 Yes, so Ullum al-Qur'an may be defined as, and this is Muhammad Ali Sabuni, so this is in Tibian for Ullum al-Qur'an. Studies concerned with the book of Revelation sent down upon the last prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi sallam. There's another definition, I don't have it on the screen here, but this is by Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, where he says Ullum al-Qur'an, he describes Ullum al-Qur'an as studies concerning the words of God sent down upon the messenger written down in manuscripts and transmitted to us continuously without any doubt. So what are these topics or areas of study? So here's just a few of them, right? So we have the Qur'an's concept and process of Revelation called Ullum al-Wahi. Then we have the collection of the Qur'an, jama'a al-Qur'an, the arrangement and order of the Qur'an, the composition of the Qur'an, the coherent structure or nathum of the Qur'an, the seven modes, the ahruf and canonical readings, the qura'at of the Qur'an, the study of the transmissional chains of narration, the asaneed of the Qur'an, the manuscripts, the masahif of the Qur'an, the occasions of Revelation called asbab al-Nuzul, the abrogative aspect of the Qur'an called nask, etc. etc. Among other things. So most Muslims have abandoned the study of traditional texts concerning these Ullum, these disciplines, these areas of topics of knowledge, and have rather relied on certain amateur preachers and apologists to teach them about their scripture. And this has led to Muslims abandoning the Qur'an altogether. And in the Qur'an, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam is quoted by Allah s.w.t. saying, وقال رسول يا ربي إنَّ قوم اتخذها اتخذوا هذا القرآن المهجورة that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam is quoted as saying, Oh my Lord, indeed my people have abandoned this Qur'an. So this is a perennial problem. So I mentioned preachers and apologists. So a preacher is called a wa'id. And a wa'id is not necessarily an alim, a scholar. So every alim, every scholar could be a preacher potentially, but not every preacher is an alim. In fact, there could be a huge difference between the two. So one of my colleagues is a tuna, he's a Catholic priest, and this man is just brilliant. He is a teacher of the Trivium, he's fluent in multiple languages, just an incredible breadth and depth of knowledge. And he's a Christian. You turn on the TV and you'll listen to a televangelist, he's also a Christian. But there's a major difference between the two. One is an alim and one is a preacher. So there's nothing wrong with being a preacher who's not a scholar, because that preacher sort of stays in his lane, right? As long as he's in contact or has recourse to the ulama and doesn't present himself as a scholar, so he's not pretentious. But the problem is that most laity, the awam, the sort of general Muslim masses, they can't tell the difference between a wa'id and an alim. Because the wa'id, the preacher looks and sounds the part, right? So even if the preacher says something wrong, the lay person will tend to run with it, right? Why not? The preacher had a beard, he had a kufi, quran and hadith are falling out of his mouth, right? In fact, I don't know, maybe 99% of khutaba, of khatibs on Friday, who deliver the Friday sermons across the west are not ulama, they're preachers. Again, this is okay as long as the preachers are staying in their lane, right? And this is why, by the way, this is just me personally. You know, I almost never wear like a turban or even a kufi. I don't wear a jubba, you know, when I give lectures or khutba. This is my personal preference. I don't want to give people the wrong impression. So I'm not an alim in the traditional sense. A traditional alim is someone who studied sacred sciences for 25 to 30 years full time, right? So then why should you listen to me? Why are you here? Well, because I will present to you what the ulama have said, okay? Also, some of what I will present to you will be from the standpoint of an academic in the more sort of western sense, which is useful as long as we ground ourselves in the foundations and frameworks of our traditional scholarship. I also use the word apologist. An apologist is like a da'i, right? Basically someone who calls to Allah and his messenger, which is obviously good. But again, there is the danger of conflating the da'i with the alim, right? It's like Ahmadidat, Rahimahullah. He was not an alim, right? He admitted this. This is not slandering him. He was a da'i. He was an apologist. And the word apologist comes from the Greek apologia, which means a defense. So an apologist is someone who defends the deen, right? And we need apologists. I consider myself an apologist and a preacher to some extent. But an apologist again has to stay in his or her lane as it were, right? Like I gave a talk one time and I said something very flippant about another religion, like sort of disrespectful. And one of my teachers who is an alim, he pulled me into a room and he censured me, right? He really kind of checked me. And I said, okay, I'll be more careful, right? I didn't say, oh, yeah, Shaykh, you don't know what you're saying. And the Quran says this and the Hadith says that, right? No. And if, you know, we make mistakes, we should try to correct ourselves. But the Hadith says honor the scholars, for they are the inheritors of the prophets, right? So we must tread lightly around the Ulama. Now, one of the signs of the Sa'a, and this is a major fitna, is when the scholars become less and less accessible, or when the scholars become corrupt. And both of these things are mentioned in the Hadith, right? These are signs of the Sa'a, the Qabdu l-Ulama, like the seizing of the scholars and the prevalence of the Ulama usu, like the evil scholars. And so the secret of this Ulama is the Sa'ad, the chain of transmission, right? So if someone is claiming scholarship but has no Sa'ad, then be careful. So anyway, this is a problem as I see it. Muslims have relied on amateur preachers and apologists to teach them about their scripture. And in fact, they were miseducated by these preachers and apologists who in their zeal to repudiate the Bible and draw a sharp distinction between the Bible and the Quran, they began to assert that the text of the Quran was uniformic in nature from its very inception. That unlike the Bible that has numerous textual variants, we were told that the Quran has no textual variants. And this is of course not exactly true. Okay, this is an inaccurate sort of a reductionist, which is to say simplistic understanding of the Quran that I think has harmed our community. So basically, these preachers and apologists, they sacrificed academic rigor and nuance for the sake of this sort of inter-religious one-upmanship. They wanted to score points against the Christians basically. So what is accurate then? What do we learn from our traditional literature written by our traditional Ulama? Well, we learn that the Quran has never been a uniformic text, but rather a multi-formic text. And it does have textual variants, but these are not of the same kind as those of the Bible, specifically the New Testament. There's a major difference. So let me explain this briefly just to show you the difference. I hope this isn't boring for people. As long as I'm not bored, that's all that matters. Several of the textual variants of the New Testament, what is the New Testament? The Christian scriptures, right? The 27 books written in Greek. So several of the textual variants of the New Testament were deliberate changes, okay, made to the text by scribes, many years after Issa al-Assalam. Okay, that were motivated by theological rivalries among early Christian groups. Okay, so they have theological significance, and they were written well after the lives of the autograph authors. Autograph authors means the original authors. Okay, and the textual critics know that these were later changes because they have access to earlier manuscripts, and they can track these changes. Now, the vast majority of the differences in the New Testament manuscripts are accidental scribal errors, okay, due to, you know, misspellings. There's something called parablepsis. That's a nice term for you. Parablepsis means the eye will skip, so a scribe is copying something. He'll look at the page, he'll go back, and then he's, for example, he's copying the word, I don't know, God, right? He sees the word God, like theos in Greek. So he'll write theos, and he'll go back to the page and he'll see the word theos, but it's on a different line. So let's just continue from there, and he'll skip a section. There's didography, didography, which means that basically you repeat, you accidentally repeat a line or a word. There's something called assimilation of parallel passages, which is where a scribe is copying something, and then a very common sort of line in a text, and then he's thinking it's actually another text, and then he sort of assimilates them, writes it down in that way. However, some of the changes were deliberate and made it into authorized versions of the New Testament canon. So this is just an example here, this is called the Johannin Coma. You see this up here, 1st John 5.7. This is the only verse in the entire New Testament that explicitly, unambiguously, teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. This verse, so there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, these three are one. This verse is not to be found in the most ancient Greek manuscripts. Okay, so this verse appeared in St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate in the 4th century, which was eventually declared authentic by the Council of Trent. This is one of the ecumenical councils that was held in the 16th century. This verse entered the Greek manuscript tradition in 1522 with Erasmus. You'll also find it in popular English translations like the King James version, which is also called the authorized version. It contains this Johannin Coma. But when more ancient Greek manuscripts were discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries, they noticed that this verse was nowhere to be found. Today, the major Greek critical editions do not contain this verse. So for centuries, Christians lived and died believing that the Trinity was explicitly taught by the New Testament. That is not. So by contrast then, the so-called textual variants of the Qur'an that are authorized are firmly traceable to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself and are a facet of the very revelatory nature of the Qur'an. In other words, the authorized Qur'anic variants are