..... What the Yemeni Korans seemed to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D."
You mind to tell us what is meant by
evolving text ? Would you like us to show you the evolving text of the Hebrew of the Torah ?
Puin, who had been sent by the German .....and his preliminary inspection also revealed unconventional verse orderings..
Thats nothing new.
Volumn 006, Book 061, Hadith Number 515. (Bukhari and same reported Muslim)
-----------------------------------------
Narated By Yusuf bin Mahk : While I was with 'Aisha, the mother of the Believers, a person from Iraq came and asked, "What type of shroud is the best?" 'Aisha said, "May Allah be merciful to you! What does it matter?" He said, "O mother of the Believers! Show me (the copy of) your Qur'an," She said, "Why?" He said, "In order to compile and arrange the Qur'an according to it, for people recite it with its Suras not in proper order." 'Aisha said, "What does it matter which part of it you read first? (Be informed) that the first thing that was revealed thereof was a Sura from Al-Mufassal, and in it was mentioned Paradise and the Fire. When the people embraced Islam, the Verses regarding legal and illegal things were revealed. If the first thing to be revealed was: 'Do not drink alcoholic drinks.' people would have said, 'We will never leave alcoholic drinks,' and if there had been revealed, 'Do not commit illegal sexual intercourse, 'they would have said, 'We will never give up illegal sexual intercourse.' While I was a young girl of playing age, the following Verse was revealed in Mecca to Muhammad: 'Nay! But the Hour is their appointed time (for their full recompense), and the Hour will be more grievous and more bitter.' (54.46) Sura Al-Baqara (The Cow) and Surat An-Nisa (The Women) were revealed while I was with him." Then 'Aisha took out the copy of the Qur'an for the man and dictated to him the Verses of the Suras (in their proper order).
Lets continue on some other interesting issues on that website:
...minor textual variations...
So lets see, that article claims "
evolving text" but yet says "
minor textual variations". In one whole nut shell its an evolving text with minor textual variations.
Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic text is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed
All I am reading is text text text, reading reading reading, dialect dialect dialect. I would like them to show word phrase differences.
Not all the Christians think this way about the Bible, however, and in fact, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1981) points out, "the closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Kur'an in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ." If Christ is the Word of God made flesh, the Koran is the Word of God made text, and questioning its sanctity or authority is thus considered an outright attack on Islam -- as Salman Rushdie knows all too well.
What is the meaning of the word "Quran" it means "Recitation" or Something that is recited. It doesnt mean text or denote anything of a text and is not parallel with the Christian concept of Jesus as the word of G-d that became flesh.
The Quran are words, words have no physical nature in which text only expresses such words. Muhammad was revealed Quran to his mind and heart not as a text.
...a historian of early Islam currently based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, published an article in which she argued that elucidating problematic passages in the Koranic text is likely to be made possible only by "abandoning the conventional account of how the Qur'an was born." And since 1991 James Bellamy, of the University of Michigan, has proposed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society a series of "emendations to the text of the Koran" -- changes that from the orthodox Muslim perspective amount to copyediting God....
Why didnt they say "emendations to the
words of the Koran" ? If this is all about
text they are making a laughing stock of themselves as to "
how the Qur'an was born" which is remote from being
a text in its original nature.
Crone is one of the most iconoclastic of these scholars. During the 1970s and 1980s she wrote and collaborated on several books -- most notoriously, with Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) -- that made radical arguments about the origins of Islam and the writing of Islamic history. Among Hagarism's controversial claims were suggestions that the text of the Koran came into being later than is now believed ("There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century");
Hmm somebody is getting warm, but then later gets cold, while others are freezing.
the nineteenth-century Orientalist William Muir, for example, contended that the Koran was one of "the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known."
This had me on a roll.
William Muir also confirmed the authenticity of the Quranic text that the article has in spot light.
...There is otherwise every security, internal and external, that we possess the text which Muhammad himself gave forth and used.....There is probably no other book in the world which has remained twelve centuries (now fourteen) with so pure a text....
Sir Williams Muir, Life of Mohamet, vol.1, Introduction
This same critic of ISlam asserts this even though the Oral transmition has been ignored.
Western researchers with a variety of academic and theological interests press on, applying modern techniques of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Koran.
There are missing something here. What about the oral transmission of the Quran. They are soo focussed on textual issues they for got about other sources.
http://www.iol.ie/~afifi/BICNews/Sabeel/sabeel3.htm
THE Koran is a text, a literary text,
Thats not what the Quran says. It was not revealed as
a text from Alllaah to muhammad like that of Moses' tablets, it is an inspiration of words infused within him.
By the end of the tenth century the influence of the Mu'tazili school had waned, for complicated political reasons, and the official doctrine had become that of i'jaz, or the "inimitability" of the Koran. (As a result, the Koran has traditionally not been translated by Muslims for non-Arabic-speaking Muslims. Instead it is read and recited in the original by Muslims worldwide, the majority of whom do not speak Arabic. The translations that do exist are considered to be nothing more than scriptural aids and paraphrases.)
SO in other words, using translations for your criticism has no authority to the original.
GERD-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding of the Koran. "The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'" he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense.
I would love to see these verses
Puin is talking about or at least to explain in which he seriously lacks in doing. But of course for you Christians an allegation is simply good enough for proof.
How about this " The Bible is illogically incosistant with it self lacking integrity and doesnt make sense to be the word of G-d ". Now of course you all will rant and rave that "You must have the Holy Casper in order to understand scripture". See how the swing can go.
Patricia Crone, the historian of early Islam, says, "everyone took it for granted that everything the Muslims claim to remember about the origin and meaning of the Koran is correct. If you drop that assumption, you have to start afresh." This is no mean feat, of course; the Koran has come down to us tightly swathed in a historical tradition that is extremely resistant to criticism and analysis. As Crone put it in Slaves on Horses,
you have to start afresh Many muslims dont do this at all to seek flaw in scholars opinion before taking it as just as. They are subject to error just like anyone.
She must have realized something what the other Quranic textual hunters didnt see and missed. She uses the word tradition ie oral rather than text. Shes really hot on the trail.
R. Stephen Humphreys....If our goal is to comprehend the way in which Muslims of the late 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries [Islamic calendar / Christian calendar] understood the origins of their society, then we are very well off indeed. But if our aim is to find out "what really happened," in terms of reliably documented answers to modern questions about the earliest decades of Islamic society, then we are in trouble.
This dude was hot. So tell me are you all still trying to find out "
what really happened" ? Just remember to get your selves lots of advil.
Wansbrough applied an entire arsenal of what he called the "instruments and techniques" of biblical criticism -- form criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, and much more -- to the Koranic text. He concluded that the Koran evolved only gradually in the seventh and eighth centuries, during a long period of oral transmission when Jewish and Christian sects were arguing volubly with one another well to the north of Mecca and Medina, in what are now parts of Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Iraq. The reason that no Islamic source material from the first century or so of Islam has survived, Wansbrough concluded, is that it never existed.
This dude was dancing on fire. He was soo hot he started freezing himself. I think we said over and over and over that the Oral Quran held preference to any written text EVEN TODAY.
Surely the best way to start is with the study of the Koran -- which promises in the years ahead to be at least as contentious, fascinating, and important as the study of the Bible has been in this century.
Verily it will be and it has. Thank you for the wonderful site artical, but we see this article in no way supporting your ideology for substantial proof. It rather encourages people as myself to scrutinize what scholars today have laid as
ijma in our religion to start from the root to find what they missed or misinterpreted and misrepresented. The same scientific nature was applied to Christianity and its history of doctrine and Biblical criticism mereless rational.