A Program for Muslims on the Textual History of the Qur’an

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:34

Well, it is 2020, and so you just sort of expect things to be 2020 -ish.

00:41

Today on the program, I am going to be specifically addressing my Muslim friends. I have invited them to tune in today.

00:48

I want this whole program to be addressed to them, but please give me just a moment here at the beginning to say that, obviously,

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Lord willing, tomorrow I will address the breaking news of the moment.

01:04

I don't even know what the decision is being called.

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This is Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, so maybe it's going to be the

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Bostock decision, something like that. I don't know. But today, the decision came down from the

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United States Supreme Court 6 -3, demonstrating that there is a leftist majority on the

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Supreme Court. You thought it was conservative, didn't you? It's not. It's a leftist 6 -3 majority.

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There are only three justices left in the Supreme Court who have any concern whatsoever concerning the original intention of the words, the meaning of the words.

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Other than that, all the rest of them are leftists, and that's it.

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And what just happened was the Equality Act just got passed by the Supreme Court. It could never pass the legislature, but it just passed the

02:12

Supreme Court, and sex just got redefined by the Supreme Court. The insanity, the moral evil of transgenderism was just established as rule of law by the

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Supreme Court, which means that I think the day of the last broadcast of The Dividing Line by this mechanism moved up rapidly just today, because we have to speak the truth, we have to be able to speak what

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Scripture states. Jesus said, God created man and woman. There is no mixing of those, there is no crossing of those, there is no such thing as transition.

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That's a fantasy, but it's now a fantasy that thanks to six black -robed radicals is enshrined in the law of this land.

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You insert fantasy into the law, you destroy the law's moral capacity.

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But that's where we are. And so I want to be able to read the decisions, and I understand that Justice Alito wrote a scathing denunciation, which means nothing, but it still always makes you feel better.

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When Obergefell was passed, there was 10 ,000 times the amount of logic and intellect expressed in the denunciation of Obergefell by the minority than anything in the feel -good, ishy -squishy stupidity of the majority.

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So, I want to be able to read Alito, I want to be able to address this more fully, but this just took place, the news of it just hit, and so I want to make you aware of it.

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It obviously is an incredibly serious matter of prayer, but it should not shock us.

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It should not shock us. I have been saying to my Christian friends from before 2016, it's all about the

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Supreme Court, huh? It's all about the Constitution. The Supreme Court and the

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Constitution, the Constitution is a piece of paper, it has words written on it. And if you've seen what leftists can do with the

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Bible, then leftists can do that a whole lot more with a much shorter document called the Constitution.

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Once you have a worldview where words do not have meaning any longer, then the

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Constitution, its rights, all those things, can evaporate in literally a moment, and that's what's going on.

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Real quickly, one last thing, Gabriel Hughes, Pastor Gabe on Twitter, just tweeted this a few moments ago, 12 minutes ago, and as soon as I read it,

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I went, oh! Here's what he said, to every church that just took federal money during the pandemic, and every

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Christian institution, higher education, or para -church ministry accepting government funds, be ready, misery is coming.

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I was so focused upon the insanity of Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts.

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We already know the insanity of the leftists, we already know that they're ideologues, we already know they don't care about what the Constitution says, they don't care about its meaning, it's irrelevant.

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They're just there to push their leftism. But now we've discovered, we thought we had a 5 -4, it's actually 6 -3 the other direction.

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I'm thinking about all that, and all of a sudden, I read that and it's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

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All those churches, all those churches put their hand out and said, yeah, we'll take some of that.

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Guess who's coming to dinner? Guess who owns your soul now? There you go, there you go.

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Tried to tell you! Well, I didn't try to tell you, I'll take that back. I apologize. It never crossed my mind that anyone would do it.

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It never crossed my mind that any church would go, yeah, let's take some of this stimulus money and cover our payroll.

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That's how we'll do it. I just never thought anybody would do it, I just thought everybody would go, yeah, right. So I didn't tell you.

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Once I found out people were doing it, the tunes, literally, of some churches, of over a million dollars,

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I'm just like, okay. And now that government can say to you, oh,

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I see you took some of our stimulus money. Have you heard of the Equality Act? You don't need to anymore because now it's the law of the land anyways.

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There you go, there you go. Okay, so, tomorrow, once I have a little time to do a little more reading,

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I mean, I've been doing reading the past few minutes just to catch up on it.

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Distracted me from really being prepared to do what I want to do, but I, that's, that's, there you go.

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That's, that's what we're up against. Sorry about that. Welcome to the program, to my Muslim friends.

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Big doings in our world as well, and I've known about these since last week.

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And so, I want to address a very important development in a completely different field.

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I know it's really hard to make this shift. The gears are smoking as I'm, the clutch just about blew up trying to make this transition,

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I will assure you. But I must,

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I must do my best. And I do this as a person who can document the reality of the fact that I have been calling for much more serious discussion of this very issue on the part of Christians and Muslims together for a very, very long time.

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I have done two debates, one in Pachosum, South Africa with Yusuf Ismail, one in London with Adnan Rashid.

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Now, Adnan and I had not gotten to know each other yet when we did that debate.

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It might be a little bit different now. But anyway, I've done at least two debates on the issue of the transmission of the text of the

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New Testament versus the transmission of the text of the Quran. And I have called for, in both of those debates, the utilization of equal scales, just scales.

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We have to use the same standards as we examine the reality that, as a

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Christian, I have a collection of 66 ancient books, some of which are far more ancient than others, written in three different languages, over the course of a millennium and a half.

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The Quran, ostensibly, is the work of a single individual over a period of approximately 22 years, at most.