part of the revelation given to the Prophet himself. The evidence of that is the ancient and mass-transmitted tradition of the Seven Ahruf. We're going to talk about this, the Seven Ahruf. It's very, very important. But that is a big difference then, I think, between the Qur'an and the New Testament. Now are there unauthorized variants of the Qur'an? Unauthorized. In other words, are there versions of verses in the Qur'an that may not be recited in prayer, for example? There are. The answer is yes. Unauthorized. The answer is because the chains of their transmission could not be verified as being both widely recited and having their origin in the Prophet ﷺ. And we'll get into all of that, insha'Allah. And I'll give you specific examples. This is still the prologue, by the way. We haven't actually gone to these. Now this is where, let me just finish the prologue. This is where the enemies of Islam come into the picture. Okay, so you have these revisionists and polemicists. See those terms at the bottom there? Revisionists and polemicists. And I'll just sit on these two terms for a minute. I'll define them shortly. So these aren't like agnostic, atheist, or Christian opponents of Islam. So they've taken notice of the average Muslim's ignorance of his own traditional literature and his claim of textual uniformity. So what these critics, they do, they dip into our traditional literature and pull out these isolated narrations that debunk the claim of textual uniformity, a claim that no real Muslim alim ever made, and then they deceptively present this to their audiences as evidence that the Quran is not preserved. So they'll say something like, in your own books it says that there are three versions of the sixth verse of al-Fatiha. It says, with a sod. And then it says, with a scene. And then it says, with a zap. So which one is correct? And then the Muslim who doesn't know any better says, oh, this can't be true. You must be reading some book authored by an Israeli agent. That can't be true. But what the critics don't tell their audiences is that the traditional Muslim authorities have always believed that the Quran was revealed in a multi-formic fashion and that this has nothing to do with the Quran's preservation. All traditional authorities maintain that the Quran was preserved in light of its multi-formic nature. In other words, these critics, they weaponize our own literature against us. They use our own traditional literature to tear down these straw men that ignorant Muslims constantly keep creating with their misguided claims of textual uniformity. And I'll explain what I mean when I say the Quran is multi-formic. This is an extremely important thing to understand. What does it mean? Quranic multi-formism. Very, very important. Okay, so who are these critics then? So these critics, let's start here. Who is doing this? It seems to me that it's really two groups. You have these radical historical revisionists. Okay? A radical historical revisionist. This is someone who swims against the tide of the historical consensus. Okay? Like someone who says that that Isa al-Islam never existed, for example. There are people like this, right? And they have PhDs in history that are making this claim. The second type is the hostile Christian polemicist. A polemicist is someone who is very aggressively attacks another religion, right? It comes from the Greek polemicos, which means war, right? And these two groups are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In other words, many of the radical revisionists are atheists and they're agnostics. They hate religion in general. They're called antitheists. But some of them are also Christian polemicists. Okay? Okay, so I want to begin by talking about what's known as the external evidence of the Quran in the first century of the Hijrah of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi sallam. Okay, the Hijrah, of course, is the migration of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622. So to put it as a question, how well is the Quran attested in manuscripts, physical manuscripts that are dated to the first century Hijri? And again here, perhaps a comparison with the New Testament will help us put things in the perspective. Comparisons help us understand. Okay? So if you don't know anything about typing and I said that I could type 15 words per minute, 15 words, you might say, well, that's good, I guess, right? I don't know. But then I said, well, the average is 40. They say, okay, you suck. That's pretty terrible. Okay, so comparisons help us put things in the perspective. Right? So this is not an attack on Christianity or the Bible. This is what I'm going to tell you is completely factual. Okay? If people are offended, then facts are offensive. But first of all, how does a textual scholar date a manuscript? How do you date a manuscript? So according to Dr. Haitham Sitli, who's probably the foremost scholar of Quranic manuscripts in the world, he's the executive director of Iqsa, which is the International Quranic Studies Association. Last name, Sitli, S-I-D-K-Y. So according to Sitli, the scholars basically look at three things, three main things. Okay? So there's paleography, there's orthography and radiocarbon dating. So paleography, okay, looks at letter shapes, how are words written? Orthography looks at spelling conventions. How are words spelled? And then radiocarbon dating is a type of scientific analysis that gives age estimates for carbon-based materials. These are the three main things. Okay? So paleography looks at what? How words are, what? Huh? Written. Orthography looks at how words are spelled. And radiocarbon dating is a scientific analysis that dates carbon-based materials. Now, Isa alaihi s-salam, Jesus peace be upon him, was speaking and teaching the Gospel in the early 30s of the first century, C-E. So how much of the 27-book canon of the New Testament is attested in extant manuscripts that are dated to the first century? What does extant mean? It means we actually have them in our possession. Physical manuscripts in the first century. And keep in mind that traditional Christians believe that all of the books of the New Testament were written in the first century and that they were all authored by apostolic authorities. That is to say, eyewitnesses to Jesus' life and message. And of course, many Christian apologists or also anti-Muslim polemicists continue to hold to this view. The view that all of the New Testament was written in the first century by men who interacted with Isa alaihi s-salam, peace be upon him, in some way. So what percentage of extant New Testament manuscripts are dated to the first century? The answer is zero percent. Literally zero. Okay? The absolute oldest extant manuscript of the New Testament is the size of a credit card. It's called John Ryland's papyrus number 52. It contains a few verses of John chapter 18. It's dated to like 125 to 150. Okay? So let me say it like this. Out of the nearly 8,000 verses in the New Testament, zero are attested in manuscripts dated to the first century. There are no manuscripts of the New Testament that are extant from the first century. Okay? Nothing for the first century of Christianity. The earliest complete copies of the Gospels are from the fourth century. It's 300 years after Jesus. Okay? Keep that in mind. Now... Let's see. We're not going to talk about this. Okay. Now, we said that a radical revisionist is someone who swims against the tide of the historical consensus, right? Maybe he has good reasons for doing so. Maybe not. Such a man was John Wansborough. That's a name that you should be familiar with. John Wansborough. He was a famous professor and vice chancellor at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Also known as SOAS by John Wansborough. And Wansborough had many famous and prolific students like Andrew Rippin and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. So, here's the problem with these orientalists and their students that they tend to make and continue to make some very tenuous assumptions about the Quran. They assume that the Bible and the Quran have similar literary histories. This is a big mistake. In my view, the Bible and the Quran are in different universes. No disrespect. And these orientalists even employed the same sort of terminology, right? They called the Uthmani Codex the Vulgate or the Masoretic Text or the Textus Receptus. They want to draw these analogs to the Islamic tradition. Now, one of the major critical assumptions of these orientalists is the following. They'll say that since the Gospels were written after Jesus' peace be upon him, the Quran must have also been written after the Prophet Muhammad. Okay. Now, most historians, whether they're confessional or non-confessional, not all but most will place the composition of the canonical Gospels between 70 and 100 of the common era in the order of David and John. Okay, that's pretty standard. That's the general consensus among New Testament historians. This is not controversial. This is not revisionist. This is very standard, very mainstream. Now, John Wandsboro gained worldwide popularity a few decades ago by positing the proposition that the Quran was written in the second half of the 8th century in Iraq by a committee of scholars from the Abbasid court. So, he was saying that the Quran was composed during this time. It was created during this time. There's no history before this time according to him. So, Wandsboro basically conceded when you think about it that a solitary, unlettered man living in the Hejaz in the 7th century could not have possibly written such a literary masterpiece. It must have been a committee of court theologians poets and historians. Now, why was Wandsboro so influential during his time several decades ago? I think there are three reasons and I've highlighted them here on the slide. Generally, western scholars tend to underestimate the importance of oral transmission. They require what's known as external evidence. That is to say physical evidence, physical manuscripts. And during the days of Wandsboro advanced western studies the Quranic manuscripts was just starting to take off. So, many academics sided with Wandsboro due to the apparent lack of extant Quranic manuscripts that were dated to the 1st century of the Hijrah. The second reason is again due to a bad assumption. Just as we don't have any extant New Testament manuscripts that are dated to the 1st century, the century of Jesus, peace be upon him, there are also probably no extant Quranic manuscripts from the 1st century Hijri, the century of the Prophet Muhammad SAW. And the third reason why I think Western