Has the Qur'an been reliably preserved? (2021-02-19) ​

0:00:01 Has the Quran been reliably transmitted ? The answer to that question will depend on whom you ask.
0:00:08 If you ask Christian missionaries and apologists they'll say: NO , the Quran has not been reliably 0:00:15 transmitted. But i want to ask a different group of people, the leading Western Experts on the Quran . 0:00:22 These are not muslims , these are professors at Western Universities , and i want to get their view 0:00:28 on this subject . And to get that answer , i'll turn to "The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'ān"
0:00:35 this is published by Cambridge University Press . It's edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe,
0:00:41 herself a scholar, and she has brought together an international team of scholars 0:00:48 to talk about this subject and others as well , they discuss the formation of the Quranic text .
0:00:55 There's a description and analysis of the contents , transmission and dissemination , interpretations and 0:01:01 intellectual traditions and contemporary readings . In all there are 14 chapters by the West's top 0:01:09 scholars. I think they're all non-muslim maybe one or two judging by their names 0:01:15 might be muslim but i'm not sure about that. Now this is definitely an academic text , it's written 0:01:20 by scholars for students of the subject and i want to read from a chapter by a very distinguished 0:01:29 professor of the Quran from the University of Berlin : Angelika Neuwirth , she's a name that's 0:01:35 very well known to students of the Quran in the West . And she discusses this subject 0:01:41 about the reliability of the text and also she offers her comments on the traditional 0:01:50 story that muslims say about the origins of the Quran , about Uthman and so on . Is that something 0:01:55 we can take seriously anymore or do we have to jettison that traditional muslim narrative 0:02:01 about the reception and the origin of the Quran . Now, iI'm going to read a couple of paragraphs 0:02:08 from this essay of hers: "Structural linguistic and literary features" is the chapter.
0:02:15 It's not very user-friendly , i'll admit that, but i'll try and
0:02:19 make some comments hopefully clarify what she's saying . I had to read it several times myself just 0:02:24 to get the sense of what she's saying , but her conclusions are really important of course 0:02:29 because these are experts , they're not christian missionaries with an axe to grind , to do down 0:02:36 muslims and do down Islam and destroy the Quran basically , the credibility of the Quran in the eyes 0:02:42 of people . So what do the top scholars say? on page 100 Angelika Neuwirth writes: "The presentation 0:02:51 of Quranic development in this chapter presupposes the reliability of the basic data of traditional 0:02:59 accounts about the emergence of the Quran , assuming the transmitted Quranic text to be the genuine 0:03:05 collection of the communications of the prophet as pronounced during his activities at Mecca 0:03:12 about 610 to 22 CE and again at Medina until his death at 632 CE . it is true that the earlier 0:03:22 consensus of scholarly opinion on the origins of islam has since the publication of John Wansbrough's 0:03:30 "Quranic Studies" (this is in 1977 by the way) and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook's "Hagarism" 0:03:37 (also in 1977) this consensus has been shattered (she says)
0:03:44 and that various attempts at a new reconstruction of those origins have been put forward .
0:03:52 as a whole however , the theories of the so-called skeptic or revisionist scholars who 0:04:00 arguing historically make a radical break with the transmitted picture of islamic origins 0:04:07 shifting them in both time and place from the 7th to the 8th or 9th century and from the Arabian 0:04:14 peninsula to the fertile crescent have by now been discarded . so just to pause there , she's 0:04:22 saying that the radical attacks in the 1970s and people like Patricia Crone , Michael Cook , John 0:04:28 Wansbrough which really criticized the traditional muslims narrative of the origins of the Quran , 0:04:36 this radical revisionist attack has basically been abandoned by scholars , it's been looked at ,
0:04:42 been analyzed , assessed and it's been found wanting , so it's now been discarded . these radical 0:04:50 theories peddled by certain well-known shall we say missionaries like
0:04:55 i'll mention one name : J. Smith . these have been discarded now by serious scholars .
0:05:02 and then she says : though many of their critical observations remain challenging and still call for 0:05:07 investigation . so they raise interesting questions but their basic theory of rejecting the
0:05:15 traditional account of the origins of the Quran has been discarded (in other words they rejected it) .
