Was the Quran Reliably Transmitted from the Prophet Muhammad?

The Quran as a Reliably Preserved Revelation

Dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, thank you very much for attending the second debate of the day. I just recited a verse from the Quran, chapter 15, verse 9. God Almighty tells us in the Quran that we have revealed the scripture, the remembrance, and we will guard it against corruption.

We will guard it against corruption. This was a promise made in the Quran by God Almighty to a people who were absolutely unlettered. There was no Arabic script at the time or no standardized script at the time when the Quran was revealed.

In fact, the Quran was the source of the Arabic script which was later on developed by the companions of Prophet Muhammad in order to pen down the Quran. So, what is the Quran? I would like to define the Quran before I begin.

Just like I tried to define the New Testament, what is the New Testament? Who wrote it? What constitutes the New Testament? Now likewise, I would like to define what constitutes the Quran. The Quran is the Arabic speech of Allah which he revealed to Muhammad in wording and meaning and which has been preserved in the Mus 'hafs and has reached us by mutawatir transmission, continuous transmission, uninterrupted transmission, and is a challenge to mankind to produce something similar to it.

This is the Quran. So, in other words, the Quran is the Arabic speech of Allah which he revealed to Muhammad. The Quran is the word of God delivered by Muhammad to his companions who then delivered it to their companions and this text of the Quran and its recitation reaches us via a continuous reporting to this day.

We have people alive to this day who can trace back their chain directly to the Prophet. So, if someone memorised the Quran, and are there any memorisers of the Quran here? Put your hand up. Allahu Akbar.

How many? I have about six, seven here in this audience. These people when they memorise the Quran, they take this authority from their teacher who taught them how to recite the Quran, not only to read it, how to recite it.

And then that teacher took this authority from his teacher and the chain goes back to the Prophet uninterrupted. No people missing from the chain, not even one individual and every single individual is known by name, by tribe, by character, by age, and by colour and tribe.

Every single individual is known, unlike what we saw in the case of the New Testament. We don't actually know who the author were. There are speculations about them. That's not the case with the Quran.

So I'm applying the same criteria here. We know who are the people who transmitted the Quran from the Prophet. So this is what the Quran is. So anything other than this, transmitted by the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is not the Quran.

One may come along and say, I have this revelation or I have this verse and that verse and this is the Quran. We will scrutinise that particular verse in the light of this definition. So the Quran we have today, which we read today, comes directly from Uthman, the son-in-law of the Prophet, one of the earliest Muslims who took the entire Quran in person from the Prophet himself.

This is the authority of the Quran and our book, unlike the New Testament. We don't have such transmission and such authority from the New Testament. We don't know when they wrote, where they wrote, why they wrote, and who they gave their books to.

The Quran is a different story altogether. We have chains going back directly to Uthman. In manuscript and in oral transmission. And then Uthman narrates from his teacher, the Prophet of Islam, Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

So anything other than the Uthmanic recension, which was conducted by a committee of scholars and companions of Prophet Muhammad, all of these people who were part of this committee, they were direct companions of Prophet Muhammad and we know exactly who they are.

We know their names and their character, what they did and how they lived. We know who they are. And they collectively, unanimously standardized the text of the Quran which we read today and this standardization comes from the Prophet himself.

Even the order of the surahs and the verses, the verses and chapters comes from directly the Prophet, peace be upon him. So how did the revelation of the Quran begin? Prophet Muhammad, as we know the story, was in the cave of Hira contemplating about the reality of his life and as to why he was created.

And then the angel, Angel Jibreel, appears to him and tells him, read in the name of your Lord, read the one who created you from a clot, read in the name of the one who taught you to use a pen, read in the name of the one who taught you how to speak.

And these verses were given to him. He was in a state of trauma and shock. He didn't understand what this means. He runs to his wife, he asks her to cover him and then she takes him to a man of scripture in the city of Mecca.

When he hears the story, Waraka bin Nawfal, a man close to his death, he tells Muhammad, This is the same angel who came to Moses. Same angel who came to you, came to Moses. Same angel. And when Jibreel, Angel Gabriel, told Muhammad to recite, to read, to proclaim, the Arabic term is Iqra, read, and he said, I cannot read, I am not learned.