revisionism takes root when it comes to Islam is because orientalists tend to employ what's known as a hermeneutic of suspicion. Okay, so this idea that we as westerners cannot really trust anything that comes out of the east. And by the east I mean the Muslim east. We must be suspicious about their claims. Right, so you know according to the Gospels Jesus wrote a donkey into Jerusalem to fulfill a prophecy. Zechariah Chapter 9 the king of Zion comes to Jerusalem humbly seated upon a donkey. But when the Quran highlights similarities between Mousa Adesunam and the Prophet SAW, it's because the Prophet must have been aware of a prophecy of Deuteronomy Chapter 18 a prophet like Mousa would come and so he claimed to be him and then tried to imitate Mousa in order to convince the Jews of Yathrib that he was a fulfillment of this prophecy. So you see when Jesus peace be upon him does something he's authentically fulfilling prophecy. But when the Prophet Muhammad SAW does something he's deceptively self-fulfilling prophecy. This is called a hermeneutic of suspicion using a double standard. So you hear this a lot like a Christian apologist he'll say the Prophet SAW cannot be a prophet because he was a warrior and a true prophet wouldn't engage in a war. Really? Have you ever read the Bible? Pick a page at random in the Old Testament. According to the Old Testament book of Exodus Mousa Adesunam ordered 3,000 men killed in a single day one day 3,000 men put to the sword. If you ask our historians about the Ghazawat of the Prophet SAW they'll say that maybe 1,500 men total were killed during the entire life of the Prophet SAW. This was in battle. So something like 1,000 Mushri Keen and 500 Sahaba in 23 years, 1,500 on the battlefield. All men compare that to 3,000 men one day put to the sword by Mousa Ali but Mousa Ali is a prophet and the Prophet SAW was not a prophet because he was a warrior. You see this double standard. Even a New Testament book of Revelation chapter 19 we have this description of Jesus, peace be upon him in his second coming. He's waging war, he strikes down the nations, his garment is soaked in the blood of his enemies. This is how he's described in the New Testament. Okay. So on one side we have the narrative in our sources like the Itkan of Suyuti chapter 18 in particular that the Suwar in Ayat of the Quran were first uttered by the historical Muhammad of Arabia and then the text of the Quran was standardized by the Uthmanic Codex committee around 650 of the common era, less than two decades after the Prophet. On the other side we have the revisionist narrative that the Quran is a later sort of post prophetic that is to say 8th century state sponsored production and that the historical Muslim narrative about the Quran standardization is wholly fictitious. So whose narrative is supported by evidence? Okay. Let's look at the evidence then. Let's look at the Quran's attestation in its first century. So remember we said the New Testament attestation in its first century is not extent. There's nothing. There are no manuscripts in the first century of Christianity. So here we're looking at the Quran's attestation in its first century. So we're not talking about the biography of the prophets I said I'm not talking about Sira, like biographical sources. I'm talking about the Quran. Okay. So the first Islamic century corresponds roughly to the years 622 to 722 but I will limit things to only the 7th century. So 699 of the common era is sort of the latest date. There are over two dozen confirmed first century Hijri that is 7th century CE manuscripts of the Quran extent right now and many others out there waiting to be identified. Okay. And scholars believe that this number will definitely increase as more manuscripts await to be analyzed in their paleography orthography and radiocarbon dating. So maybe the most famous manuscript is called Mingana 1572 A. This is, that's this technical catalog name but you know it probably, if you know about this, the Birmingham manuscript. Okay. So the Birmingham manuscript was initially misdated as a second century Hijri manuscript. Primarily because the script was wrongly identified as being Kufic. It is in fact Hijazic. So in 2011, a Hungarian graduate student named Alba Fidelli, she's now Dr. Fidelli. She had the manuscript radiocarbon dated on a hunch and the results were stunning. It was dated no later than 645 of the common era with a 95.4% accuracy. So that is 13 years after the death of the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. So that is right around the time of the birth of Dr. Caleb. Furthermore, manuscript 328C was identified as coming from the same codex as the Birmingham manuscript. So this comes out to about 8% of the Quran, 8% dated to within 13 years of the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam at the absolute latest. I mean based on this dating, one could make the case that Mingana 1572 A and manuscript 328C was originally a companion codex, in other words a mushaf of an unknown companion of the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And manuscript 1572 A contains the beginning of Sulataha. It's possible that this was a very manuscript that Aramad read and caused his conversion if that story in the Sira is accurate. We have to take Sira with a grain of salt. But is it just this 8% how much of the entire Quran is attested in manuscript witnesses from the first century Hijri? The answer is the entirety of the Othmanic text. There's a website called Islamic Awareness. It's a pretty good website. And it's listed all Quranic manuscripts that are dated within the first Islamic century. And there's pictures of them. And according to the researchers who run this site Islamic Awareness, these manuscripts constitute up to 96% of the Quran. However, Dr. Sitli believes that this data is outdated and that it's closer to 100% of the Quran. We have 100% of the Quran in extant manuscripts from the first Islamic century. Okay. This is the opinion of Dr. Haitham Sitli, Dr. Mareen Panputin, Dr. Sean Anthony, and these are western scholars and, you know, I obviously hope that they obviously hold certain opinions that we won't agree with. And I'll talk about that. But when it comes to the attestation of the Quran, we are all in agreement. Okay. The entirety of the text is attested in the first century Hijri. This is without question. And furthermore, modern stylometric analysis was conducted on the Quran revealing that the Quran had one author. It's one man, one person. So, John Wansborough and his ilk have been, what? definitively falsified. Right? They were wrong. Right? But as they say, people like this don't die easily. You know, Marx is still alive. Right? So, you know what the revisionists are saying now? They're saying that the Quran must have been written before the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. It's a wing to the other extreme. Right? So, they're saying something like, I don't know, the Prophet found the Quran in Mecca sometime and he liked it, and then he claimed that he received it as a revelation. So, this is nothing but wishful thinking. There's no good evidence for this. But they have to say something. Right? So, first the Quran was written after, now it's before, but it can't be during the life of the Prophet. So, you see, this is called the Quran talks about this obstinacy. Right? It's like a child who says, I want some jelly beans. The parents say, you have to eat dinner first. No, I want the bag of jelly beans. I want the whole bag now. No, you have to eat dinner. No, I want the jelly beans. No, you have to eat dinner. Okay, fine. So, the kid eats dinner. So, here's some jelly beans. I don't want any now. Right? Just vacillating between extremes. That was the best analogy. Okay. So, according to Dr. Sittri, the process of manuscript dating has become actually much more accurate in recent years. So, some manuscripts, Quranic manuscripts have been reconsidered and dated earlier because the scientific testing is getting better. It's improving. So, there are a lot of manuscripts that were considered second century that are now being moved into the first century of the Hijrah. Okay, for example, Dr. Sittri mentions a manuscript called Saray Medina 1A. It's in Turkey. And it was believed to be second century. But now, the dominant opinion is that it's a first-century manuscript written in Hijazik and Kufic, which is more or less the entire Quran. Other first-century manuscripts, they're listed here, the Topkapi manuscript in Turkey, which is 99% of the Quran. There's something called the Tubigan manuscript, which is 26% of the Quran dated no later than 675. There's something called the Codex Parisino Petropolitanus, kind of a mouthful, 46%. You have Codex BL as British Library, OR 2165, Codex Meshad, Codex 331, Codex 330G, and then the Marcell Codices. And then you have something called the Sana'a Palimpsest. You see that at the bottom, towards the bottom there? The Sana'a Palimpsest. This is also called Sana'a 1 or C1, which is 41% of the Quran. But a different textual tradition than the other manuscripts. And I'll explain what I mean by that. But by and large, it's identical to the Uthmani textual tradition. But we have to talk about why it's slightly different. And this is a great topic. And this is a topic that's being exploited by anti-Muslim polemicists. This would have demonstrated the Quran is not preserved. But this discovery only supports the Muslim narrative. I'll show you how it completely backfires on the polemicists. Keep that in mind. We have to talk about that later. C1, the Sana'a Palimpsest. This was a manuscript of the Quran that was discovered in 1972 in Yemen. That is slightly different than the Uthmani textual tradition. Yes? Yeah. Yeah, some of them destroyed. Some of them were written on in codices that just sort of were over time. Some of them were probably divided amongst... A lot of these are probably family Qurans that were divided amongst family members. Some of them are just partial Qurans. At this point, and we'll talk about this, orality took precedence over actual written text. So if you had something memorized, there's no need to write it down. So basically the written text was a memory aid in the first generation. Okay. So Western scholars, they make another critical assumption that if a companion did not write something down, then he must not have believed it was the Quran. That's a bad assumption. And we'll talk about that, inshallah. You know. Just to give you an example, apparently the Mus'af of Ibn Mas'ud did not have al-Fatiha or the last two Mu'awwa the Tain, sort of 113 and 114. So Western