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The oldest portion of the Quran is minimally half a millennium younger than the oldest portion of the

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New Testament. And you only have one language, primarily, in the transmission.

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I mean, there are loanwords, but let's go with the idea of Arabic as the original language, obviously.

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So you have major differences right there in age, authorship, the nature of the literature itself, lots of differences.

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But what we have are written texts that were transmitted by hand until the invention of printing.

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They might say, well, ours transmitted orally. Well, there were oral elements in any ancient tradition, or even medieval, because the

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Quran's right on the borderline between ancient and medieval. I mean, most people go right around 600.

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So it might fit into the very, very, very end of the ancient world, the very, very beginning of the medieval.

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It depends on where you draw the line. But every work has an oral element to it.

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There has been an emphasis amongst Muslims on that oral element of the

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Quran, but that oral element cannot be analyzed remotely from our time period, because it's oral.

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But it can have a big impact upon the transmission of a text. And I think the fact that we have as many aroof as we have, the readings of the

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Quran, even in printed form, I think that that probably goes back to a period of oral transmission.

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Now, what has happened that all of a sudden everybody's talking about this. It's something we've been talking about for a long time,

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I've done debates. And what I have said in those debates is that there is a fundamental difference in the mechanism by which, and we normally just stick with the

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New Testament versus the Quran, because the primary theological differences between Islam and Christianity are based there, primarily, though issues relating to prophecies of Muhammad, prophecies of Jesus, things like that, do go back to the issue of the

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Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, the Ketuvim, what we call the Old Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures. But primarily looking at the

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New Testament and the Quran, what

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I have called for is a recognition of the difference between what's called free transmission, which is what we have in the

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New Testament, the free transmission of the text, where there's no governmental authorities, there are no overriding powers that can say, turn in all your copies of the

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Book of Romans, we're going to provide you with the official copy. That couldn't happen. There was no centralized

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Christian church that had that kind of authority for centuries until long after many of the earliest manuscripts of the

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New Testament were buried in the sands of Egypt. The church never had that power or capacity, and given the ancient world, would never have had that power or capacity, even if they had been more widespread and numerous than they were.

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With the Quran, you have a controlled transmission. Even within the Islamic sources, you cannot escape what's called the

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Uthmanic revision. You cannot escape Sahih al -Bukhari 6509510, the collection under Abu Bakr, the revision, the production of an official version under Uthman.

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This is very early in the transmission of the text. This is not only found in Islamic sources in the

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Hadith, but also in Christian sources dating from around the same time period.

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The same fundamental story is told within Christian sources that you have within Islamic sources concerning this particular subject.

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And so, you have the caliphate producing an official version and sending it to the key

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Islamic cities. And so, this is functionally a controlled transmission of the text.

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And there's a huge difference between a free transmission and a controlled transmission of the text.

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And I have argued that, in reality, the free transmission of the text gives you a considerably higher confidence that you still possess the original readings than a controlled one, especially if there is evidence of the destruction of preceding texts in the revision process.

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And there is, both in Islamic and Christian sources. In the

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Islamic sources, ordered that other copies, other mushaf were to be burned. And the

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Christian sources soaked in, what was it, lye water or something along those lines? It was one of the sources.

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But in any case, you have in the documents this information about the destruction of preceding versions that are considered to not follow the official version that is now being put forward.

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This is a very important thing. It's very important because when Christians and Muslims talk, the vast majority of Muslims, the vast majority of Muslims, and I'm hoping,

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I'm asking, I'm going to be sending this with time index so I can skip past the first part, but I'm sending this to a number of my

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Muslim friends with whom I have had debates, to Adnan Rashid, to Yusuf Ismail, to Dr.

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Khadi, and to Shabir Ali. And it's Dr. Khadi and Shabir Ali who have made comments recently that have started all of this.

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We are constantly dealing with the reality that I know that Yusuf Ismail knows,

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I know that Shabir Ali knows, Dr. Khadi has now made this public statement in regards to these things, that there is a textual history to the

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Qur 'an, and that not all the manuscripts of the Qur 'an read identical to one another. This has been known for a very, very long time, but there's a difference between it being known by scholars and being known by the vast majority of Muslims.

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99 .9 % of the Muslims with whom I have ever had dialogue with did not know anything about the history of their text.

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They did not know that there are variations. In fact, they've read book after book after book that says that every single manuscript of the

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Qur 'an is identical to every other single manuscript. I've had Muslims look me in the eye and tell me that with absolute assurance what they're saying is true.

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I had absolute assurance what they're saying was false, but that's the problem, is there are tremendous numbers of books out there.

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And many speakers, popular speakers on YouTube and before then, that present the idea that there's just one

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Qur 'an, there's no variations whatsoever. And therefore, when they can pick up any

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English Bible and find some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that, well, there you go, that's the end of the conversation.

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Your text is corrupt, our text isn't. We win. That's just, that's the essence of what the conversation has looked like.

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And I have been saying for a long time, we're never going to get anywhere until there is an honest recognition that both of us have ancient texts and both of us have a textual history to our ancient texts.

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Now, the Christians are already open about that, except for King James Onlius and T .R.

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Onlius. So there are some groups of Christians that have the same mindset as the vast majority of Muslims, that there cannot be any variation.

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And Bart Ehrman, shockingly enough, because that's Bart Ehrman's view. If it's inspired, there'll be no variation.

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That's what Bart Ehrman says. That's what the T .R. Onlius say. That's what the King James Onlius say. And that's what the vast majority of Muslims say, is that if it's given by God, then

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God will somehow, in some miraculous fashion, strike any scribe dead who's about to make a mistake, basically.

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Or we'll just take them over and they'll write the right thing, or whatever. Now, Christian scholarship has never held that view.