And the book of Isaiah, chapter 29, verse 12, actually prophesies this. It is clearly stated therein, when the book is given to the one who is not learned and it is said to him, read, I pray thee, he will say, I am not learned.

I am not learned. This is exactly what happened in the cave of Hira. And the book, the revelation started coming down. It came down and teachings were being brought to the Prophet of Islam and he was teaching then his companions who would then pen this revelation down.

In the city of Mecca, these revelations were written down. Umar bin Khattab was on his way to kill the Prophet, one of the companions of the Prophet later on, who embraced Islam. This man was about to kill the Prophet.

He was told to go to his sister's house, who was a Muslim, and he went there in the city of Mecca in the year 5 Nabawi, when the Prophet had already been preaching for five years. He goes to his sister's house and he finds her reading a parchment of the Qur 'an.

It was written in Mecca. Okay, then we have other narrations and they can be found in this book, the Qur 'anic text, written by Al-Azami, and it is one of the most authoritative sources I would refer you to read in order to understand how the Qur 'an was transmitted.

Then the Prophet moves on to Medina, and I don't want to go into the history of Islam, why he moved to Medina, that's not relevant to the debate here. How was the revelation penned down? How was it put down?

This is the question which I wish to address. Firstly, the revelation, when it started coming on the Prophet, peace be upon him, Jibreel came with one mode, one dialect, the Qurayshi dialect, brought the Qur 'an in Arabic language.

Then the Prophet told him that my people are illiterate. The Arabs are a very rigid people. They will not recite the dialect of the Quraysh. They won't accept it because they have tribalistic antagonism among them, and they will find it difficult to recite in the dialect of the Quraysh.

And how many tribes were there in Arabia at the time, major tribes? Quraysh, Khudail, Taqif, Hawadhin, Kinana, Tamim, and Yemeni tribes. All of these tribes had different expressions and different modes of speaking in Arabic language.

They spoke the same language just like the Americans and the Irish and the Scottish speak the same language, but it sounds different. They have certain words different to the other accents. So this is exactly what was the case in Arabia at the time.

So when Jibreel came with one mode, one dialect, the Prophet of Islam told him my people won't be able to recite this in one dialect. They were rejected because of the Qurayshi dialect. And then Jibreel gave two dialects, two modes.

He said even this is not enough. Eventually Jibreel came with seven dialects, and he allowed, in fact he revealed the Qur 'an in these seven different modes to the Prophet, and the Prophet taught his companions in these seven different modes, and they were reciting the Qur 'an in these seven different modes.

So what are the incidents narrated by Imam Bukhari? In book 61, hadith number 514, this incident states that Umar bin Khattab, he saw a man called Hisham bin Hakim, a Muslim, reciting the Qur 'an, the same chapter which was taught to him by the Prophet, in a different manner.

So he took him, he held him, and he took him to the Prophet and he said, Ya Rasulullah, O Prophet of God, he's reciting the Surah Furqan, Chapter Furqan, differently than the way you have taught me. And the Prophet asked him to recite, and he recited.

He said I have taught him the way he's reciting. And then he told them that the Qur 'an has come down in seven different modes, for you, the Arabs, to have easy access to the Book of Allah. So that you can easily recite it in your own dialects, in your own expressions.

So this flexibility was allowed by God, to recite the Qur 'an in seven different modes. And this is how the Qur 'an was being penned down, by the scribes of the Prophet in respective areas. So who were the scribes of the Prophet?

Who were these people who were writing the revelation from the Messenger of Allah? Who were these people? We know every single of these people who wrote the Qur 'an directly from the Prophet. When he would receive a revelation, do we have anything like this from the New Testament?

None. Never. Doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. We don't even know who the authors were. Here we have a revelation coming down to the Prophet, and he himself dictating to his companions, as to what should be written as the word of Allah.

And he in fact forbade them to write anything other than the Qur 'an. He told them, do not write my words. Write only the Qur 'an. Write only the Qur 'an, lest you may mix the Qur 'an with my words. And who were the scribes of the Prophet in Medina?