scholars say that he didn't believe that these were surahs. The first thing, that's the first and the last page of is Mus'af, which are the first pages to get destroyed over wear and tear. Right? But we'll talk about that. That's a very important topic that is constantly brought up. Yeah. Any more questions? Good question. Yes. You're saying that if we take the revisionist position, how would a revisionist explain specific people mentioned in the Quran, like the Prophet and Zaid, who was a companion? Exactly. That's why it's a radical revisionist position. So, Wandsboro, his insanity doesn't really end there. He'll say that there never was a historical muhammad. That this entire thing is fictitious. It was invented as a political sort of strategy to take over that part of the world and unite sort of Jewish Christians and together in this Jewish-Christian movement sort of coalesced into this new movement called Islam. Right? So, they would say that these stories are just invented. They're claiming that there's someone named Zaid or muhammad or whoever. And these stories about specific sort of events in the Quran, these are just invented by the authors to give the impression that this is actually historical information. No one believes this anymore, except a radical, radical revisionist. But you'll get people like this, right? People have really strange opinions and they have Ph.D. some of them. That doesn't mean anything. Anyway, we'll talk more about that, inshallah. Alright. So, moving on here. Aha! Let's talk about the Ahruf in the Qara'at. This is very, very important. This is like the essence of it right here. Okay? So, if you've been sleeping up to this point now is the time to wake up and call. So, I would translate Ahruf as recitational variations. It's very difficult to translate Ahruf. Okay? And Qara'at as canonical reading traditions. Okay, so the Ahruf, very important topic. And this word is being now weaponized by anti-Muslim Christian polemicists in a major way. They are the ones that are presenting this topic to many Muslims for the first time. That's not good. When a Christian polemicist and anti-Muslim Christian polemicist who's trying to convert you to Christianity is the first person you hear about these things from. That's not a good sign, right? Okay. It's well established in our tradition that the Quran was revealed to the Prophet upon seven letters, literally. Sometimes translated as seven modes. Again, I prefer seven types of recitational variations. From our perspective the Ahruf are revelation. They are by design. They're not by accident. The essential purpose of these Ahruf, these variations is two-fold. The first is theological. The Ahruf enrich our understanding of the Qalaam of Allah SWT. So by making the Quran a multi-formic text Allah SWT opened up different meanings for us. We're enriched intellectually and spiritually by the Ahruf. The Ahruf give us a deeper engagement with the Qalaam of Allah. I'll give you examples, inshallah. The second purpose of the Ahruf is practical. The Ahruf are a means of taysir. They make the Quran's recitation and memorization easier for us. They give us options. Okay? There are multiple correct readings. There is recitational latitude and this is out of God's mercy. Again, this is by design not accident. The presence of the seven Ahruf is ma'lumina deen. This is something that is well known and established in the religion. It cannot be denied. It's not some secret. It's mentioned in numerous Ahadith like Muslim, Tirmidhi, An-Nasai, Muslim, Ahmad, Mu'at-e-Malik, Musannath, Ibn Abishaybah, etc. Over 20 Sahaba mentioned this in our Hadith corpus. It's considered by many, Mu'tawatir lafvi. What is Mu'tawatir lafvi? It means mass transmitted in its very wording. And the most eminent secular textual critics and historians of today maintain that the tradition of the seven Ahruf likely goes back directly to the Prophet s.a.w. because of the popularity and antiquity of this tradition. In other words, the tradition of the seven Ahruf was not invented by later Muslim scholars as a way of explaining why there is recitational variance in the Quran. Historically, the source of the tradition of the Ahruf was the Prophet s.a.w. and he used it as a way of explaining why there was recitational variance in the Quran. So, that is very important. So, just a couple of Hadith here. The Prophet s.a.w. said that Gabriel read the Quran to me in one Harf, one mode, and I continue to ask for increase until it reached seven Ahruf. The other Hadith here from Imam Ahmad, he said, I read the Quran to me in one Harf, one mode and I continue to ask for increase until it reached seven Ahruf. The other Hadith here from Imam Ahmad, this is probably the most famous one, there was a dispute between Umar and Hisham. Umar, radiAllahu anhu and Hisham ibn Hakim, radiAllahu anhu. They each read the same verse from Surat al-Furqan differently. There was a slight difference. They went to the Prophet s.a.w. and in fact, the Hadith says that Umar dragged Hisham by his collar and the Muslims from the very beginning were very intent on getting the Quran exactly right and investigating readings that were questionable. The Prophet s.a.w. asked Umar to recite. Umar recited and the Prophet s.a.w. said like this it was revealed. And then the Prophet s.a.w. asked Hisham to recite. So Hisham recited and the Prophet s.a.w. said like this it was revealed. And then he concluded by clarifying a famous statement Indeed, the Quran was revealed in seven modes or seven Ahruf so recite what is easy for you. And just the third report Imam Muslim reports that Ubay ibn Ka'ab said that he entered the mosque and he heard the recitation of two other companions different from each other as well as different from his own. So he says a type of doubt he says entered into his heart. So even a great companion like Ubay ibn Ka'ab was initially puzzled by this multi-formic aspect of the Quran. It's very unique to the Quran. Then the Prophet s.a.w. explained the Ahruf and their purpose to him and the doubt left him. So this hadith actually supports our narrative that there were several companion reading traditions or the standardization of the text by the Uthmani Codex Committee This was what the committee had to work with and we'll talk about that very important the Uthmanic Codex Committee There are many other reports as well but here's the main point I want to emphasize again is that it is most probable historically that the Prophet s.a.w. himself is the source of these recitational variations in the Quran that he recited the Quran in various ways and that he claimed that the reason for this was the 7 Ahruf Now a Christian or an atheist or a secular historian will say that he doesn't believe that the Prophet is receiving these words from God That's fine whether the Prophet is receiving revelation or not it makes the most sense historically to attribute at least a portion of these textual variations to the Prophet himself. Now a historian might claim that other recitational variations that Muslims regard as authentic sprang up after the Prophet as well I mean I don't agree with this and I'll show you why but I think it must be acknowledged by historians that the recitation of the Quran as a multi-formic phenomenon has a prophetic provenance a prophetic origin that at the very least the starting point of these variations is not in the post-prophetic period So I think that the most an unbeliever or a skeptic could say is fine the Prophet invented the concept of the Ahruf because he couldn't remember everything he had previously said Of course again this is not a historical argument but rather highly subjective wishful thinking So I think that denying the prophetic origin of the Ahruf is historically dishonest and as I said many imminent non-Muslim historians of the Quran will say yeah it probably started with them because it's such an ancient and well attested tradition of the seven Ahruf Now anti-Muslim polemicists love to give Muslim lay people like the general masses the impression that the traditional Ulama were not forthright about these things like the seven Ahruf that the Ulama were sort of keeping these things a secret because they were afraid or something that this would somehow compromise the preservation of the Quran or that the Ulama lie to them and said that the Quran was a uniform text this is totally false all of the seminal kutub on the topic of Ulum ul Quran all of them written by traditional Ulama of Ahla Sunna wal Jama'a all of them have a section on Ahruf and Qiraat So this is not some secret teaching that Muslim scholars have been covering up only to be uncovered by these honest and brave Neo Orientalists these textual Indiana Joneses Thank God for that No, the seven Ahruf has nothing to do with the preservation of the Quran None of the Ulama who wrote about the Ahruf said that the Quran was not preserved Traditional scholars are very proud of the fact that the Quran was revealed ala sab'ati Ahruf This is an amazing and beautiful and elegant and unique aspect of the Quran You'll see what I mean when I give you examples So the problem was never the Ulama The problem is the ill-informed preachers and apologists who create straw men narratives that anti-Muslim elements exploit That's the problem Miseducation Not education Here's a quote from This is a fantastic book by the way, it's called The History of the Quranic Text I actually brought this version of it is old You're not going to find it like this anymore There's a new version of it This is a text in English that is probably the best text in English on this topic The history of the Quranic text from Revelation to Compilation He also does a comparative study with the Old and New Testaments to make that comparison This is what he says Although contemporary scholars outside the Islamic context have offered a range of imaginative interpretations to get to the quote, real quote on Those unfamiliar with the Islamic intellectual tradition should remember that every last quote variant or quote alternate reading uses evidence that the classical Islamic account is inaccurate comes out from the Islamic intellectual tradition itself So what he's saying here is basically what we said before is that you have critics of Islam weaponizing our own literature against us by presenting these things to ignorant Muslim masses and saying the Quran is not preserved as if these things were not mentioned by the Ulama Now there is a difference of opinion as to what exactly the Ahuruf are But they are there There's no doubt about this And some opinions are stronger than others So Imam Suyuti lays out all of these