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The early Christian fathers discussed variations in their manuscripts from the very beginning, from starting the second century.

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So that's never been the viewpoint of people who actually are studied.

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And as I said, there are Muslim scholars who know this. But right now, even

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Dr. Khadi has said that the ulema back home, in the

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Arabic world, not in the Western world, but in the Arabic world, just has ignored this area, has not dealt with this particular area.

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So what has happened? Well, what has happened is, over the past couple of weeks, last week

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I was made aware of an interview between Mohammed Hijab, whom

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I've been trying to arrange getting to meet him and arrange having a debate, man, with what's going on in travel and stuff like that,

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I really hope we haven't lost the opportunity of doing that. But my last few trips to London, I've been trying to arrange something like that, and I just keep running into stone walls.

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But anyway, Mohammed Hijab interviewed Yasir Khadi.

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Now, if you're new to the program or something like that, Yasir Khadi and I turned the

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Christian -Islamic discussion world upside down a couple years ago when we had a pair of dialogues on weeknights, one in a

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Christian church, one in the mosque, and it wasn't a formal debate. We were discussing all sorts of other issues.

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And so the first night I was asking Yasir Khadi questions, the second night he was asking me questions, he's explaining what it's like to be a

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Muslim in the Western world and things like that, and he's asking me questions like, we

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Muslims don't understand the trinity, explain it to us, why did a part of God have to die? And here

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I am in a mosque, getting to answer these questions, and it was great, but it got a lot of pushback, mainly just from my side, not from the

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Muslim side. But from our side, all sorts of folks, you're not supposed to have this kind of respectful conversation going on between Christians and Muslims, despite all the doors it opens.

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But anyways, so same Yasir Khadi, who is now the head of the

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Islamic Seminary of America in the Dallas area. He had been with the

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Maghrib Institute back in Memphis, and now he's in the

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Dallas area. And so Mohammad Hijab did a 90 -minute interview, and the first part of the interview was about things that Yasir Khadi experienced when he was studying in Medina, and some of the prejudice that he experienced coming from the

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United States, and not fitting into certain groups that were in control there, and things like that.

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It was very interesting. But then, Mohammad Hijab asked the question about the

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Aroof. Now, recently,

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I picked this up, this is by Fadl Saliman, this is

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Bridges' translation of the Ten Kiraat of the Noble Qur 'an. Kiraat, readings, the

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Aroof, are used. There are, if I, and I was going to grab one, and then

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I got, I ran into the Supreme Court thing and got distracted. But if you have, and I should have that,

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I know it's in here someplace. If you have the standard, oh, well, close enough to bite me, if you have the standard

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Qur 'an, and now, this is not the one

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I was looking for, the one that had the blue pages. But, if you get your standard

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Arabic Qur 'an, almost all of the United States are going to be printed in the exact same way.

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And I've mentioned that they are so consistent, that I was listening to a lecture by Yasir Khadi once, and he's memorized the

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Qur 'an, but everybody has, you know, your mind, it's like in that one debate where, you know,

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I've quoted John 1 -1 in Greek 10 ,000 times, and then you stumble over something that one time when a camera's on you.

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But he couldn't get the ayat out, and so in frustration, he said, it's surah, whichever surah it was, right -hand page at the top.

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Now, for us, that would be meaningless, because right -hand page at the top might have worked if everybody had the same old

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Schofield printing of the King James Version of the Bible or something like that. But it worked for them, because that's how consistent these printings are.

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Well, the problem is, this is what you'll get in the West, but this isn't what you'll get in India, and this isn't what you'll get in Pakistan, and this isn't what you will get in Indonesia.

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And there are different versions, they're not different translations, don't make that mistake, but they have differing versions, and one study recently of 36 different printings came up with 93 ,000 differences between these various printings.

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Now, the one standard one in the West, from 1924 in Cairo, when

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I talked to my Muslim friends and I asked them, what manuscripts were used in the construction of the

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Cairo text? Who were the scholars that examined the differences between the

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Mus 'haf? How did they decide textual variance? There's not a single

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Muslim in the world that knows. I don't know of any Muslims that do know, I don't know if that information is actually available.

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I don't know that they even used manuscripts. When the King James translators translated the King James, they didn't use manuscripts, they used printed editions.

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They used Beza 1598, then they used 1552 Sifanis, they used Erasmus, they used printed editions, they didn't use manuscripts.

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And given that the Cairo text was just simply due to the school system there asking for a standardized text, in all probability they didn't use manuscripts.

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And so, how did that become the inspired version? But it's not.

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If you can buy from Muslim sources entire books which are designed to give you the differing readings that are found in the printed editions of the

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Quran, obviously there's a textual history, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of knowledge as to what that textual history actually is.

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And some of us have spent a fair amount of time, I'm not ignorant, let's go over here,

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I'm not ignorant of what Muslims have been saying. My library is actually rather full.

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In fact, my library has more of this stuff than most of the Muslims I talk to, by a longshot. So here is the history of the

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Quranic text from revelation to compilation, al -Azami's work, yep, quite familiar with it, I've got the

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Sa 'ana Palimpsest, Hilali's work on the Sa 'ana

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Palimpsest, and other works on Sa 'ana there. We have, this actually came with a really cool, this is the

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Quran of Uthman, this is the one, the

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Russian printing of this particular one from 2004. Very very interesting.

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By the way, all these earlier ones are fragmentary, they're not the complete text of the Quran, all the earliest manuscripts.

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Here's the Topkapi Palace Quran, there's a very interesting chart in here with some of the variant readings between the major mushaf, between the major manuscripts, up toward the front, yeah right here, variant readings found there.