0:05:22 then she goes on : new findings of the Quranic text fragments because (just to pause again) there 0:05:29 have been so many earlier and earlier manuscript fragments or whole manuscripts of the Quran have 0:05:36 been found over the recent years , we have a wealth of manuscript evidence now that goes back 0:05:42 within the first century of the time of the prophet and this makes a big difference . she says :
0:05:48 new findings of Quranic text fragments moreover can be reduced to a firm rather than calling to 0:05:54 question the traditional picture of the Quran as an early fixed text composed of the surahs 0:06:01 we have . so she's saying all these manuscripts confirm the traditional account that the Quran was 0:06:08 fixed in the form we know it very very early on and we now know this because we have the evidence ,
0:06:15 we have empirical evidence , hard facts , the actual manuscripts themselves which prove this (she says).
0:06:23 Nor have scholars trying to deconstruct that image through linguistic arguments (so okay they now turn 0:06:29 to other arguments "the radicals" using clever linguistic arguments), nor have scholars trying 0:06:36 to deconstruct that image through linguistic arguments succeeded in seriously discrediting 0:06:42 the genuineness of the Quran as we now know it. So she's saying that even these attacks have failed 0:06:50 and the genuineness of the Quran that we now have it has been vindicated (to put it in my own words).
0:06:56 Now , she refers to the work of Christoph Luxenberg who views the Quran as an 0:07:02 originally Syriac Arabic melange , later adapted to the rules of classical Arabic .
0:07:08 and Günter Lüling who reads the Quran as a collection of hymns composed in a Christian 0:07:15 (believe it or not) Arabic dialect and later revised to fit the grammatical rules 0:07:20 newly established in the 8th and 9th centuries (so these are some of the crazy ideas that have been 0:07:28 weighed and found wanting and dismissed). Whereas Lüling's reference to the earlier hypotheses of 0:07:35 Karl Vollers, who had identified the original language of the Quran as broadly dialectical 0:07:41 points to a yet unresolved problem, Luxenberg's assumption of a Syriac-Arabic linguistic melange 0:07:49 as the original language of the Quran lacks a methodologically sound basis. (This is a 0:07:55 scholarly way of saying 'it's crap' I mean it just has no basis, there's no evidence for it , it's just 0:08:01 hypothesis and speculation). She continues (to conclude): The alternative 0:08:08 visions about the genesis of the Quran presented by Wansbrough , Cook and Lüling and luxenberg
0:08:16 are not only mutually exclusive (in other words, they all contradict each other) .
0:08:21 but rely on textual observations that are too selective to be compatible with a comprehensive 0:08:28 Quranic textual evidence that can be drawn only from a systematically microstructural reading .
0:08:36 so just to put that into a simpler english , she's saying that the alternative is the revisionist 0:08:42 scholars about the origins of the Quran , from Wansbrough , Crone , Cook , Lüling , Luxenberg .not 0:08:48 only do they contradict each other so they can't all be true any one of them in theory could be 0:08:52 true but they rely on textual observations that are too selective, in other words they don't 0:08:58 use a comprehensive wide basis of evidence , they have very selective and they pick on little things 0:09:06 and make big theories , they're not looking at a comprehensive as she says Quranic textual 0:09:11 evidence , they're not looking at all the evidence. END QUOTE So that's the passage there i just 0:09:17 read in pretty dense academic language . But the conclusion i draw on this 0:09:25 top expert who's not a muslim at the University of Berlin, expert on the Quran is that the traditional 0:09:33 muslim story of the genesis of the Quran , in other words it was given to Muhammad during 0:09:39 his own lifetime codified into one single text if you like just after by Uthman (we all 0:09:48 know the story) , this has not been successfully challenged by radical and skeptical scholars ,
0:09:56 these radical skeptical scholars are now pretty much not accepted as having anything 0:10:03 valid and to say any longer, their theories are discarded. Although some of the questions 0:10:08 she says that they raise are still of interest, so there is that. But she herself
0:10:14 says the beginning of this passage i read that she relies, she assumes the genuineness 0:10:21 of the Quranic text that we have today being the same text that goes back to Muhammad. So that's 0:10:26 her working hypothesis - it's not been successfully challenged by radical skeptic scholars. So there we 0:10:33 have it, we have two very different views, we have the views of Christian missionaries 0:10:38 who say we don't have a reliable text and we have the views of the experts , the scholars , the 0:10:43 people whose who are professors in this subject who say the opposite. So i think that 0:10:52 i just find that very very interesting . this book is worth getting actually  ,
0:10:56 against a scholarly text, it's a very advanced text but it provides you with some real
0:11:01 information about actual scholarly research rather than the perhaps the propaganda that 0:11:07 you'll come across from Christian websites and missionaries . Until next time