opinions in his master piece but essentially there are three opinions and there's overlap The one opinion is that the seven Ahuruf are seven dialects of Arabic This is the opinion of Abu Urbaid Qasim is Musallam that the seven Ahuruf are seven dialects of Arabic This is not a strong opinion however the explanatory power of this opinion is not sufficient The second opinion is that the Ahuruf have potential variations to any one word in the Quran that any one word can have a maximum of seven different forms for example Ibn Sirat al-Mustaqeen that's one form Ibn Sirat al-Mustaqeen that's three of Sirat It can have up to seven That's another opinion The third opinion is that the Ahuruf are seven categories of recitational variants in the Quran This opinion of Abu Fadr al-Razi Ibn Qutaybah Imam al-Jazali The Ahuruf are seven categories of recitational variants in the Quran although different scholars have some slight differences in their final categorizations And this is perhaps the strongest opinion I think this has the strongest explanatory power Again the Ahuruf are seven categories of recitational variants in the Quran that were all recited by the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam and we'll demonstrate that inshallah Let's look at some examples The first harf is nominal variation nominal variation in other words variations in nouns So this is one harf This is a classic example in al-Fatiha Malik yawm ad-deem Malik yawm ad-deem Everyone knows this one and they mean different things Malik owner Malik king What's the difference? Well you see a king may rule and set laws over a kingdom but he may not necessarily own everything An owner may own something but he may not necessarily rule over anything So Allah swt is both owner and king He rules and owns everything One of my teachers gave the analogy There's a king in Morocco but this king, even though he's the king he can't just go into somebody's house That's not his Even though he's the king, he doesn't own that pizza An owner, you might own your house but does that mean you can build a little musket on your front lawn If you own a house in San Ramon, can you build a little musket on your front lawn? No, you can't do that HLA will destroy you But you say I own this house You're the owner but you're not the king of it In other words, you don't set the rules you don't make the laws Allah swt is king and owner So the prophet recited it both ways We know this He recited it both ways But the radical skeptic will say How do you know that? How do you know the prophet recited it both ways? This just seems like Muslims are trying to cover up a discrepancy in their book So this can be answered using common sense We don't have to rattle off assani like chains of transmission So my contention is the statement, the prophet recited it both ways is as factual as saying that Thomas Jefferson was the third president or that Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor It's just a fact And people can question these things that they want and again, like I said, there's people who always do like one of my teachers said that a Hindu graduate student wrote a PhD dissertation on how the Taj Mahal was actually built by Hindus and it's a Hindu temple So many wrote a PhD on this in the past So there's always going to be people like this So let's ask a basic question How many times did the companions hear the prophet recite al-Fatiha? Let's think about this I did the math I mentioned this in the Qutbah a few weeks ago So the five daily prayers were mandated in the eighth year of the Meccan period So al-Fatiha must be recited as we know in every prayer cycle So the prophet SAW 15 years 15 times 354 days that's the lunar year is 5,310 days Three of the daily prayers are audible in their first two cycles So they would have heard the Fatiha six times a day from the prophet SAW So 5,310 times six recitations a day is 32,000 recitations The Sahaba heard the prophet SAW recite al-Fatiha 32,000 times over the course of 15 years And this is not counting the times that he recited it in Salat al-Juma, Salat al-A'id or outside of prayer in conversations and lectures and sermons So did the companions of the prophet really get al-Fatiha wrong? Was there really a difference of opinion as to whether the prophet said Malik or Malik Did they transfer this uncertainty to their students? So this is just ridiculous It's ridiculous He obviously recited it both ways The Quran was, it continues to be a mass-transmitted living tradition It was constantly heard recited and memorized Like some people would say well in the pre-modern world there was an oral culture and you know people were just sort of they memorized everything Right? And some modern historians would say that's not true People made mistakes back then and I agree they made mistakes They constantly heard, recited and memorized constantly, every single day since its inception by dozens, hundreds, thousands millions, billions of people But the madness doesn't end there Some orientalists and modern Christian polemicists even go further into the twilight zone and they claim that Abdullah ibn Mas'ud the great companion did not even believe that al-Fatiha was part of the Quran So this is ridiculous beyond comprehension and we'll get there, inshallah But there's a Harvard professor who makes this claim I'll come back to this issue I mentioned nominal variation as one harf There's also inflectional variation This is another harf inflectional variation And this has a theological and practical purpose So with respect to practice Allah SWT says Arjulakum Anoint or wipe your heads and wash your feet for wudu This verse also can be read Do you guys see the difference? Oh yeah, there's no Arabic here Arjulakum in the transliteration Arjulakum with a fat'a It's called accusative, direct object Arjulakum with a kasra indirect object Genitive case ending So the first one says Wipe your heads and wash your feet The second one says Wipe your heads and wipe your feet So generally we wash our feet during wudu But there are circumstances where we can wipe our feet When did we do that? Well we have to look to the sunnah The normative practice of the Prophet SAW Allah SWT He could have revealed another verse that said wipe your feet He inspired the Prophet SAW to recite the same verse but with a slight adjustment He inspired the Prophet SAW with another form of the verse This other form gives us an additional meaning This is a testament to the distinctiveness and elegance of the Quran This is one of the reasons why the Quran is a sui generous with one of a kind No other book is like this Now with respect to belief There's another example at the bottom of the page here of the slide 1934 of the Quran says That Ika'i Sabnu Maryam Qawlal Haqil Ladi Fihi Yamtarun Such was Jesus the son of Mary It is the word of truth about which they vainly dispute We see Qawlal La'a with a fatah So here the word Qawl is in the accusative meaning the aforementioned statement about Jesus What we just mentioned about Jesus is the true account Qawlal Haqil The Christological teaching found in the preceding ayat represents the true Jesus That he is what? Nabiullah Prophet of God Abdullah Slave of God Not the son of God That he's Mubarak He's blessed He's not Mal'un as Paul says in Galatian He calls Jesus Mal'un a cursed He's not a deceiver or a blasphemer as the Talmud says None of these things This verse can also be read Qawlul Haqil You see Qawlul with Dammah Now it's nominative So now the verse means Such was Jesus He is the word of truth Jesus is the word of truth about whom they are vainly disputing Jesus is the word of Al Haq The word of Allah Which is an honorific title Asakrimi as Imam Ar-Razi Explains if someone is known for their generosity You can say he's generosity itself In other words, the Quran is highlighting the truthful speech of Isa A.S. That everything he said was wahi He only spoke the words of God Therefore he's called the word of God as a way of honoring and praising him So why does the Quran praise him in this way and emphasize his truthfulness probably because the New Testament proposes that is to say falsifiable predictions and blasphemy while the Talmud describes to him deception and sorcery Okay So we see how the Ahruf enrich the meanings of the ayat Just a slight difference of a vowel So this is an aspect of the other uniqueness of the Quran Okay Any questions so far No, whatever you want to ask question Yeah, go ahead So that's taking the other opinion that every verse or word of the Quran can have seven different variations So No, I think the the ayat was revealed to the prophet in different ways It's possible that he received different forms of the same ayat at the same time Is it possible that if he came into contact with Arabs that were of a different dialect and we'll talk about that His dialect does have something to do with the Ahruf that he would recite it in a different dialect and that's also a form of wahi I think these things happen sort of more organically Yeah Allahu anam Yeah, this one Oh, I see No, no, no They're completely different Yeah, we'll talk about that mistake that the Ahruf and the Qara'at are synonymous So Warsh is a Qara'a But this Qara'a of Warsh is drawn from the seven Ahruf, the pool of the seven Ahruf Okay So I'll clarify, we're going to get to that Insha'Allah, that's a very good topic and we actually know the source of the confusion why that happened, why Muslims started conflating Ahruf and Qara'at Yeah, we'll get to that Insha'Allah, yeah Yeah, we'll talk about the Uthmani Codex committee and what happened after How do we go from the Mas'ahif to the Qara'at Okay But going back here to the Ahruf So here's a third type of Ahruf It's called dialectical variation Okay, so for example Allah SWT says Wa lam yakun lahu kuf'an ahad Alright Wa lam yakun lahu kuf'an ahad Wa lam yakun lahu kuf'an ahad Wa lam yakun lahu kuf'an ahad Where we said Shiraat al-mustaqeen Shiraat al-mustaqeen Siraat al-mustaqeen Why? You see the Arab was the first standard bearer of the religion So Allah SWT naturally facilitated things for the Arab and certain revealed certain words and phrases in different Arab dialects Okay So we're going to take this message to the world So this is the wisdom behind this Harf Okay Allah SWT says Thus we have revealed to you in Arabic, Quran, recital in order for you to admonish the mother of the cities Mecca and those around it Okay So this is This is dialectical variation One of my favorite dialectical variations is in Suraat Ibrahim verse 35 So it says But there's a variation that says And it's only in this ayah The fourth Harf out of seven