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And then of course the Crown Jewels, which you see in the background of the dividing line very often, maybe you didn't recognize that they were down there, but these two that were, that are normally just on top of Codex Sinaiticus, two museum quality reproductions of manuscript 328 from the

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British, in France, and what's it, 1625, 2165, sorry, 2165 from the

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British Library, some of the earliest manuscripts, earliest mushaf of the

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Quran. Again they are fragmentary, they are not complete. So the point is that we have done very due diligence in looking at the other side and the information that is there to try to verify whatever assertions it is that we are going to make.

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Now, with all of that, it's important to point out that the state of the textual study of the

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Quran is in its infancy in comparison to where we are with the

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New Testament. That's just a fact. Let me just, for my

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Muslim friends, let me just show you from my computer,

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I have this on my phone, I have this on my iPad, this is the New Testament textual screen that comes up when

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I, if I, I brought up Romans 5 -1. I did a sermon recently where I talked about the end of Romans, I went into Romans 5 -1, and I also did a program here on the

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Dividing Line where I talked about the difference between Ecommen, the indicative, and Ecommen, the subjunctive, at Romans 5 -1.

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And here's, you put in Romans 5 -1, and this is what comes up on your screen. Multiple textual commentaries, multiple critical editions of Greek text, and that's the

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Island 28th over here, UBS 5th down here. I can go into textual interlinears on the, can't do it here because of where I am, but textual, actually

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I can do that here, let me just show you again, there it is, there's textual interlinear for various Greek New Testament, Texas Receptus, Westcott, Hort, Byzantine, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Washingtonius doesn't contain it, that's why it's all,

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Alexanderus, I can compare manuscripts like this, there is absolutely, positively nothing, nothing at all like that, bring up Romans 5 -1 real quick on this one, too, there is absolutely positively nothing like this for the

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Quran. It does not exist anywhere on the planet, because the foundational work that is required to do this would involve a massive amount of, you would be producing a, and here's the, you can put

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Sinaiticus right next to Vaticanus, Washingtonius doesn't have Romans 5 -1, Alexanderus, and then the papyri over here, notice they're all linked together across the modules.

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I mean, it is astonishing the amount of information that we have as New Testament scholars to deal with the ancient text of the

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New Testament. It is a tremendous blessing, really is fantastic, and it's only getting better and better, and yes,

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I can then bring up the actual, I can go to Codex Vaticanus and I can bring up the actual page, and I can examine it, because this is a transcription of it,

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I can bring that up, I can do the same thing with Sinaiticus, Alexanderus, these are all available.

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So the point is, this has required decades and decades and decades of cooperation of Christian scholars from around the world in the production, for example, of a consistent catalog.

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You need to know, you need to have one designation for every manuscript, so that you can know which manuscripts we're talking about, because a lot of these, a lot of the

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Koranic manuscripts have multiple names, and so it's hard to, you know, which palimpsest are you talking about here?

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Well, I'm not sure. Is it that one? Is it? It's very, very confusing. There needs to be a catalog, there needs to be high -quality digital photography of all of these things, all that information needs to be made available to everybody, and then those manuscripts need to be collated.

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And we are way ahead on all of this, because there has always been, you understand, the

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Party of Christians, that this is a vitally important thing to be doing. Again, there are some Christian groups, we don't need to do any of that.

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All that's been an absolute waste of time. We have our TR, we have our King James, whatever it is, we don't need to worry about all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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And that's the attitude that Muslims have had all along. Why do

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I need all that? I've got this. This is all I need. When I debated Adnan, and I'm going to invite

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Adnan to watch this. Adnan, remember in London, what you said during our debate at one point?

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Remember, it was getting a little raucous, remember we had the guys down front that were doing the alaqbaars and all that kind of stuff, and I made a really good point, and they didn't say anything, so I said, hey, where's my takbir?

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And they were looking at me like, we're not supposed to do that. Anyway, but remember, Adnan, you said, hey, as long as we can get back to Uthman, that's good enough.

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No, it's not. That's getting back to the First Revision. That's not good enough.

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And so that's the point of what this is. So, there is a huge gap between us at this point.

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It's not that this could not be done for the Qur 'an. I'm concerned, to be honest with you,

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I've told the story before, I remember back in 2006, 2007, a

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Palimpsest manuscript came up for auction, I think it's Sotheby's, from the Qur 'an.

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It was purchased and never heard from again. Boof! Gone. Who knows where it went? Don't know.

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Don't know. There's reason for concern for that. There's really no reason to be concerned that there are any major biblical manuscripts that are just hiding out someplace and someone doesn't want anybody to see them.

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But the Sa 'ana manuscripts are extremely important. Are there any other Sa 'ana -type finds hiding in mosques someplace that people know about but don't want?

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But because there's so many variants, as there were in Sa 'ana, that people don't want to have that get out there?

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Don't know. It's possible. But there's a huge gap right now between us.

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In fact, let me illustrate one further aspect of that before I get into what Dr. Khadi said.

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We not only have that, but we have stuff like this.

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Let me maximize. Here is the CBGM online databases.

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And this is for a single variant in the book of Acts, chapter 8, verse 22, whether there is the little connective un, therefore.

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And here are the manuscripts that have been collated, relationships of manuscripts to one another.

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I can then click on these and I can bring up relationships between that manuscript and other manuscripts.

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I can bring up, for example, Optimal Substamata between P45 and manuscript 03.

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I mean, this is stuff anybody can do online right now. This is the level of information that we have available to us.

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It is astonishing what is there. All of this can be done for the

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Quran as well, but it would take a huge international effort. And I don't see a whole lot of interest, honestly, outside of maybe some

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Western Muslims to do this. But maybe we can get that started.

