native Arabic speaker. And that is the use of the present tense or imperfect verb after
the "idha," whereas the perfect would be the thing to use after that, in the first person.
And so, the thing that sprung to my mind is not a probable reason for what was going on there,
and that's fine. Actually, that ʾālif, you can tell -- by the way, somebody asked the question
"how can you tell what was erased?" And, typically the way that you can tell what was erased,
or have a clue to what was erased, is by the shape of the erasure. People didn't erase,
you know, a whole section. They would erase the letter itself. So, you can see, often,
the shape of the letter that was erased. And, that was an upright letter ... it was either an ʾālif
or a lam. And, you know ... but, you know, it is fine for people to go
and criticize these things. I accept all valid criticisms. I don't deny that, and that I'll
make a mistake from time to time, as everybody does. But, I think it's a little bit uncourteous
to blow this out of such great proportion. I think, if somebody was a speaker, a non-native
speaker, of English and came and did academic studies in the United States, for example,
I cannot imagine being so inhospitable to that person, and rude to that person, as to criticize
them endlessly over over an error of grammar, or something like that. I think I might point it out
in a professional way, and then move on from that. And so, the basis of my work is not the ... has
not until this point been the detailed analysis of these things. I try to give some detailed
analysis, or my initial ideas, so that you know, as a starting point. But, you will see in my
academic publication a more fully developed thing than that. But, in the meantime, I would
just ask you ... you know, I obviously don't have control over what people say out there, and what
people do, but for those of you who are generally good-mannered and kind people, I would just ask
you to treat me as you would treat anybody, with a certain degree of grace and kindness. And,
if you see a mistake, please do me the courtesy of letting me know about it. But, you know,
I would ask people of goodwill to refrain from blowing things out of proper proportion
to the big picture. And, the big picture is, really, the manuscripts that I'm showing you,
the fact that corrections exist in them, and the fact that some of those corrections are
not probably due to scribal error, while some of the other ones are probably due to scribal error.
And so, I'm very open to the various possibilities for that. Alright, so, again, a lot of people have
been contacting me and wanting to have interviews with me, and debates with me, and and things like
that. And, I just want to make very clear: I'm not interested in doing debates. I'm not a debater.
I'm not an apologist, or a polemicist. I know that there are other people who are doing that,
and I've made, also, clear that I have complete respect for that. I think there's a place for that
mode of discussion, but it's just not me. That's not what I'm up to doing,
and I cannot, and don't have the time to address everybody who comes after me. I'm sorry for that,
but in due course I will be doing things, you know, as I think is appropriate
and in the sort of academic tone that I want to keep this stuff to. Alright, so, I just want to
make that clear I've answered Sidky because his review appeared in a scholarly journal,
and this does not mean that I will not engage non-academics. Obviously, you know that
people have been leaving comments in the bottom of the videos, and I've been trying to answer those,
you know, picking some of those, and I will be dealing more with those in future videos. I'll do
some more Question and Answer, because there are some very good questions that have been coming up
in the comment section, and I want to be able to put those in front of you, and deal with them. So,
thank you very much to those of you who have been very thoughtful in your comments, including those,
you know, who maybe think I got something wrong, or whatever. I thank you for doing that, because
I really do appreciate the learning process. We are all in a process of learning in life and,
you know, this is not the end of the journey, hopefully; this is a step along the way. And so,
thank you for being here along with me, and I appreciate you. I do want to let you know that
this past week I was very happy to receive in the mail the book that I mentioned to you before,
and it's a German volume from Inarah. This book has my chapter in it which deals with the
insertions of "Allah," and it also has a number of other chapters. There are nearly 900 pages
in this book. So, I'll put a link in the in the description box below if you'd like to look
at that, as well as a link to my own book if you're interested in picking that up after having
read the review, if you haven't gotten it yet, and I do thank you for supporting this channel,
for watching, and I appreciate you all. I hope you are doing well wherever you are in the world. Bye.