is called synonymic variation In Suraat al-Khujalat Or you believe if an immoral person brings you any news investigate the truth This verse is also read As If an immoral person brings you any news ascertain the truth It's called synonymic variation Investigate the matter ascertain the truth Make tab'in and make tathbit Either one can be read in prayer Because they both conform To the Uthmani Rasam The continental skeleton The shorthand text of the Uthmani codices And are both authorized through Sened, through transmission So you see the original Uthmani codices And we'll get into the narrative here Did not have dots or vowel notations No dots No vowels No fatha kasra So So Are two authorized renditions Of the continental skeleton Of the Uthmani textual tradition Those are all right All of those are right All of those are correct All of those are correct Arabic That's what they say But that's incorrect All three of those are authorized Readings of the Fatiha All have assani that go back to the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam That's exactly the point I was making earlier Is that Generally when Muslims hear this difference They'll think, well, which one is right Because we've been sort of trained In the thinking In a certain type of way But the Quran is different than that The form of the Quran is very unique It's multi-formic There's different ways of reading The same ayat That are all authorized So it's all correct It's all Arabic and it all has sanat Now if you would have said Ehdina's I don't know This is obviously, why is it wrong Because there's no sanat for this It comes out of nowhere It's spurious, it's isolated It has no chain of transmission It's not even correct Arabic Yeah The other Yes No, this doesn't change the meaning Dialectical variations don't change the meaning But other variations do Nominal variation changes the meaning Malik and Malik mean two different things It comes from the same root, but they have two different meanings Yeah So it's also a misnomer to say Well, the Ahrov don't change the meaning They do change the meaning That's the point of it, is to change the meaning That we can wash and wipe the feet That can't be dialectical So sometimes they change the meaning But the dialectical ones, they don't change the meaning It's just a different pronunciation Yeah, the sawd was different Was difficult on some Arabs The Prophet ﷺ was inspired by Allah To recite it in their dialect Which is okay It's classical Arabic And it's authorized Okay, let's see here So the remaining Ahrov are verbal Particular and syntactical These examples are sufficient So nominal, inflectional, dialectical, synonymic Verbal, particular, and syntactical Those are the seven Ahrov, insha'Allah And something very close There might be some slight differences In these categorizations That's basically it Now, Muslim scholars have described That length in the books of al-umul Quran That there were several readings In pre-Othmanic companion codices That differed in their rassam In their textual traditions From the Uthmani rassam So let's talk about the history Of the Uthmanic textual tradition And make sense Of these companion codices These masahif Of individual sahaba Okay So what happened between The revelation of the Quran And the standardization of the Uthmani textual tradition So the Prophet ﷺ He recited the Quran in prayers and lectures For 23 years 27 Ahrov He recited the Quran as a multi-formic text Various companions Went home And they recorded what they heard from him In their personal codices Okay These included Abdullah ibn Mas'ud And Ubay ibn Ka'ab And Abdullah ibn Abbas And the author of C1 The Sun'a Palamsas We'll call him companion X And others The codices Okay So we have these various text types Or textual traditions This is the term that's used by textual scholars So the textual tradition of ibn Mas'ud The textual tradition of ibn Ka'ab The textual tradition Of Abdullah ibn Abbas The textual tradition Of companion X So according to the Muslim sources During the Prophet's time There was widespread memorization Of the Quran There were scribal recordings of the Quran And there was an annual review Of the Quran every Ramadan With the angel Gabriel Alayhi salam Now if historians Are hesitant To accept the latter That's fine, but certainly it is a fact That in the Prophet's time The recitation of the Quran was widespread And it was being written down Okay, that he had In even very critical academics They admit this That he had scribes, official scribes Now the vast vast majority Of the texts of these companion codices Were in total agreement However according to our literary tradition There were some minor differences between them Okay, and our traditional scholars Wrote at length about these differences So they did not see this As a problem of preservation at all So our classical tradition Can easily account for these differences So we can say That they differed because of four things Okay, the companion codices Differed because of four things Various orthographies In other words The companions spelled words in different ways Okay They used different spelling conventions So like if I write If I spell the word color In Microsoft word as C-O-L-O-R, that's fine But if I put a U in there And it's misplaced But in England that's the correct spelling Different dialect This does not affect the meaning whatsoever Number two, variance due to the revealed Ahruf where the rasam was different And I'll give you possible examples of this Scribble errors, i.e. Misremembering the exact syntax With the exact wording And I'll give you possible examples And then differences due to Exegetical glosses or notes Made by companions In their personal codices And I'll give you possible examples Insha'Allah Okay, but let's continue the narrative here Various companions They go out into the Muslim world The newly conquered lands This was before the Uthmanic standardization Prior To 650 of the common era And these companions They take their textual traditions with them Ibn Mas'ud goes to Iraq Ibn Qab goes to Syria And companion X goes to Yemen So multitudes of people Are becoming Muslim in these lands And at some point the Muslims in these lands Outside of Medina Begin to become aware of Or come into contact with other textual traditions Textual traditions that they did not know about And these textual traditions Are slightly different than What they were taught by their teachers So this causes a bit of unrest in the provinces So the caliph So the caliph Uthman He's informed Of this unrest So he forms a codex committee in Medina Around 650 of the common era Maybe a few years earlier So he then attempted to recall All of these various manuscripts Floating around the provinces Because he's going to standardize the text Based upon the dominant Readings of the Quran in Medina at that time In other words The most prevalent readings Of the companions He's also going to write The Rasam, the continental skeleton The shorthand text of the Quran In the orthography of the Quresh The Qureshi dialect of Arabic Because this was the prophet's tribe And the majority of the Quran was revealed In this dialect So these actions more or less Stabilize the text once and for all Now different scholars They suggest that the Uthmani Textual tradition Was likely a critical addition itself And I think this is consistent with our narrative In other words, the Uthmani Textual tradition was drawn Out from the various Companion textual traditions That were present in Medina So the companion Zaid Ibn Thabit He called for these manuscripts And they were checked against each other And then checked against the memories Of the Hafaf Who served on the Codex committee And only those readings that were the most Widespread and popular Were recorded in the various Uthmani codices That would be sent out into the regional Provinces, into the Amsar Okay His diagram will help us a little bit So according to Sitri and Van Puten, Sean Anthony and others All extant Quranic manuscripts today Descend from a single text type The Uthmani text type The Uthmani textual tradition That is their textual stemma That's the sort of technical term Textual family All extant manuscripts except For one, the lower text of C1 The Yemeni palimpsest And we have to talk about that Okay, but all of these scholars Maintain that C1 And the Uthmani texts share A common ancestor And a scholar named Sadri calls this ancestor The prophetic archetype C1 was a very important discovery We'll see more about it later Inshallah, but I think that With the discovery of C1, which is likely A companion Codex, we can say now With a strong degree of confidence That the verse order in the Companion codices was very fixed In other words, the structure Of the suras was stable But not necessarily the sura order Although the sura order is generally Longest to shortest But this doesn't really matter So the word sura in Arabic means Offense or an enclosure Each sura in the Quran is a stand-alone Coherent literary unit So the order of the suras is not Essential So in C1, we'll talk more about C1 Two verses are transposed And one verse was clearly accidentally skipped So these were scribal errors We'll come back to that, inshallah Here So the letter P at the top Stands for the prophetic archetype This represents all of the Quranic recitations Of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam A la sab'ati ahruf Everything that was recited By the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam There are various arrows shooting Down from the letter P At the end of one arrow We see im, that's ibn Mas'ud At the end of another arrow We see c1, that's the sun'a palamsas And then c2, c3, etc These represent the companion codices These are the various companion Textual traditions That contain minor differences Due to various spelling conventions Variations in the ahruf Possible scribal errors And possible exegetical notes So this is what Zaid had to work with Now under each companion textual tradition There are arrows shooting down But converging upon a single point We can call this point The Uthmani textual tradition Okay? So the Uthmani textual tradition Is a critical addition That incorporated the strongest Readings Of the existing companion textual traditions Which were themselves Eyewitness recordings Of the prophetic archetype So in essence What we recite today Is an eclectic compilation Of the most widely attested Readings Of the prophetic archetype The best of the best Gathered from the companion textual traditions And Medina and checked against the memories Of the Quran memorizers And masters How long did it take? How long did it