Scholars mention 60 different names, and some of them are, Abu Hudaifah, Abu Sufyan, Abu Salama, and Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, Abbas, Ubayy ibn Ka 'b, Arkam, Usaid ibn Hudair, Aus, Buraidah, Bashir, Thabit ibn Qais, Jafar ibn Abi Thabit, Jahan ibn Sa'd, Juhaym, Hatib, Hudaifah, Hussain, Hanzala, Hawaitab, Khalid ibn Sa 'id, Khalid ibn Walid, Zubair ibn Awwam, Zubair ibn Arkam, and the list goes on.

On page 68 of this book, the Qur 'anic text by Muhammad Mustafa al-Adami, you will find some of the names of the scribes of the Prophet who were writing this directly from the Prophet himself. And all of this was collected within the life of the Prophet in written form.

The First Collection of the Quran under Abu Bakr

So what happened when the Prophet, peace be upon him, passed away? What happened? Abu Bakr, the first caliph of Islam, comes to power. The first caliph of Islam comes to power, and he was told by Umar that now we should put the Qur 'an in one codex, in one collection, because the revelation has ceased to come.

It doesn't come anymore. The Prophet is dead, he has passed away, and now we should put the Qur 'an in one codex. So Abu Bakr said, I shouldn't do it because the Prophet didn't do it. Umar convinced him that we have to collect the Qur 'an because the revelation has ceased to come down.

So Zayd ibn Thabit, one of the young companions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was chosen for this task because he himself personally revised the Qur 'an in its entirety with the Prophet in his final year.

So he was the best person for the task. Some verses were abrogated which were not to be included, others were to be included, but they were still abrogated. So the decision was made by the people who were directly learning from the Prophet himself.

The Prophet taught them as to what the Qur 'an is, and what is to go in, and what is to go out. Some verses were abrogated and they were left out. So this concept of abrogation exists in the Bible, it's there, and I doubted that Dr. James White would ever bring this up as an argument, the issue of abrogation.

So the Qur 'an was taught by the Prophet to his companions, they penned it down, and then in the time of Abu Bakr, Zayd ibn Thabit was told by Abu Bakr that do not accept anything from anyone when they bring the Qur 'an to you.

Now Zayd is a man who has memorized the Qur 'an in its entirety, he knows it by heart. Abu Bakr knows it by heart, Abu Umar knows it by heart, Ali knows it by heart. And this incident happened only because a battle took place, a battle called the Battle of Yamama.

And in this battle, almost 70 of the reciters of the Qur 'an passed away. They died fighting a false prophet. And they passed away. So Umar came to Abu Bakr and he told him that we should put the Qur 'an in one codex, lest we may lose some of the Qur 'an because of so many people dying, so many reciters dying.

Now what did he mean by that? He didn't mean that we may lose the contents of the Qur 'an written down, because the Qur 'an was already written down in its entirety. He was talking about oral transmission, oral authority taken from the prophet as to how to recite the text, not the written text.

The written text was there in its entirety. He was talking about losing authorities. 70 men died in this battle who took the Qur 'an directly from the prophet as to how to recite it. So we will lose this authority.

Put the Qur 'an down and increase the number of these authorities so that people can read the Qur 'an. And the Qur 'an now was penned down. And who were these people? Now James White has been claiming in some of his talks and presentations that this was a big problem.

70 people died, the Qur 'an was lost, okay. But we have clear-cut references in our histories that there were people alive even after this battle who knew the Qur 'an in its entirety by heart. For example, people like Abu Ayyub, Abu Bakr, As-Siddiq, Abu Darda, Abu Zaid, Abu Musa Al-Ashari, Abu Huraira, Ubaid bin Ka 'b, Umm Salama, Tamim Ad-Dari, Hudayfa, Hafsa, Zaid bin Thabit, Salim, client of Hudayfa, Sa 'ad bin Ubadah, Sa 'ad bin Ubaid Al-Qari, Sa 'ad bin Mundhir, and the list goes on again.

All these people were alive after the battle of Yamama and they had memorized the Qur 'an in its entirety. So the Qur 'an was penned down in that way. From the memories, from written parchments, from bones and the skin of trees, and Zaid bin Thabit was specifically commanded by Abu Bakr not to accept anything other than a parchment which was written in the presence of the Prophet himself, accompanying two witnesses, Allahu Akbar.

This is a man who had memorized the Qur 'an himself, and he was telling a man who had also memorized the Qur 'an himself, in its entirety, but he's telling him for our conviction so that we today can be certain about as to what we find in the Codex, or in the text of the Qur 'an.