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There is the Corpus Chronicum project. Very important. I'd like to see it continuing, but I think most of the people involved with that are

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Western scholars, and there has been resistance from those on the other side. Here's what happened in the interview with Mohammad Jabb.

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Yasir Qadhi very honestly said when he went to Yale, he was asked a lot of questions about the transmission of the text of the

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Quran that he could not answer, that had not been a part of his training in the Arabic world, in Medina and places like that.

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And that's certainly been my experience in my conversations with Muslim apologists, people involved in doing dawah, in my experience, is they'll know a lot about why they don't accept the

38:27

New Testament. But they don't know much positively about the history of how they themselves got their own text.

38:35

The assumption being, the accepted assumption being, well, it's just been preserved by Allah. This is the promise, and we just simply accept that that's how it's come to us.

38:52

So basically, Yasir Qadhi and then Shabir Ali also put out a video where he's discussing some of these things, especially the qiraat, the variant readings.

39:04

There is a difference that we need to recognize. There is a difference between talking about printed editions and the manuscripts from which they eventually have to be derived.

39:16

Eventually, you have to explain, okay, the printed editions arose not from someone sitting there reciting it, but they were taken from manuscripts, in Arabic, mushaf.

39:30

They were taken from manuscripts. So what manuscripts were used? And do we know which manuscripts are better than other manuscripts?

39:35

And why are they better than other manuscripts? This is what's called textual criticism. This is what Christian scholars do all the time.

39:43

All the time. I preached yesterday at my church, and I preached from Colossians chapter 1, the preeminence of Christ, creator of all things.

39:55

Yes, we believe he's the creator of all things. And I went back, and my son -in -law and daughter and my grandkids live in the area now, go to the same church.

40:08

And so after church, we get to, we've been having dinner. It's been a very enjoyable time.

40:16

And so we're sitting there having some tacos last night. And my daughter goes, yeah, it was just a couple of minutes into the sermon,

40:26

I leaned over to Eric, and I said, he's just translating to Greek.

40:32

He doesn't have English up there, I can tell. And she was right. I was just translating, all I had was my

40:37

Nestle Island 28th edition, I was just live translating as we were going along. But she could tell, because she had been memorizing that passage, and I kept, even when

40:45

I'd reread it, it would come out a little bit differently, because that's how it is when you're translating.

40:52

And so at one point, in Colossians chapter 1, verse 14, there's a textual variant.

40:59

And in the middle of a sermon, where I am wanting to make an, I've got a point that I'm getting to. I still took 60 seconds, 90 seconds, to mention it, explain it, give the parallel passage from which the variant came,

41:15

Ephesians 1 .7. It's in my book on textual criticism, on the King James Only controversy. But I did.

41:22

I put that in my sermons so that my people are aware of these issues.

41:28

They need to be aware of these issues, because there are going to be people that are going to bring up... Actually, I spent a little bit longer, because I told a story about the guy in Salt Lake came up to me and asked if I used the bloodless

41:36

Bible, and it was based on that particular variant. Anyway, so we're used to discussing these things.

41:44

Muslims are not. And therefore, when someone like Yasir Qadhi starts talking about these variations,

41:52

Muhammad Hijab asked an extremely important question.

42:00

I thought about queuing it up, but you can go online, go to Yasir Qadhi's... Qadhi is spelled

42:05

Q -A -D -H -I, Yasir Qadhi's Q -A -D -H -I, Yasir Qadhi's YouTube channel has the interview on it.

42:14

I imagine Muhammad Hijab has it on his too, I don't know, but that's where I got the whole version.

42:22

Because, like I said, it was initially sent to me as an edited three -minute video.

42:31

And people started responding to it immediately. You notice I didn't. You know why? Because I got in touch with Yasir Qadhi.

42:37

And I wanted to make sure, because remember, years ago, when a mutilated version of something

42:43

Yasir Qadhi had said started passing around, they were using it to try to get him fired from his work and stuff like that? I wanted to make sure, does this misrepresent you or something like that?

42:53

So Saturday morning, I listened to the entire thing while I was writing, so I could make sure that I have the entire context and stuff like that.

43:03

So Muhammad Hijab asks Yasir Qadhi, if you were handed a blank mushaf, a blank manuscript, what would you write on it?

43:21

And what he's asking is, of the various aruf, of the various versions, because some are popular in Pakistan, some are popular in India, some are popular in Indonesia, there's the one popular in the

43:36

West, what would you write? Now, I'm really hoping that Yasir will watch all of this.

43:49

I know it takes time, but I'm hoping that he will. As soon as I heard him say that, first of all,

43:58

I both listened to it and I watched Yasir Qadhi's reaction, and I could not help but immediately think of how many times

44:09

I've had King James -only advocates ask me, okay, what is the perfect English Bible at this point?

44:25

Because in their mindset, even though the English language didn't exist when the Bible was revealed, there has to be a specific...

44:35

and there can't be anything else. If there's any variation whatsoever, well then,

44:40

I just can't believe any of it. That's the mindset in the King James -only -ist, and I would argue it's the mindset in the

44:47

TR -only -ist as well, if you really push them. TR -only -ist, for our Muslim friends and people who believe the text is receptive, the underlying

44:53

Greek text that was translated into King James, it's one step away from King James -only -ism. That mindset was what was behind the question being asked of Yasir Qadhi.

45:06

Because Yasir Qadhi's response is, it's just not that simple. And Muhammad -i -Shabaab is, but it needs to be that simple!

45:14

There needs to be a yes and no. And Qadhi's... there can't be! Because Yasir understands the history of transmission.

