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- Mar 3, 2006
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Koran Origins by Ibn Warraq
Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader of the Koran at every turn.
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"..The orthodox position is motivated by dogmatic factors; it cannot be supported by the historical evidence.... 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 the 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'" (As-Suyuti, Itqan, part 3, page 72).
A'isha, 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 such as Ibn Masud, Uba ibn Ka'b, 'Ali, Abu Bakr, al-Aswad, and others (Jeffery, chapter 6, has listed fifteen primary codices, and a large number of secondary ones).
As Islam spread, we eventually had what became known as the metropolitan codices in the centers of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa, and Basra.
As we saw earlier, 'Uthman tried to bring order to this chaotic situation by canonizing the Medinan Codex,..."
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Koran Origins by Ibn Warraq
Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader of the Koran at every turn.
www.sullivan-county.com
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