He said, don't accept anything from anyone unless it accompanies two witnesses who saw this very parchment written in the presence of the Prophet of Islam. And that's how Zaid bin Thabit put the Qur 'an.

But those different readings, I don't like to use the word variants because what is a variant reading? What is the definition of variant? Variant is something which is uncontrolled, which was unintentional, or an intentional change.

That is what a variant reading is, and that's what it constitutes. But something controlled, deliberately put, deliberately disseminated, cannot be regarded as variant because that's what it is. If I write the book, one book, and I give it to someone, and then I write another book with differently worded sentences, then that cannot be regarded as variant because I am the one who is behind the book.

I have controlled it. So, the Qur 'an came down in these seven dialects, and some of these dialects differed in wording. Synonyms were used by different tribes to express certain words in different ways.

And these synonyms were accommodated in the copy of Abu Bakr. But in the time of Uthman, almost ten years later, a battle was taking place in a place called Azerbaijan, and there some people were reciting the Qur 'an different to each other, and now these are all new Muslim converts.

Converts to Islam. The Arabs knew exactly how to differentiate between one tribal dialect from another. They knew exactly how to do it. But these new converts, this is a problem now. They don't know how the dialects work, and they are all claiming that my reading is the perfect one.

So, he comes to Uthman, Khudaifa bin Yaman, from the battlefield, he comes straight to Uthman and tells him, now is the time to standardize the text of the Qur 'an, to put it in one dialect. And the Prophet had told Umar and Hisham, when they went to him, talking about the dialect, the Prophet told him, recite whichever is easy for you.

It's in Bukhari. Whichever one is easy for you, recite it, because the reason why God revealed the Qur 'an in seven different modes, is to facilitate ease for you, so you can recite it easily. You don't have to stick to one tribal dialect.

So now, this injunction was there from the Prophet, and who is Uthman? What authority does he have? Who is he to standardize the Qur 'an without a prophetic injunction? In fact, we have a direct prophetic injunction in this regard.

The Qur 'an tells us about the Prophet, Messenger of Allah ﷺ, I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed Satan, In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. And Muhammad does not speak from himself, rather he speaks from revelation.

And he told us, ﷺ, عَلَيْكُمْ بِسُنَّةِ وَسُنَّةِ الْخُلَفَاءَ الرَّاشِدِينَ الْمَهَدِينَ مِنْ بَعْدِ Upon you is my way, and the way of my successors, and my rightly guided successors. And then in another report, it tells them, my rightly guided successors will govern for thirty years, Uthman is one of them.

So Uthman had a direct authority from the Prophet to do what he did, and he did it via consensus. He got all the companions together, and he said to them, this is the situation we have, people are still reciting those dialects.

And now is the time, we the authorities who took the Qur 'an directly from the Prophet, we know exactly what the Qur 'an is and what dialect it came down, and we can differentiate, we need to now standardize the text and put it in one dialect.

And he established a committee, headed by Zaid bin Thabit again, the same man who Abu Bakr chose earlier, and he told them, put the Qur 'an in one dialect, the Qurayshi dialect. One dialect. And if you differ with Zaid, because Zaid was not Qurayshi, but he had memorized the Qur 'an in the Qurayshi dialect directly from the Prophet, he said, if you differ with Zaid, he told the rest of the committee members who were Qurayshis, put it down in the Qurayshi dialect.

And this is exactly what was done, it was controlled, it was strictly controlled, 100 controlled by the highest authorities possible in Islam. People who took the Qur 'an directly from the Prophet. Where is the comparison?

Where is the comparison? That's the question. Where is the comparison between the Qur 'an and the New Testament? The New Testament, the oldest manuscripts are from when? 200 years later, most of them.

Okay, and then we don't even know the authors. And the canonicity debate, it wasn't even established to be the scripture, or the word of God. Up to the year 200, people still don't know what the New Testament is, or what it looks like.

It did not exist. The New Testament up to the year 200, or even later, did not exist. It was canonized in its current form in the 4th century. And the earliest, or the latest, testimony to this canonization we have is the letter of Athanasius, and James is aware of that.