45:24

He understands that you have multiple lines here. In fact, from my perspective, I think the

45:29

Aroof would go back to early variants, maybe some from...

45:39

well, maybe some of these have to do with the way that things were memorized by a particular memorizer, that went to a particular area, and so that becomes the popular reading there.

45:50

But obviously, Yasir Qadhi, Ibn Masud, there's huge evidence in the

45:59

Islamic sources that Ibn Masud's readings, in many places, varied.

46:05

The early Tafsir literature records these, records places where Ibn Masud's readings differed from Uthman's.

46:13

And logically, that would be a first place to look for the original source of the different Kiraat and the rise of the

46:24

Aroof, applying standard textual critical thinking and methodology.

46:34

Even though there is a difference with how the Quran is transmitted, there's still that reality that it's a document that has to go through human hands, and it has a history to it.

46:45

And it was a shorter history than the New Testament, so I do not expect there to be nearly as many differences, especially meaningful differences.

46:53

There can't be. There cannot be. You know why there cannot be? Because the Quran is only about half the size of the

46:59

New Testament, and it was only transmitted for approximately 900 years before it goes into print.

47:12

And printing doesn't stop development, but it massively slows it down.

47:18

Whereas the New Testament has to go through a millennium and a half before 1450 years — 1350 years — before printing takes place.

47:30

And that's not even talking about the original language that was in Latin before it was first printed by Gutenberg. Anyway, so there are differences.

47:38

There are fundamental differences time -wise, the size of the text, the kind of scribal errors that would be made in looking at an

47:49

Arabic text versus a Greek text, for example. These are all issues that come up.

47:55

And then, of course, the role of revision, because that free versus controlled transmission issue is massive when it comes to textual critical issues and things like that.

48:10

So Muhammad Hijab wants a

48:17

Salafi answer, and I have people who come up to me all the time who want the

48:24

Christian corresponding to a Salafi answer. They want an absolute — there's no questions,

48:32

I'm going to ignore the textual history — they're willing to trade truth for certainty.

48:40

There are Christians who are willing to do that, there are Muslims who are willing to do that. And trading truth for certainty is a pretty popular thing, it really is.

48:49

And so Muhammad Hijab is going, and Yasir Qadhi won't do it. He did, however, eventually — what he said was, this is a very advanced topic, you need to be talking with people who can read

49:00

Arabic, and he's saying this is not something you talk about amongst people without preparing them.

49:06

And I've said similar things, I mean, I've been spending decades of my life trying to educate

49:13

Christians about the history of their own text so that we can talk about these things. Because you've got the

49:20

Bart Ehrmans running around making their arguments, and people need to know how to respond to them.

49:26

But I get what Yasir Qadhi was saying, but he did say very quickly to Muhammad Hijab that what he would write down would be a mixture of the various aruf.

49:44

Now, what that tells me is that what he's saying is, well, we have to look at the readings and do what?

49:56

Apply standard principles of textual criticism, which is what Christian scholars do every single day.

50:05

Every single day. But this is now an explosion of shock amongst

50:14

Muslims, that a conservative, believing

50:19

Muslim scholar would say you need to apply textual critical principles.

50:26

This isn't an explosion or shock for me, but it is for most

50:32

Muslims. And certainly, certainly Yasir Qadhi needs to understand that when

50:40

Christians talk to Muslims, the Muslim understanding of their own text is not the same as his understanding of their own text as to its history and its transmission over time.

50:56

Now, why do I hope? I really, really, really, really hope that what this is going to do, what

51:04

I hope it doesn't result in is some massive pushback that silences

51:13

Western Muslims from honestly dealing with the history of their text.

51:19

That would be horrific. That would be the wrong direction to go. Now, my hope is that this will open doors for further discussion, because what have

51:31

I been saying? Out there by himself, the strange fellow who, before he debated

51:40

Shabir Ali for the first time, listened to hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of Shabir Ali lectures while riding a bike to understand, get hold of the resources, try to accurately represent what the other side has to say, use equal scales.

52:04

I'm not going to make an argument against the Quran that would then be equally opposite against the

52:10

New Testament. You can't do that. And that's what has been done in the vast majority of the debates that I've done with Muslims.

52:17

They've used one standard for the Quran and a different standard for the New Testament. My hope is that with the comments that are being made by people like Aser Qadhi, that there would be a recognition that we've been right all along.

52:29

You need to use the same standards. You need to use the same standards. And hence, my hope would be that people like Muhammad Hijab would hear that and go, alright, we've got some catch -up to do.

52:46

Let's learn the basic principles of textual critical study. We want to know.

52:56

We want to get as close to what was originally given by Muhammad as possible.

53:02

Right? I mean, that's the goal of New Testament textual criticism. I want to know what the apostles wrote, not what somebody 50 years, 100 years, 300 years, 500 years later thought should have written.

53:16

So we need to do that. And we need to get hold of resources like this and get hold of resources like the top copy manuscript.

53:31

And we need to start pushing for a critical edition of the Quran. I have said over and over and over and over again when you're reading this

53:42

Quran, there are no footnotes. There are no footnotes. There are no references to where the readings differ.

53:53

There are no references to where the consonantal text differs, or the vowel pointing, or the printings where the

54:04

Mus 'haf have different readings. There's nothing like that. That's what you need. We have that.

54:10

We have that. Any time you grab the Nessie Olin edition of the Greek New Testament, there it is, ding ding ding ding, and see the notes at the bottom of the page?

54:18

There they are. We have that. You don't. And I've been pointing this out since about 2006 and saying, this is a major difference between us and for us to really meaningfully discuss, because we have to meaningfully discuss.

