Popeyesays
Well-Known Member
The recision of Uthman was in the final years of his caliphate.Ibrahim Al-Amin said:
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One of Uthman's actions, controversial at the time, is now the act for which he is remembered. He headed a committee that established the basic text of the Qur'an. Various Muslim centers, like Kufa and Damascus, had begun to develop their own traditions for reciting and writing down the Qur'an. Uthman feared that the nascent Islamic empire would fall apart in religious controversy if it did not have a sacred text recognized by everyone. Sometime during the end of his reign, the committee produced a text. Uthman had it copied and sent copies to each of the Muslim cities and garrison towns, commanding that variant versions of the Qur'an be destroyed, and only his version used. Many devout believers believed that his actions were high-handed and accused Uthman of tampering with the sacred book.
(Note that John Wansbrough and some Western historians believe that the Qur'an was completed later than Uthman's time; theirs is a minority opinion. See the article on the Qur'an.)"
That there was need of a standard text can hardly be denied, yet many believe that the standard text left out as many as 345 verses of the Qur'an as it was known by many. The fact is that a pre-recision Qur'an was actually discovered in an old mosque in Yemen in which there are many discrepancies between the Uthman recision and the older document.
From http://www.muslims.ws/win/quran/third_and_final_compilation.htm: "Though there was difference of language but there was no change in the real meaning of Quran. In Bokhari Muslim and Mishkat Hazrat Ibne Shahab a famous follower of the companion of Prophet narrates that I have heard this news that all these seven languages were one in the religion and commandments. There was no difference regarding lawful and unlawful things among all. Some time temporary change from one word to another word giving same meaning was allowed to make the recitation easy. Allama Qastalani says that every one was not allowed freely to exchange the word from another word. It depended upon the hearing from the Prophet. It was a temporary phaze to make the recitation easy but when facility for scribing and learning Quran by heart became available now there was no excuse then the exchange y of words were disallowed. During the period of Hazrat Uthman consensus of the companions was arrived on that recitation which was adopted by the Prophet in the last recitation in the month of Ramazan, then leave for changing words was stopped.
Most of the learned men opine that one recitation was finalized during the life time of the Prophet after rehearsing Quran from Hazrat Jibraeel for the second time in the same month of Ramazan in which the Prophet recited Quran with Jibraeel two times. Some persons say that one recitation was decided during the period of Hazrat Uthman. However it is proved by many traditions of the Prophet and sayings of research scholars that recitation of Quran according to a language other than the language of Quraish was only a temporary leave due to some hardships, condition and some necessary reasons."
It is an article of faith under modern doctrine of Islam that the recision is the pure and accurate text, indeed. Butg to an outsider there is reason to wonder. The fragments were discovered in 1979 and examined and photocopied by European scholars.
"Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries -- they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.
The mainly secular effort to reinterpret the Koran -- in part based on textual evidence such as that provided by the Yemeni fragments -- is disturbing and offensive to many Muslims, just as attempts to reinterpret the Bible and the life of Jesus are disturbing and offensive to many conservative Christians. Nevertheless, there are scholars, Muslims among them, who feel that such an effort, which amounts essentially to placing the Koran in history, will provide fuel for an Islamic revival of sorts -- a reappropriation of tradition, a going forward by looking back. Thus far confined to scholarly argument, this sort of thinking can be nonetheless very powerful and -- as the histories of the Renaissance and the Reformation demonstrate -- can lead to major social change. The Koran, after all, is currently the world's most ideologically influential text." http://www.derafsh-kaviyani.com/english/quran1.html
The efforts of the Muslim world to adapt to consideration of the Qur'an as literary and historical may cause some extreme distress, but I think in the long run dealing with the issue constructively will be of great benefit to Islam and the rest of the world.
Regards,
Scott
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