Boreal
FADE TO BLACK
Triumph of the Irrational
KORAN
A Confused, Jumble, Crude, Incondite, Endless Iteration
Thomas Carlyle [1795 - 1881]
The first official Koran was compiled after Muhammad's death by a scribe by the name of Thabit. He was urged to do so by the Prophet’s successor as leader of the believers following the death of many of the best memorizers of the Koran at the battle of Yamama during the so-called War of the Apostates, a rebellion mainly against the rule of Abu Bakr.
The rebellion was triggered by the acquisitive Bakr insisting that Muslims now pay him the Zakat, the obligatory charity, just like they had paid his predecessor ((more about this in the Chapter: Five Perplexing Pillars - Zakat).
Narrated Zaid bin Thabit Al-Ansari who was one of those who used to write the Divine Revelation:
Abu Bakr sent for me after the (heavy) casualties among the warriors (of the battle) of Yamama (where a great number of Qurra' (reciters of the Koran) were killed). Umar was present with Abu Bakr who said, “Umar has come to me and said, ‘The people have suffered heavy casualties on the day of (the battle of) Yamama, and I am afraid that there will be more casualties among the Qurra (those who know the Qur'an by heart) at other battle-fields, whereby a large part of the Qur'an may be lost, unless you collect it. And I am of the opinion that you should collect the Qur'an.’"
Abu Bakr added, "I said to Umar, 'How can I do something which Allah's Apostle has not done?'"
Umar said (to me), "By Allah, it is (really) a good thing."
So Umar kept on pressing, trying to persuade me to accept his proposal, till Allah opened my bosom for it and I had the same opinion as Umar.
(Zaid bin Thabit added:) Umar was sitting with him, Abu Bakr, and was not speaking to me). "You are a wise young man and we do not suspect you (of telling lies or of forgetfulness): and you used to write the Divine Inspiration for Allah's Apostle. Therefore, look for the Qur'an and collect it (in one manuscript)."
By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains (from its place) it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Qur'an. I said to both of them, "How dare you do a thing which the Prophet has not done?"
Abu Bakr said, "By Allah, it is (really) a good thing."
So I kept on arguing with him about it till Allah opened my bosom for that which He had opened the bosoms of Abu Bakr and Umar. So I started locating Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leaf-stalks of date palms and from the memories of men (who knew it by heart).
I found with Khuzaima two Verses of Surat-at-Tauba which I had not found with anybody else, (and they were): "Verily there has come to you an Apostle (Muhammad) from amongst yourselves. It grieves him that you should receive any injury or difficulty He (Muhammad) is ardently anxious over you (to be rightly guided)" (9:128)
The manuscript on which the Quran was collected, remained with Abu Bakr till Allah took him unto Him, and then with Umar till Allah took him unto Him, and finally it remained with Hafsa, Umar's daughter.
Bukhari 60.201
The final official version of the Koran was revised and rushed into production during the Caliphate of Uthman, the third caliph, for reasons explained in the following hadith:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
Hudhaifa bin Al-Yaman came to Uthman at the time when the people of Sham and the people of Iraq were Waging war to conquer Arminya and Adharbijan. Hudhaifa was afraid of their (the people of Sham and Iraq) differences in the recitation of the Qur'an, so he said to Uthman, "O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Quran) as Jews and the Christians did before."
So Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, "Send us the manuscripts of the Qur'an so that we may compile the Qur'anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you."
Hafsa sent it to Uthman. Uthman then ordered Zaid bin Thabit, Abdullah bin AzZubair, Said bin Al-As and 'Abdur Rahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies.
Uthman said to the three Quraishi men, "In case you disagree with Zaid bin Thabit on any point in the Qur'an, then write it in the dialect of Quraish, the Qur'an was revealed in their tongue."
They did so, and when they had written many copies, Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa.
Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.
Said bin Thabit added, "A Verse from Surat Ahzab was missed by me when we copied the Qur'an and I used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it. So we searched for it and found it with Khuzaima bin Thabit Al-Ansari. (That Verse was): 'Among the Believers are men who have been true in their covenant with Allah.'" (33:23)
Bukhari 61.510
Needless to say, Thabit’s first attempt at compiling the Koran from the recollections of surviving memorizers was bound to elicit different recollections of the same event such as those recounted earlier. He may simply have included them all in the pile of papers stashed under Hafsa’s bed to be sorted out later. It was obviously not sorted out during the review commissioned by Uthman. In any event, it would have been next to impossible for Thabit’s committee of four to ascertain which recollection was the most accurate and may explain why many different account of what was said remained in the final version.
Revelations in duplicates, triplicate, quadruplicate, quintuplicate… are possibly the strongest evidence that Muhammad was indeed illiterate and had only his memory to depend on to accurately repeat to the assembled believers the content of the Koran that the Angel Gabriel, the Messenger to the Messenger, read to him the night before or in dreams which he mistook for reality.
29:48 You did not recite before it any book or write it down with your right hand. Then the negators (sic) would have been in doubt.
If Muhammad could not refer to written notes, and such, to avoid repeating himself or telling a different version, then it was not only the believers remembering the same things differently as to what he preached, but the Prophet himself who added to the confusion. Not to be dismissed is that, except for the short Surah 7, Al-Fatihah, the next 113 chapters are actually the recollection of 113 people interviewed by Thabit as to their recollection of what Muhammad preached
Despite Uthman’s effort, the Koran continued to be preserved, mainly, as an oral tradition until the 1920s when the University of Azhar settled on one oral tradition to produce the text of the Koran in use today known as the Cairo Edition.
Extract from:
FORGOTTEN WITNESS: EVIDENCE
FOR THE EARLY CODIFICATION OF THE QUR’AN
Estelle Whelan,
Columbia University
Excerpt from Journal of the American Oriental Society,
vol. 118, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–14.
Oral recitation nevertheless remained the preferred mode of transmission, and, as time passed, variant versions of the text proliferated - the kind of organic change that is endemic to an oral tradition.
In addition, because of the nature of the early Arabic script, in which short vowels were not indicated and consonants of similar form were only sometimes distinguished by pointing, writing, too, was subject to misunderstanding, copyist's error, and change over time.
In the early tenth century, at Baghdad, Abu Bakr Ibn Mujahid (d. 936) succeeded in reducing the number of acceptable readings to the seven that were predominant in the main Muslim centers of the time: Medina, Mecca, Damascus, Basra, and Kufa.
Some Qur'an readers who persisted in deviating from these seven readings were subjected to draconian punishments.
Nevertheless, with the passage of time, additional variant readings were readmitted, first "the three after the seven," then "the four after the ten."
The modern Cairo edition, prepared at al-Azhar in the 1920s, is based on one of the seven readings permitted by Ibn Mujahid, that of Abu Bakr ‘Âsim (d. 745) as transmitted by Hafs b. Sulayman (d. 796).
Al-Azhar, and others before it, could improve on the grammar and typography of the Uthman codex, on which the various recitations are based, but not much else without Allah’s approval; a consent that was not forthcoming with His ultimate spokesman long dead and the Author’s unwillingness to directly engage with those for whom He wrote the book. This is why even the Cairo edition of the Koran remains very much what Thomas Carlyle described early on; a sentiment echoed by Edward Gibbon [1737 - 1794].
As toilsome a reading as I ever undertook; a wearisome confused jumble.
That the Koran is a badly put together, poorly written book is self-evident. Nonetheless, this is not a good enough reason not to give it the respect believers insist it deserves. But there's more!