54:37

This is not a subject that you can just simply leave off to the side. Your text talks about our books.

54:46

Historically, your text comes after our book, half a millennium afterwards, and your text says to the

54:56

Alangil, the people of the gospel, that we are to determine, we are to make decisions based upon what's in the gospel.

55:06

Well, that means we need to know what's in our gospel, but it also seems to mean that at the time that was written, the gospel still existed.

55:16

And so, your text refers to our text, and says that our text was nuts all, it was sent down.

55:24

So, we can't avoid this conversation. It may be difficult, it may be hard, it may take a while, but you can't avoid this conversation.

55:35

And here's my hope. Once you have recognized the textual history of the

55:43

Quran, and then the textual history of the New Testament, I'm going to present to you a strong argument that the free transmission of the text of the

55:54

New Testament gives you a much higher reliability to the resultant text that I have right here, than the controlled text gives you to this right here.

56:06

It does. And I want to be able to explain that to you. And to be honest with you, in the vast majority of the debates,

56:12

I get to that point and my Muslim friends stop hearing me, because they just simply don't believe there's a textual history to look at in the first place.

56:21

But once your own leaders are telling you that, then maybe finally we can get that next step taken, and now we can start talking here, and we can start talking about intertextuality, that is the fact that the

56:36

Quran makes reference to stories in both the Old and New Testaments, the Tanakh and the

56:41

New Testament, and we can talk about what their sources were. And then we can start having serious discussion about what the author of the

56:52

Quran did and did not know about the sources that he was utilizing. Because if you are using sources to reconstruct the text of the

57:04

Quran, which is what you're talking about doing, you may not, right now you just may be going, no, no, no,

57:09

I will not, no, I can't go there. But that's what textual criticism is. It's utilizing the sources that have been given to you to reconstruct the text.

57:23

Then you have to start asking questions about, given that yours is the third of three,

57:30

I'm not sure that's the best phrase I want to use, because you know how that's used, different context, you've got the

57:37

Old Testament, you've got the Hebrew Scriptures, made reference to in the Quran, the story of Lot, for example, told four or five different times in the

57:47

Quran. What sources did the author use to come up with the story of Lot? You have

57:54

New Testament, almost no, there's really no direct reference. But you have stories about Jesus, right there in the text of the

58:02

Quran. And then you have Surah 5, which connects all of them together. Says God sent down the

58:08

Torah to Moses, sent down the Injeel to Jesus, and now you've got the Quran to Muhammad, they're connected together, now that you recognize they all have a history, a textual history behind them, now we can start talking about the relationship they have to one another.

58:25

Because when we boil it all down, what all of us are having to talk about is the fact that you prioritize the

58:34

Quran, even though it's only half, it's much smaller than the

58:40

New Testament. You prioritize that over the other two, and why?

58:49

Functionally, for the vast majority of the Muslims in the world, it's because of a book called Itzar al -Haqq.

58:55

Itzar al -Haqq, 1864. A book that determined the very essence of Dawah, to our very day.

59:08

And that is, there is a... I think Yasir Qadhi is aware of this, down through the history of Islam, there were two competing pathways.

59:17

There were those who believed that the text of the Christian scriptures, or the

59:24

Torah and the Injeel, had not been corrupted, but had been misinterpreted. And then those who believed that the actual wording had been corrupted.

59:33

After Itzar al -Haqq, 99 % of Muslims above, above 99%, believe that the text of the

59:41

Bible has been corrupted. Now Itzar al -Haqq was a horrific work of scholarship.

59:49

Horrifically biased, filled with errors. It's been refuted repeatedly, but it's still one of the most popular books out there.

59:56

And it has determined the very nature of Dawah. You start doing serious compilation of the manuscripts and textual criticism of the

01:00:04

Qur 'an, and you will not be able to continue to utilize the argumentation that has been popularized by Itzar al -Haqq.

01:00:12

And that's going to change everything. We might actually be able to start having meaningful conversation based upon equal scales.

01:00:22

Upon equal scales. So that's my hope, because I fully understand, and may

01:00:31

I say something here? If you're more of the

01:00:36

Salafi bent, maybe even more toward the Maqdalis side of things, before you grab your pitchfork and your torches and head for Yasir Qadhi's house, or his office, you need to understand that he's simply telling you the truth.

01:01:07

He's simply telling you the truth. If you know, if you just know what's in here.

01:01:17

If you just know about just the ten kirat, just here,

01:01:22

I mean, there's more to it than that. I think more important than this, you've got to be looking, you see, start with the manuscripts.

01:01:31

Then you can start talking about other sources and printed compilations and all the different versions that are available in the world today and all the rest of that stuff, but you've got to start here.

01:01:40

If you just have this, and you want to give an honest, al -haq, truthful answer to Muhammad Hijab's question, what do you write on the blank

01:01:59

Mus 'haf? Then you have to, if this is all you have, you have to apply principles of textual criticism to this.

01:02:09

You have to, if you have a variant, let me give you an example, and I would love to have the time to do this, maybe somebody will, but I can guarantee you that we will be able to find examples of what's called homay tel yatan in the variant readings of the

01:02:34

Quran. Homay tel yatan, I know enough Arabic to know that there are particular grammatical terminations in the various verbal forms, or the various noun forms as well for that matter, that are common in the language.

01:02:50

So what happens is, you're reading through the text, and you finish writing a particular verb that has a common ending.

01:03:05

In English, we'd have things like an ing, hitting, running, boating, etc.,

01:03:13

etc., ing, among substantives, t -i -o -n, es, whatever.

01:03:20

Common grammatical ending. You write it down, you look back at what you're copying, and three words down the line is another word that ends with the same ending.

