Challenges
of
Change

You know,

if so many amazing patterns of 19 appear in the Qur'an,

as described in Welcome Wonders

why was it seen as so vitally important that everything else had to be discarded

because some didn't

The problem

was not so much that there were points where the patterns didn't apply,

considering that so much did

The problem

was that some outlier patterns

also match perfectly but to a slightly different text.

Now from the time of its revelation,

the words of the Qur'an were seen as unchangeable

and as such they were learned and repeated.

This was the language of God,

and you did not make up or guess at the words,

not if you were a believer.

So when the Messenger died

and the revelation was over

the words were gathered into an agreed complete Reading,

and written as the known text.

That text was seen as perfect and unchangeable,

and it was understood that having been revealed by God

it would also have been protected by God

in its recollection and transmission.

A whole world of scholarship was devoted to the text

and its acceptable variations,

and a whole civilisation was built on the understanding

that the Qur'an is now, and always was perfect.

There are no mistakes.

It is what God wanted it to be.

The agreement of the muslim world on that point is extraordinary,

across all those warring factions and intellectual divides,

centuries of scholarship around the globe

have had that belief at the foundation of their studies and the texts they write.

And indeed, scholars do like to work with texts

but to understand the words of the Qur'an

it is also important that we try to keep in mind

how the first muslims related to it,

the ones to whom God was speaking directly,

to imagine their experience.

Nowadays it's hard to imagine

what it might be like

to live in a community that doesn’t read and write.

But the early muslims were mostly illiterate,

and Al-Baladhuri reports that out of the many thousands in the entire tribe of Quraysh

there were no more than 17 people who could read and write at the time of the early revelations.

Remember

Muhammad himself could not read,

though he quickly saw how it would help the community

with their learning of Qur'an.

Societies can function without reading and writing,

but inevitably the people in those societies

don't think of words as something you see,

but something that you hear and speak.

So it was that those early muslims

related to the sound and meaning of the Qur'an.

The beauty of the language amazed them.

They thought it was magic.

Just to hear it could convert people into

followers of Muhammad.

They did not learn it as a book in the way that muslims do now.

It didn't exist in that form.

They heard it as individual ayats or surahs,

and learned it that way,

they learned the parts they felt close to and loved.

And yes they used their rudimentary knowledge

of reading and writing,

in all its crudity,

scraped on bones and stones

and scrawled on bits of skin

to help them remember the words

But what was important was the sound of the words,

not the written text.

The words intervened in their lives

in a clear and present way,

guiding them in their behaviour.

The Qur'an not only explained

the nature of God and the creation that they lived in

but the God that self-described and self-defined

through the words of the Qur'an

often revealed words

that directly answered their questions.

Unlike idols

their God interacted with them

and answered back.

They did not need to be made to learn those words,

they were eager.

And in their daily prayers they repeated those words they had learned,

to reinforce their memories,

speaking the words in their own accents

not just the Qureish dialect

which was ultimately given precedence

being the accent of Muhammad.

In the beginning it would seem

that as people became muslim

their relationships with the Qur'an

would have been both close and personal.

And they knew that if they were in doubt about anything

Muhammad was there to guide them.

But with the death of the Messenger,

the muslim world was a different place,

and disagreements could no longer be brought to the ultimate arbiter.

Muslims had to decide for themselves

what was right and what was wrong,

and whether there was one single law

that should apply to all of them.

And opinions as to who would make decisions

soon came to serious blows

and as is usually the way,

when the blows are over

it is the winner that makes the rules.

So as the muslim ummah formalised itself,

even before the law,

the Qur'an was the earliest example of

the crystallisation of the muslim Way of Life,

the flexible made rigid,

the changeable now fixed.

No longer set in its original context

the Qur'an now became a subject for academic study,

and branched and flowered

through all the Qur'anic sciences.

But all those sciences weren't there

when the original muslims heard and learned

the original revelation.

Since then, the experience of the Qur'an

and the understanding of its nature has changed

from voice to ear to heart and tongue and brain,

and finally to written text

and the unifying singularity of that text

across the muslim world

is an extraordinary testament to

the unique fascination of the Qur'an,

the reverence in which it is held

and the endless joy and fulfilment to be found in its study.

Bear in mind that if we agree

that revelations of Divine Authority ceased upon Muhammad's death

then everything that comes after that point

can only be seen as the muslim mythos,

the accumulated knowledge and understanding

of those who have called themselves muslim.

This is the store of all we can know about the revelation,

the context of its revelation,

and the life, words and actions of the Messenger

and those around him.

But that civilisational mythos

was born from the Qur'an,

and the Recitation has always been at the heart of the world of Islam,

in all its myriad forms

So it was always going to be asking for trouble

to suggest that the Qur'an has had mistakes in it from the beginning,

and that an apparent number pattern

is enough justification to reject and discard

the entirety of muslim intellectual history.

Nonetheless some managed to summon up the hubris to do just that.

And all based on some assumptions

related to the Muqatt'at Nuun and Saad,

and a couple of distinctive ayats in sura 39.

Unfortunately those who fought to defend

the accepted text of the Qur'an

chose to fight that assumption as if it was

the numerical fact on which it was based,

rather than recognising what was a numerical fact

and coming up with a better assumption.

That is what we have to do

if we are to reconcile

these new discoveries with muslim history.