So now, what about this Qur 'an? Now this parchment is from the time of Uthman, James kept claiming that we have nothing from that time. We have thousands, listen carefully, ladies and gentlemen, we have thousands of Qur 'anic parchments, written, similar to this one, from the 1st century.

I am a coin collector, I am a numismatician, as mentioned by my friend in the beginning. I have coins in my possession from the 1st century of Islam, hundreds of them with the Qur 'an on them. With the Qur 'an on them.

Entire chapters are there on the coins. Small chapters, but they are there. And we have thousands of parchments, some of them were found in Sana 'a, in Yemen, and this is one of them. Now, interesting thing about this one is that, this has been dated, carbon dated, to somewhere between the mid 1st century, up to the time of Uthman, with 99 precision.

99 probability it has been carbon dated. And paleographers, people who study these manuscripts in the writing styles, they have also confirmed this, that this is a very, very early parchment, in fact from the time of the Companions.

The last Companion was, in fact, Anas bin Malik, one of the Companions of the Prophet, who took directly from the Prophet the Qur 'an, he died in the year 94. He was a young man when this parchment was written.

Companions in their thousands were alive when these parchments were written, and we have hundreds and thousands of them. Not hundreds and thousands, hundred thousands, hundreds and thousands of them. We have them in different libraries in the world.

Now this one reads from Surah Baqarah, Chapter 2, Verse 265. Is there a Hafiz there? Very quickly, I'm running out of time. Any Hafiz? Surah Baqarah, come forward, brother, come forward. Do you have a Musaf with you?

Come, come, quickly, come. Can I borrow your... Can you recite Surah Baqarah from Verse 265 onwards? بِعَمْوَالِهِمْ إِبْتَغَىٰ. You know? Surah Baqarah, 265 onwards. Do you have a Musaf of the Qur 'an?

Okay. Yeah, it's there, 265. If you read from 265 on, this is a parchment from the time of Uthman, and it was written then. 265 in Arabic. Sorry, one second, I will... 265. Can you read the verse of 265 onwards?

And please follow me. This is what I am reading, and this is what I'm going to be following, and this is what this brother is going to be reading. There is not a difference of a word. There is not a difference of a word, let alone a sentence.

265. Yeah. Surah Baqarah, 265. Okay, thank you. Yes, yes.

Sorry about this. Can I quickly make this point, and James can have some extra time? وَمَثَلُ الَّذِينَ يُنفِقُونَ أَعُوذُ بِاللَّهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ وَمَثَلُ الَّذِينَ يُنفِقُونَ أَمْوَالَهُ بِتِغَاءَ مَرْضَاتِ اللَّهِ وَتَثْبِيطًا مِّنْ أَنفُسِهِمْ كَمَثَلِ حَبَّةٍ أَنْبَتَتْ كَمَثَلِ جَنَّةٍ بِرَغْوَةٍ أَصَابَهَا وَابِلٌ فَآتَتْ أُكُلَهَا ضِعْفَيْنَ فَإِن لَمْ يُصِبْهَا وَابِلٌ فَطَلْ وَاللَّهُ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ بَصِيرٌ.

JazakAllah.

This was a few sentences read from Surah Baqarah, from this parchment from the mid-first century when Uthman himself was alive. There is not even a difference of a letter, let alone words and verses.

There may be differences in other manuscripts. Thank you very much. I have to now finish, and I will continue in my rebuttal with the rest of my presentation. Thank you very much indeed.

The Need for a Critical Edition and the Limits of Controlled Transmission

All right. Well, thank you very much, Adnan, for that presentation. It is going to be interesting because I have the Su 'ana manuscripts in my presentation as well, and I'll be wondering if there's any loud Takbirs at the end when you discover that the actual original writings of Su 'ana are different than what you have now.

That'll be interesting to look at. Now, the key to this second debate is to apply the same standards here that we should have been using in the examining of the New Testament. Was the transmission of the Qur 'an a free transmission or a controlled transmission?

I think we have already actually come to the conclusion on that. We recognize that it is a controlled transmission. Now, a quote for you from Mazzar Qazi. He says, Muslims and non-Muslims both agree that no change has ever occurred in the text of the Qur 'an.