01:03:34

Homay tel yatan, similar ending. Your eye catches the second, rather than the one that you were at, you continue copying from there, as a result, you accidentally delete the two words that are in between.

01:03:48

You didn't do it intentionally, it's a standard scribal practice. We're humans.

01:03:56

Our eyes are not photocopiers. I can guarantee you we can find homay tel yatan in the various qiraat of the

01:04:08

Qur 'an. Betcha. There won't be as many as in the

01:04:13

New Testament, because it was formally, it was controlled transmission, and because it's just much shorter.

01:04:20

You just don't have as many words to be able to do it. Free transmission will always produce more textual variance, because it's a free transmission.

01:04:31

But it still gives you a higher certainty as to the final product than any controlled transmission ever can.

01:04:39

I want to see, I want to see, I would pray for the day when

01:04:48

I would have the freedom to present a paper to a group of Muslim scholars as to why controlled transmission and free transmission must be differentiated from one another, and what that means for the

01:05:04

Qur 'an and the New Testament. That would be awesome. That would be wonderful. Not because, oh, well pat yourself on the back, no, because I have been saying for years, we've been debating the same subjects over and over again, and we keep coming up against the same walls, and the reason for this is no even scales.

01:05:28

No even scales. You're using one standard for the Qur 'an, another standard for the New Testament. That was my first objection to Shabir Ali in 2005, when

01:05:39

I first started listening to him. When I first started listening to him, when I was first contacted by the guys at Biola about doing a debate with him, which took place in May of 2006, one of the first things

01:05:51

I heard was, wait a minute, he's using one standard for the Qur 'an and another standard for the New Testament. And that has been the ubiquitous constant reality all along.

01:06:05

Here is a door that is open that can change that, that can get us on the road to getting farther down the road, because I am convinced of the truthfulness of what

01:06:20

I believe. And because I'm convinced of that, then I can be wide open about my sources, and I can dive deep into your sources, because I have absolute confidence.

01:06:35

But because I am committed to speaking the truth to you in love, the two have to go together.

01:06:42

I can't use the excuse of love to be untruthful to you. And I'm not being loving toward you if I'm being untruthful to you.

01:06:49

So I have to use both. So I have to use the same example. I have heard people make arguments about the

01:06:58

Qur 'an that I will not use because I cannot verify it or because it requires me to use a different standard than what

01:07:07

I use in the defense of the New Testament. And guys, again, I'm speaking to my Muslim friends. I don't just defend the text of the

01:07:15

New Testament against Muslims. I defend the text of the New Testament against a lot of different perspectives that would say that it has been corrupted or changed over time.

01:07:26

And in fact, I defend the critical analysis of the text against the people on the other side that say, as Christians, we shouldn't do any of that anyways.

01:07:38

So I'm trying to be consistent. I'm trying to be consistent in how I deal with your claims, how

01:07:46

I deal with my responses, with my own beliefs. And this is what drives all of you crazy.

01:07:53

You know I care about you. When I get to sit down with you guys and have lunch and have dinner, you know

01:08:03

I really do care about you guys. And so, this is a great opportunity to make some strides and to get the word out and maybe you guys can put some pressure, because you know, trust me, stuff like a critical edition of the

01:08:28

Greek New Testament doesn't just pop into existence. There has to be funding. There has to be funding.

01:08:37

And you need a critical edition of the Quran. A real one. Not one made up by people just to try to, well, this is what

01:08:48

Uthman had and that's good enough for us. No, you, I want you guys to be able to look me in the eye and say, we want to know what

01:08:57

Muhammad said. Not what somebody later said. I want to know too.

01:09:04

I want to know too. Because that's the, once we're there, now we can ask the question, alright, now that we know what he said, how does that compare with what came before him, which he said he was consistent with?

01:09:23

And right now, all I get is, well, we reject what your text says because it's been changed. But if you're not having to do textual criticism, recognizing you should have been doing it all along, you can't just turn around and say that.

01:09:36

Because I can say, well, you're having to do textual criticism too, so what? Now we can actually start talking about the substance of what our books actually say.

01:09:46

This is big. This is important. And if you are a person absolutely dedicated to truth, this should not be something that you are going to in any way resist.

01:09:58

So you Salafi that are mad at Yasir Qadhi, he was telling the truth.

01:10:05

He was simply telling the truth. Once you know this, and then you ask the question, okay, what's the final text?

01:10:15

You have to go, it's going to depend upon what we're looking at and what sources we're using.

01:10:23

That's the reality. That's called being truthful. That's where we are.

01:10:30

That's where we are. So there are, there are articles appearing, videos being put out and stuff about what

01:10:43

Yasir Qadhi said, which Shabir Ali has said on a brief thing that he put out just recently.

01:10:51

Again, Muslims in the past did know these things, but I have said many times, many, many

01:11:00

Christians have no history, no idea of the history of their own text. It's worse.

01:11:07

It's worse. Let's just be honest. I think that's what Yasir Qadhi was saying. It's worse even amongst the ulama in Medina as to what the history of the

01:11:16

Quran is. It really is. So it's time to move past that.

01:11:22

It's time to move past that. It's time to actually deal with these issues and I'm looking forward to it.

01:11:30

I really, really hope it takes place. I really, really do. So there are some thoughts. I hope that's useful to you and I look forward for the conversation to continue.

01:11:43

Like I said, tomorrow on the program, we will be looking at the continued collapse of Western culture and the moral fiber, civilizational constructs of the

01:12:04

United States of America. And it's because we have abandoned the foundation that gave us strength, which was the

01:12:13

Judeo -Christian worldview. So, more on that in the program tomorrow.