"....While modern Muslims may be committed to an Impossibly conservative position, Muslim scholars of the early years of Islam were far more flexible, Realizing that parts of the Koran were Lost, Perverted, and that there were many Thousand variants which made it impossible to talk of Koran.
For example, As-Suyuti (died 1505), one of the most famous and revered of the commentators of the Koran, quotes Ibn Umar al Khattab as saying:
"Let No one of you say that he has acquired the entire Quran, for how does he know that it is all. Much of the Quran has been Lost, thus let him say, "I have acquired of it what is available" -Suyuti, Itqan, part 3, page 72).
Aisha the favorite wife of the Prophet, says, also according to a tradition recounted by as-Suynti,
"During the time of the Prophet, the chapter of the Parties used to be Two Hundred verses when read. When Uthman edited the copies of the Quran, only the current (verses) were recorded" (73).
As-Suyuti also tells this story about Uba ibn Ka'b, one of the great companions of Muhammad:
"This famous companion asked one of the Muslims,
"How many verses in the chapter of the Parties?" He said,
"Seventy-three verses." He (Uba) told him, "It used to be almost equal to the chapter of the Cow (about 286 verses) and included the verse of the stoning". The man asked, "What is the verse of the Stoning?" He (Uba) said, "If an old man or woman committed adultery, stone them to death."
As noted earlier, since there was No single document collecting all the revelations, after Muhammad's death in 632 C.E., many of his followers tried to gather all the known revelations and write them down in codex form.
Soon we had the codices of several scholars....."
".....The problem was aggravated by the fact that the consonantal text was unpointed, that is to say, the dots that distinguish, for example, a "b" from a "t" or a "th" were missing. Several other letters (f and q; j, h, and kh; s and d; r and z; s and sh; d and dh, t and z) were indistinguishable.
In other words, the Koran was written in a scripta defectiva.
As a result, a great many variant readings were possible according to the way the text was pointed (had the dots added).
Vowels presented an even Worse problem. Originally, the Arabs had no signs for the short vowels: the Arab script is consonantal. ....using different vowels, of course, rendered different readings. The scripta plena, which allowed a fully voweled and pointed text, was not perfected until the late 9th century....
The problems posed by the scripta defectiva inevitably led to the growth of different centers with their own variant traditions of how the texts should be pointed or vowelized. Despite Uthman's order to destroy all texts other than his own, it is evident that the Older codices survived...."