The above prophecy for the eternal preservation and purity of the Qur 'an came true not only for the text of the Qur 'an, but also for the most minute details of its punctuation marks as well. It is a miracle of the Qur 'an that no change has occurred in a single word, a single letter of the alphabet, a single punctuation mark, or a single diacritical mark in the text of the Qur 'an during the last 14 centuries.

That's the claim that I think a lot of Muslims here tonight believe. But at this point, there is truly no question as scholarly sources, Islamic and non-Islamic, both attest to the exact same story. And there's a massive difference between what Islamic scholars say and what many Muslims believe on this particular matter.

For example, in 2007, there was a publication, the top copy manuscript. I have a copy of this publication. And here you have one of the charts is produced. There are three pages of these charts showing the variant readings between major manuscripts of the Qur 'an.

This is an Islamic produce. This is from Muslim scholars in Turkey showing the variations in these Mus 'haf in regards to the text of Qur 'an. I didn't produce this, they did. And there's three pages of them.

You can look at that for yourself. But I need to show these to you. I want to get to the real issue, which is the means of transmission. But the fact that there are textual variants has to be recognized.

Because what you just did, I could put P66 up on the screen. Maybe I'll do this in my rebuttal period. I could put P66 up on the screen and read it to you in Greek, and it'll be exactly what's up there too.

That doesn't prove much. The question is, is what's in that manuscript what was originally written by the author? That's the issue we need to be dealing with tonight, not anything else, okay? So let's try to keep the emotions to themselves.

Look at Surah 3, 158. Here's a variant that's found in Surah 3, 158. Let's sort of blow it up here so you can see it. Here's a text under consideration which speaks of Allah surely gathering those who die to himself.

Here is the same text from Qur 'anic manuscript 328, which is found in the National Library of France in Paris. It is dated to around 100 years after Hijra. But as reading Hijazi text is hard even for those who read modern Arabic, let's expand the text out a little bit so you can see it.

Now what you can see is that the Paris manuscript has an extra aleph, not found in the modern printed Qur 'anic text. But in this case, that extra aleph completely changes the meaning. In the ancient text, it says those who die will not be gathered to Allah, while the modern 1924 printed text, which I would imagine most Muslims in the audience have, says that they will surely be gathered to Allah.

Now please, make sure you understand why I point this out. I'm not saying we can't figure out the original wording, but I am pointing out how important it is to have a full, unedited, widely dispersed manuscript tradition with which to make such determinations.

That is very, very important. Likewise, Surah 2, 222. You were just looking at Surah 2, 265. All right. Surah 2, 222. Let's look at it in the Foggs Palimpsest manuscript and also bring in the Sa 'ana manuscripts as well.

Surah 2, 222 provides another example, this time based upon Foggs Palimpsest manuscript. A palimpsest is a manuscript where the original writing has been washed off in another version or completely different work written on the washed leather.

Using ultraviolet light, we can often read the original writing. When we read the original text in the Foggs manuscript of Surah 2, 222, which I have here on the top, and compare the current edition, we see not just variation, we see wholesale editing.

Words are changed. The word order is changed. Verbal forms are altered. Grammatical terminations are changed, et cetera. This is clear evidence of the continued attempt at least a century after Uthman of reading the Quran of the readings of Ibn Masud.

But even more vital is the fact that a palimpsest portion of the Sa 'ana manuscripts, which have been radiocarbon dated, as Adnan was pointing out, to have a better than 50 chance of being pre-Uthmanic in date, contain a third reading of this text, which is different from both the Foggs and the Uthmanic readings.

Now this is evidence of text types, just as we will see both Bukhari and Al-Kindi record for us as we look through their texts. So here we have evidence in the palimpsest of preceding text types, even before the Uthmanic texts that exist that you were just reading, and saying, see, nothing has changed.

Well, how did that text get on there before there that was different? There was a redaction. There was an editing. And I wanna know what was originally given, not what somebody else thought should have been given.

And that's why the free transmission of the text is so superior to any controlled transmission of the text. Now, let's look at what Sahih al-Bukhari says about where the Quran came from. This is the earliest sources we have, many of the sources, many of the sources.

You have to have two manuscripts, and they had to be, those are later traditions. Oh, you can talk all about Isna chains you want. Every single Hadith that Bukhari and Imam rejected had an Isna chain.

There were thousands of them, that no one that I know of, and nobody that Adnan quotes in regards to history that he was using against the New Testament would ever accept the idea of Isna chains as the standard of historical research.

