Ibn Masud's Death and the Text of the Qur'an

Greetings, I would like to discuss in this brief video a response, actually present a response to a video that has been posted to YouTube by someone entitled or calling themselves One More Muslim. I don't know if this individual is related to one of the Muslims who put up a false attack on me a number of months ago that I refuted and that they've never responded to, I have no way of knowing.

But it says special thanks to Muslim by Choice and Natsam44, which are some fairly major Islamic providers of videos to YouTube. And in fact I subscribe to their lists and keep an eye on the things they're posting.

And so this seems to be a cooperative effort. In essence, this is an attempt to attack my scholarship on a non-essential issue, rather than providing meaningful responses to the rather large number of issues that I've raised to which the Muslim responders have really had no response at all.

Specifically, they attempt to draw a parallel between some comments that I made in response to Jalal Aboualoub and his gross misrepresentation of the Christian faith. As I recall, he had said something along the lines of, because of what we believe about Jesus' sacrificial death, we just believe we can just go out and sin all we want.

And also the fact that Jalal had, in a previous debate with David Wood, demanded that if anyone's going to make any comments whatsoever about Muhammad or the Quran, they must read Arabic. And since David doesn't read Arabic, then he shouldn't be making any of these comments whatsoever, because you have to know the original languages.

But then when we got into my debate with Jalal on the deity of Christ, he not only did not know the original languages, but didn't care, and used willy-nilly sources, sources that are highly questionable and not examinable, because he didn't bring his sources.

He really wasn't, he was just sort of going with what he had heard, basically. So we had those two aspects, and I made some comments as I got up that I would never wish to do that to Muslims, that I would never wish to misrepresent their faith in that way as he had just done by saying that Christians just believe we can just go out and sin all we want, and I pointed out the biblical refutation of that.

They're attempting to parallel that with a situation in my debate with Shabir Ali in May of 2006. I made reference a number of times to the situation with Ibn Masud and how he died. And I will admit that what I should have said is that there are some sources that say that Ibn Masud did what I consider to be the most honorable thing.

For those that don't know what I'm talking about, let me just give you a brief background. There are a number of sources that indicate that when Uthman made the final revision of the Quranic text and attempted to enforce that text upon the entire Ummah, that Ibn Masud, who was one of the closest companions of the Prophet, he was well known for his knowledge of the Quran, refused to give up his Quranic manuscript, which differed, had fewer surahs, had variant readings.

Many of the early sources, many of the early tafsirs, mention variant readings. We're not talking variant pronunciations here. We're talking different words, different spellings, with the resultant different translation of the language, whatever else it might be.

We're talking about textual variants, the very things that most Muslim apologists say do not exist in the Quran, but in fact do. Any scholarly Muslim recognizes that and knows that. But Muslim apologists tend to say, no, there isn't any such thing.

And basically, most Muslims today believe that when you pick this up and you open this, that what you have right here is exactly what Uthman wrote around 652 or so, and that there has been absolutely no change.

This is actually a 1924 Egyptian printing. And there are no notes at the bottom of the page or anything like that to indicate that there has been an extensive examination of manuscripts and so on and so forth.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. So Uthman tries to enforce these things, and Ibn Masud, his manuscripts were different. He claimed to be significantly closer to the Prophet, to know the Quran better, and there was a great division between he and Uthman.

And when I say that I would expect that Ibn Masud would do the honorable thing, if he really believed what he said, if he really believed that what he possessed was what the Prophet had actually said, and that Uthman was distributing an inferior version of the Quran, then it would be hard for me to honor a man who would go, oh, okay, and give up his manuscript to an inferior version.

And so the story goes that he was beaten for refusing to give up his manuscript and he died of that beating. Now that tends to be the Shia understanding, because there seems to be a connection between Ibn Masud's readings, which continued in the Quranic manuscript tradition for quite some time, and Shiite understandings of certain things as well.

And the Sunni, who need to present more of a, shall we say, positive view of Uthman as one of the rightly guided caliphs, obviously say no, no, Ibn Masud gave up his manuscript and lived in a certain place and died in peace there and so on and so forth.

Now there are sources on both sides. I have, and let me contrast, well, I'm jumping ahead of myself. I made these statements in the Shabir Ali debate, he challenged it. And all I had that evening, since that wasn't the subject of the debate, I was using it as an illustration, an illustration of the fact that both the Quran and the New Testament have a textual history, that you can't just treat the one as having a textual history and not treat the other as well.

And I believe that is the fatal flaw of Islamic apologetics, they just tend to do so, they always do so. Shabir said no, and so when I was challenged on that, I tried in probably less than 90 seconds to 120 seconds to find on the little computer I had with me, it was a little HP tablet that I was using, I tried to find the notes from which I had taken that.

And the problem was, the only way I could open those notes was in a reader that was not a browser, and the notes were in HTML. Now if you've ever just opened up an HTML file in a regular text reader, it's a mess.

There's all sorts of extraneous stuff all over the place. I found the quote, I tried to find the footnote, which of course in HTML codes can be a mess, and I gave the wrong reference. I gave the wrong reference during the course of the debate.