take? I don't know I can check on that fellow Oh definitely, yeah It was started and completed during his lifetime Yeah Probably more Yeah We'll get there, inshallah Okay So the committee could not have done a better job When you think about it The master Uthmani codex is called the Imam manuscript So this The master codex Was copied at least three times And sent to the Amsar, the regional provinces There's an Andalusian scholar named Abu Amr al-Dani Who wrote a book called al-Muqnir Which is a major reference when it comes to Qura'at and Mas'ahith And he's cited several times By Imam Suiti And according to Adani, there were four Uthmani codices Medina, Kufa, Basra, and Syria But he mentions there could have been up to seven And then Dr. Siddi conducted Something called phylogenetic analysis Okay, so this is Something that's used in biology To track evolutionary Sort of history of organisms And this analysis generated These various stemmas Or family trees of manuscripts I don't know exactly how it all works, but he does This is some really like cutting edge stuff But basically, Dr. Siddi Analyzed and aggregated all Of the extant Quranic manuscripts That he can get his hands on And he concluded that all of them go back To four ancestral codices Okay, with the exception of C1, we'll talk about that So all extant manuscripts Go back to Medina, Basra, Kufa, and Syria And then based on the carbon dating He says The time window is consistent with 650 of the common era The time of the caliph Uthman So Siddi concludes, as does others Van Putin and Nikolai Sinai That the broad strokes as it were Of the traditional Muslim narrative Of the Quran standardization By Uthman, around 650 Is historically accurate This is what the physical manuscript Evidence points to The physical manuscript evidence Points to the historicity Of the standard Muslim narrative So John Wandsboro is Refuted again Dr. Nazir Khan, there's a beautiful Essay, you can look it up Nazir Khan on The variants in the Quran He says that the traditional Muslim narrative Is true because, quote The absence of any compelling evidence To challenge it, as well as Quote the presence of considerable data In its support And then Siddi further says that the Algorithm suggests that the Medinan codex Is likely the Uthmanic archetype In other words, the Basra, Kufa, and Syrian codices were copied from the Medinan The Medinan codex was the first Codex that was produced This is what the evidence shows Physical evidence Now let's look a bit closer at this I said there are four reasons for The Uthmanic codices I think I skipped this Here's what I was saying earlier The Uthmanic textual tradition is a critical Edition that took the strongest readings From the existing companion textual traditions Which were themselves eyewitness recording Of the prophetic archetype And then a note here Abu Amr al-Dani In his Al-Mukneer That there were four Uthmanic codices Medinan, Kufa, Basra, and Syria And the Uthmanic codices Confirms the Muslim narrative And now the sort of general historical Consensus among secular historians Is to confirm the sort of Essential historical veracity Of the standard Muslim narrative So here's something interesting here So the top of this says Skeletal, that is Rasmi Variants in the textual tradition Of ibn Mas'ud Verses the textual tradition Of Uthman Of ibn Mas'ud It's not extant We only read about it The only Potential companion codices that we have Are C1, that was discovered in Yemen And the Birmingham manuscript But we have no external evidence Of ibn Mas'ud's Mus'af, his codex And C1 is definitely not his codex Now I should mention Some contemporary Muslim scholars have argued That there never was a Mus'af Of ibn Mas'ud In this book He explains this argument In chapter 13 It's called the so called Mus'af Of ibn Mas'ud And the alleged variances therein Personally I'm not convinced by this argument I think it's an interesting argument When you engage it, but it's not very compelling In my opinion, I think ibn Mas'ud Definitely did have a Mus'af What happened to his codex What happened to his Mus'af Ibn Ibn Iqam Probably not I mean one of the students of Imam al-Kisa'i Named Yahya al-Farah He actually said that he saw A physical copy Of the codex of ibn Mas'ud At the end of the second century So we have eyewitness testimony To his existence Way after Ibn Iqam Now was this a fake or a fabrication Was it the original or a copy There is a report in Ibn Abu Dawud That Uthman did decree That all personal fragments of the Quran That differed from the Uthmani Mus'af Be destroyed But Ibn Hajar al-Qanani he mentioned that It was possible that people erased the ink Rather than burned or destroyed Their manuscripts and of course The lower text we'll see of c1 Was actually erased However Ibn Mas'ud's codex Apparently survived well into the 8th century But nonetheless So suppose that it existed It is reported that In the textual tradition of Ibn Mas'ud Ibn Mas'ud read Surah 101 Like this Al-Qari'a So Al-Qari'atum Al-Qari'a Wa Ma'adzirakum Al-Qari'a Yawma yakoonu nasuka al-Farashi Al-Mabathoth So far so good Wa takoonu al-Jibaluka Suf al-Manfush Now what does the Uthmani textual tradition say Al-Qari'a So Ibn Mas'ud says The mountains will be like carded Suf Uthman says The mountains will be like carded Ehn Yeah So what can account for this difference Why is there a difference, number one There are three possible reasons Number one, this was an example Of synonymic variation One of the seven Ahruf In other words, at times In order to facilitate comprehension Of various Arab tribes The Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam Would recite verses in various ways And sometimes a word with a similar Meaning would be used for another word Because the latter was not known Or not popular among a given tribe So Suf and Ehn are synonymous They both mean Wul Wul It doesn't make a difference at all Which word is used in the context of this verse So the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam Recited it both ways At times The Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam Had this type of recitational latitude For the sake of For the sake of facilitating understanding That's one possibility Another possibility that I Intimidated earlier is that this simply an error That Ibn Mas'ud erroneously Wrote down the wrong word He remembered it wrong The Sahaba were not infallible A third possibility is that He wrote Suf somewhere in his codex Of course we don't have the codex We're speculating But he wrote the word Suf somewhere in his codex Maybe above or below the verse As a tafsiri note An exegetical note In other words to remind himself That Ehn means Suf Maybe because he wasn't familiar With the word Ehn And so he wrote down a synonym But then later some of his students Maybe thought that he was correcting the Mus'af Or that he was saying that either one Could be recited as a function Of the Ahruf We do know that I mean Imam al-Baqilani he mentioned that That Sahaba did write Tafsiri notes in their Mus'af Imam al-Jazali mentioned this as well That they would clarify things for themselves In their Mus'af So these were their personal codexies And so they would write their personal Notes in their personal codexies Just like you write notes in your books Sometimes people annotate their books So these notes in the companion codexies Were really the first form of tafsir Quranic exegesis In Islam So in the Sun'a palim says That we'll look at The author wrote at the beginning of The nine surah he said La Taqool Bismillah He's not writing the Quran here This is obviously a note to himself To remind himself not to say Bismillah Before reading surah to Toba But for the sake of argument Let's go with the first possibility Let's say that Ibn Mas'ud recited it as Suf because this is what he heard The Prophet recite Okay fine And there are reports that Ibn Mas'ud refused To submit his Mus'af because he said That he learned these readings from the Prophet himself That's fine Now even though Ibn Mas'ud's textual tradition Was popular in Iraq Is very likely That there were several companions in Medina Who learned the Quran from him So he was a great teacher of the Quran So it's very likely that there were Companions in Medina Who recited verse 5 Of surah 101 As Kasufil Manfush So why does the Uthmani textual Tradition say Erhin and not Suf Why It's very simple This is very very simple The latter reading Which Suf was just not Widely attested in Medina At the time of the Codex committee So Suf Okay fine was revealed to the Prophet So for the sake of stabilizing The text it was abandoned By the Codex committee Now you might say How can they abandon something From the Quran That's a good question How is this not How is this not a textual corruption How is this not nasqh Abrogation So let's start with the latter So with respect to nasqh No one other than the Prophet Can abrogate anything from the Quran By Allah's leave Perhaps Suf was abrogated By the Prophet In his final mu'alada In his final review with Gabriel And Zaid in his committee knew about this So that Erhin reflects the Prophet's Real But again let's say for argument's sake That it was not abrogated That both readings were valid How can the Codex committee abandon The Suf reading Again this is very very simple So the Ahruf Are a form of Ruqsa Okay Ruqsa means what Concession Alleviation Special permission The Quran was revealed in seven Ahruf To make understanding easier And a Ruqsa By rule may be abandoned For example if you travel during Ramadan Right You do not have to fast Right You can take that Ruqsa And not fast Or not take it and fast It's your choice So the Codex committee made the choice To stabilize the Rasam Upon one Harf To reverse Rather than to have one Uthmani Codex Say Suf and another Uthmani Codex Say Ahin because this would have Potentially led to the very same type Of unrest in the provinces That the Codex committee was specifically Formed a quwel That would have defeated the purpose So this was not Nasq This was not abrogation of the Quran This was abandoning a concession Abandoning a Ruqsa Neither was this Tahrif To change a word to another word That was not found in any companion Codex Or any manuscript Resided by a known companion For example If the Codex committee Wrote Just an example of a word That is totally unattested in this verse So this would have been Tahrif This would have been textual corruption But if the Codex committee Were to fabricate Or corrupt the Quran Then they would have been confronted By dozens and dozens and hundreds Of other Sahaba Who would have made life very difficult For the committee Somebody