They would never accept it. Again, we need to use the same standards. Now, you know the text, Sahih al-Bukhari 6, 509 and 510. Nuraid Zayd bin Thabit, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq sent for me when the people of Yamama had been killed, that is a number of the Prophet's companions who fought against Musalima.

Abu Bakr then said to me, Umar has come to me and said, "'Casualties were heavy among the Qur 'an of the Qur 'an, "'that is, those who knew the Qur 'an by heart "'on the day of the battle of Yamama, "'and I am afraid that more heavy casualties "'may take place among the Qur 'an on other battlefields "'whereby a large part, a kathir, "'large part of the Qur 'an may be lost.'".

This has nothing to do with pronunciation. Why in the world would these people be afraid that a large part of the Qur 'an is gonna be lost, well, actually, we have the entire thing written down, we even actually have all the verses, all the ayahs and everything, it's all been written down, we've got all this, but it's the pronunciation we're worried about.

That is not a meaningful reading of the original, and there are many Islamic scholars that would agree with that. That's not a meaningful reading of the original. There was a concern that the Qur 'an would be lost because the Qur 'an was not yet written down.

That's why there was a concern. Therefore, I suggest you, Abu Bakr, order the Qur 'an be collected. I said to Umar, how can you do something which Allah's Apostle did not do? Umar said, by Allah, it is a good project.

Umar kept on urging me to accept this proposal until Allah opened my chest for it, and I began to realize the good in the idea which Umar had realized, okay? So, he says, I started looking for the Qur 'an and collecting it from what was written on palm stalks.

Why didn't he just go and get the original that was already there with all the ayahs and everything all there? No, he goes looking for the Qur 'an and collecting it from what was written on palm stalks, from thin white stones, doesn't sound like a mishap to me, and also from the men who knew it by heart.

Oh, so all of it wasn't written down till I found the last verse of Surat al-Tawbah, repentance, with Abu Kazim al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. One person knew this text.

One. What about those 70 others that died at Yamama? Did any of them know some that nobody knew? That's a question that has to be asked. It can't just be swept under the rug. It has to be asked. And we're gonna find out in the next hadith that even at this point, this is right at the days of Abu Bakr.

This is right after the death of Muhammad. 18 years later or so, 15 to 18 years later, they're gonna find another verse that they didn't find the first time around. And this is your own hadith sources.

I'm just quoting what it says. The verse that they found with one person was, verily there has come unto you an apostle, Muhammad, from amongst yourselves, agrees in that you should receive any injury or difficulty till the end of Surat al-Tawbah.

So there you have the last one bound with one person. Then the complete manuscripts, copy of the Quran, remained with Abu Bakr till he died, then with Umar till the end of his life, and then with Hafsa, the daughter of Umar.

So there's the first collation of Abu Bakr. Next hadith. Hudaifah bin al-Yaman came to Uthman. Hudaifah was afraid of there, the people of Sham and Iraq's differences. In the recitation of the Quran, not just the pronunciation, how they're reciting it.

There were differences. Why would that cause anybody a problem? Well, because they didn't have a fixed manuscript yet. And so they come traveling back and they say, Uthman, O chief of the believers, listen to what's said here.

Save this nation before they differ about the book, the Quran, as the Jews and Christians did before. Oh, so we don't want to have any differences. We don't want to have any argumentation. So we need one fixed version.

There's a problem here. So we need to have one fixed version. So Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, send us the manuscripts of the Quran so we may compile the Quranic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you.

So Hafsa sent it to Uthman. Now, let me just ask you a question. If all they did was take what was from the days of Abu Bakr and reproduce it, this shouldn't have taken much difficulty at all. There shouldn't have been any more collation.

They shouldn't be looking for new ayahs. But that's not what happens. In fact, Uthman then ordered Zayd bin Thabit, and you have the entire committee here, to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies.

And why would Uthman say to the three Qurayshi men, in case you disagree with Zayd bin Thabit on any point in the Quran, then write it in the dialect of Quraysh. The Quran was revealed in their language.

Wait a minute, I thought you were just recopying what you already had. Why would you be worried about something like this? Didn't you do this back at the original collation? Hmm, sounds like something more is going on here.