Now in the weeks that followed, not only did I correspond with Shabir Ali about this, but I brought up on the dividing line another example of my fallibility that I can't read HTML code in less than two minutes off of a computer screen and make sure that I do it perfectly.

And so I discussed that, brought it out, brought out the actual source I'd used, found a number of others, and I don't even know if this video got some of that information from what I said on the dividing line, I don't know.

I don't remember if I put it on the blog or not, it's been quite some time, so I just don't even honestly remember at this particular point in time. So anyway, I gave the wrong reference to the particular story of Ibn Masud's death.

So evidently, the idea is that I must have been using as bad a research form as Jalal al-Bawalrub was using, and that simply isn't true. In fact, just looking at some of the sources that would substantiate many of the things I've said, this is the Encyclopedia of Islam.

Now some might say, oh you said you never allow somebody to use an encyclopedia. Well there are encyclopedias like Britannica, there's encyclopedias that are online that are not in any way scholarly. This, in printed form, costs about $4 ,000.

It is a scholarly resource. This CD-ROM version that I have was just under $700, and the articles contained therein are written by scholars, Muslims may not like all of them, they're Western scholars, but they clearly have full command of the information that they're using.

Likewise, in the same way, you have the Encyclopedia of the Quran. I have the entire set, the rest of it is back there behind me, you can see it down there, along with Ibn Kathir and others, and Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Muslim, so on and so forth.

Each one of these volumes retails for around $365, thankfully I was able to find a few of them used for about $150, but some of the others were the full $365. And so the sources that I've been using cannot be paralleled with those that Jalal was using or said he was using or wasn't using well enough, whatever else it might be.

And what I'd like to try to do in response to this video is maybe elevate the conversation some. I know there will always be those people who, because they can't respond meaningfully to what you're actually saying, will try to convince their followers not to listen to someone by taking pot shots at them and trying to convince them that, well, if they've made one mistake, if they can't read HTML on the fly during the middle of a debate and get all the references right, then they're not to be trusted on anything, see?

And there will be people who accept that kind of argumentation. Then again, those folks wouldn't be overly impressed with anything I have to say anyway, so not much I can do about it. But to try to elevate the conversation, I would like to ask my Muslim friends to think about something about the death of Ibn Masud.

Let's say the Sunni idea is correct, and Ibn Masud goes, oh, fine, Khalif Uthman, whatever you say, I give my manuscript to you, so on and so forth. Why would there be so many readings traceable to Ibn Masud in the early text of the Qur 'an if he had ever done that?

Have you ever thought about that? It's my experience, and this would be true both directions, there are not a lot of Christians who have thought about the early textual transmission of the New Testament.

There's not a lot of Muslims who've thought about the early textual transmission of the Qur 'an either. But think about it for just a moment. Aside from the palimpsest manuscripts and, you know, 328a and 228b, which are the various of the early Qur 'anic Hijazi text manuscripts that we have, there is also a witness to the Qur 'anic text which would be somewhat parallel to the patristic witness in the New Testament, the early Church Fathers, and that's in the early tafsirs.

And when we look at the early tafsirs, we see a large number of the Qur 'anic manuscripts that are there, a large number of variants that are discussed, and we're not just talking about the various ways of reciting the Qur 'an here.

We're talking about the actual wording. There wasn't a fear to mention that at that time because obviously the modern view of the Qur 'an as a fixed text, inviolable, simply hadn't developed yet in the history of Islamic thought.

And so why would we be able to find Ibn Masud readings in palimpsest manuscripts, Ibn Masud readings in the tafsirs, and we're not talking about two or three, we're talking about literally hundreds over the spans of all this material.

If Ibn Masud had just gone, okay, would we have that kind of abiding testimony to the impact of his particular Qur 'anic readings? I don't know that we would. It seems much more logical to me if we were trying to bring in other information from outside to cast some light on Ibn Masud's death.

It seems in looking at some of these materials, in looking at the Encyclopedia of Islam, for example, on Uthman, one of the things that was mentioned just in passing that I found very interesting was that because of the resistance of the Qur 'an to Uthman, now why would the Qur 'an be resisting Uthman?

Because of that, Kufa, the city associated with Ibn Masud, was basically at a later point in time not even under Uthman's political control. That the Qur 'an were successful in undercutting his authority in that area.

Doesn't sound like there was any acquiescing to Uthman by the Qur 'an, and why would the Qur 'an focus in that area if not for Ibn Masud? So you see, there's a lot of other issues that go into this, and it does help us to start thinking about some of the key issues in regards to the transmission of the text of the Qur 'an.

I don't think that I'm going to get people like OneMoreMuslim or JustAnotherMuslim or whoever the people hiding behind these various names on YouTube are, I don't think I can get them to elevate their dialogue and stop trying to find anything to pick at me as an individual.

But as long as I have opportunity of reaching out to honest-hearted Islamic people, I'm going to keep raising these issues. And I'm just going to have to hope and trust the Spirit of God will get them through those issues and help them to truly understand that I'm not their enemy.

I'm seeking to speak the truth to them. So, thanks for watching.