might say well Uthman was assassinated Yes he was Six years later He was killed by foreign rebels Who accused him of nepotism So it was political Now there are some biographers In standardization of the Quran But I think this is just natural You can't make everyone happy But there's no strong evidence Whatsoever that any companions Were upset with them Regarding the Codex The Sahaba were universally pleased With the actions of the committee Possibly That's possible That's one possibility The other possibility is that this is simply an error That he made Another possibility is that He wrote the word Suf in the margin of his Codex To remind him that it means Suf But then over time his students Believed that he was maybe correcting the Codex Or he was saying you can recite either one We don't really know So I'm taking the position That okay for argument's sake It was revealed both ways We don't know that for certain We don't even have his Mus'a This is all things that we're reading about his Mus'a Yeah it seems like it Yeah So this is a type of thing That these Christian polemicists This is the hill they want to die on Suf or Ihn I mean it's really desperation Right And again this is No there's several differences Yeah there's several differences But by and large It's exactly the same But there are a few differences And we can explain these differences Through our tradition Right But here's Just to compare this to a variant reading In the New Testament John 118, no one has ever seen God The only begotten Son No one has ever seen God So you can see how that's a big difference Is he the only begotten Son of God Or is he the only begotten God Right This is very different than Suf and Ihn Right Now what about the Hadith So this is a Hadith That Christian polemicists love to quote It's in Bukhari And this Hadith is supposed to like shatter Our narrative But again it actually supports our narrative So it's a Hadith that says The Prophet SAW said Take the Qur'an Take the Qur'an Take the Qur'an from four Take the Qur'an from four Mu'ad So first thing, he did not say only these four The Prophet SAW mentioned these four Because they were the most eminent Teachers of the Qur'an in his day But here the Christian polemicist says Aha The Prophet said take the Qur'an from Ibn Mas'ud Yet the Codex committee abandoned Many of his readings Gotcha Mr. Muslim So this is just A stupid argument Let's think about this And what did the companions do? Did they just ignore him? No, they obviously listened to him And learned the Qur'an from Ibn Mas'ud Not all of them, someone to Ubey Someone to Mu'ad, etc The companions who learned From Ibn Mas'ud probably wrote down What they learned So when Zaid asked the generality Of the companions to bring Their manuscripts to the Masjid During the standardization process Those manuscripts were probably present And I already said that the Uthmani Textual tradition was a critical addition That assimilated the strongest readings From the existing companion Textual traditions. In other words Much of the textual tradition of Ibn Mas'ud Was incorporated Into the Uthmani textual tradition So the Codex committee did take From Ibn Mas'ud and Ibn Ka'ab And Salim And Mu'ad and others The Codex committee was in total conformity With this hadith This hadith absolutely Works against the Christian polemicists Okay Let's move on here Some orientalists And many modern Christian polemicists Claimed that since there are reports That Ibn Mas'ud's Codex did not contain al-Fatiha That Ibn Mas'ud did not consider al-Fatiha A part of the Qur'an So they're trying their best here So they introduced this Shubha And for me This goes beyond ridiculous This is like ludicrous Ludicrous is more Strange anyway If this report about his Codex is accurate It's obvious that Ibn Mas'ud Did not write al-Fatiha In his Codex because al-Fatiha Was so ubiquitous There was no need to write it down And in fact a scholar named Abu Bakr al-Anbari Is quoted By Imam al-Qurtubi So according to Anbari Ibn Mas'ud was asked point blank Why didn't you write al-Fatiha In your Mus'ha And Ibn Mas'ud responded That if I would have written it I would have written it before every Surah So this is how Muslims pray We recite al-Fatiha And then another Surah So Al-Anbari goes on to say That Ibn Mas'ud did not write it Because there is no need All the Muslims had it memorized And so he left it off for the sake of brevity And for the polemicists he was a non-secretor A non-secretor In other words an argument whose conclusions Does not follow So Ibn Mas'ud did not write a Surah down in his Mus'ha Therefore he denied that it was revelation No, at this early time In history Orality took precedence over writing Okay And here's a quote from Dr. Nasir Khan The reality is that The Sahaba used the writings of the Quran As memory aids for personal worship Of recitation And consequently never intended them as Complete official copies of the Quran Imam Al-Tabri actually In his tafsir Of this ayah 1587 Indeed we gave you the seven Off-Repeated verses and the great Quran Imam Al-Tabri in his tafsir He says that Like what is the off-repeated Off-Repeated one What does that mean? He quotes a statement from Ibn Mas'ud Where Ibn Mas'ud said Al-Fatiha And the great Quran said Sayyid Al-Quran Ibn Mas'ud is a statement attributed to him A sound statement that When the Quran says It's referring to Al-Fatiha So how could he reject Al-Fatiha As being part of the Quran Now a critic here might say Well those traditions could have been fabricated It just seems so convenient Okay but again This is not a historical argument It's an argument that a Christian apologist Will use because he's forced to Because these traditions are devastating to his case But fine, let's forget about These statements of Ibn Mas'ud Let's use logic in common sense If Ibn Mas'ud did not consider Al-Fatiha To be part of the Quran And how did he pray? How did his students pray? In Kufa Ibn Qais How did their students pray? We know their name How did their students pray? Abu Hanifa If Ibn Mas'ud did not believe in Al-Fatiha This causes a cascade Of unsolved mysteries In Bukhari we're told that Ibn Mas'ud Student Alqama actually traveled to Syria And met with a companion named Abu Darda And they talked about the textual tradition of Ibn Mas'ud Did Alqama dispute With Abu Darda and his hundreds of students About the Quranic status of Al-Fatiha? No, he didn't If he did You better believe that we would have heard about that This would have made headlines Okay The other question is When The codex, when the Uthmani codex came into Kufa With Al-Fatiha written On the first page Did the students of Ibn Mas'ud that were in Kufa Say that's not the Quran And deny the Fatiha? Again, we would have heard about that They would have been brought up on charges For blasphemy and put in prison or punished There's nothing like this What's interesting also is Arthur Jeffery Who is an Australian orientalist He points out that Ibn Abu Dawud Mentioned in his Kitab al-Musahif That is reported that Ibn Mas'ud Used to recite Al-Fatiha as Arshidna Sirat al-Mustaqeen Arshidna Instead of Ibn Sirat al-Mustaqeen And other critics are quick to point this out as well Our scholars are very, very transparent They mention all of these things There's nothing to hide But here's the problem for the critics They can't have it both ways So did Ibn Mas'ud believe in Al-Fatiha Or not Is it nothing or is it Arshidna? We can't have it both ways So, I already mentioned that It is beyond obvious that Ibn Mas'ud Considered Al-Fatiha to be a surah of the Quran But what about this business of Arshidna Was this an authentic variant reading Like Malik and Malik Could it have been revealed To the Prophet ﷺ in this way In addition to Ibn Sirat al-Mustaqeen As a function of the Ahruf The answer is yes, it's possible Although highly improbable Therefore not plausible Perhaps Ibn Mas'ud meant this Again to be an explanatory note A tafsiri note To himself that Hidayah In this verse means Irshad Maybe that's possible But it's anomalous It's isolated, it has no solid basis And Ar-Qiraat Come from mass transmitted Living traditions Isolated or spurious reports And not from remote possibilities Right, so the bottom line Is no one denied al-Fatiha This is just a smoke screen The other thing they bring up to create another shubha Is a report that states that Ibn Mas'ud's Mus'af lacked the last two surahs Of the Quran, the surah 113 and 114 It's called al-Mu'awah the Tain Okay Yes, so Yuti mentions this And therefore here comes the wild Non-secretary conclusion again Ibn Mas'ud rejected these two surahs As being the Quran And they cite some isolated reports Where Ibn Mas'ud erased these surahs from his codex So my response here Has four parts Number one We've already established That for Ibn Mas'ud If something was not written in his Mus'af It did not mean That he rejected it as being the Quran Okay, perhaps he only wrote it in his Mus'af Perhaps he only wrote in his Mus'af What he heard the Prophet recite in prayer So he didn't hear these two surahs Recited in prayer But that doesn't mean that he rejected them as the Quran Of course the Fatiha would be an exception here Because it was so ubiquitous Number two Our reading traditions come from mass transmission Not from isolated reports Number three According to Imam Shamsuddin al-Jazari In his famous book Four of the ten mass transmitted reading traditions So we'll talk about these Asim, Hamza, Al-Kisa'i, and Khalaf All in Iraq All of these can be traced To the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam Through Abdullah ibn Mas'ud And all of them recite Surah 113 and 114 And number four Even if this were true And this is the point that Ibn Hajjab makes Even if this were true And Ibn Mas'ud erased these two surahs From his Mus'af And then there'd be the Quran It's clear from his students And their students that he eventually Did come to believe In their Quranic status This is the point that Ibn Hajjab Even if the statement is true It's obvious that he changes mind later So this is yet another red herring That these polemicists want us to chase This is making a mountain out of a molehill Basically Okay, let's move to the Mus'af Of another companion So the polemicists, they also absolutely Love this Mus'af Again, we don't actually have it, it's not extant We only have writings that describe it Any questions, so far? So Okay What's the big deal about this Mus'af? Well, there are reports that the Mus'af Of Ibn Hajjab contained two additional surahs That did not Make it into the Uthmani Codex Okay So First of all, Al-Alami mentions in his book This book here, the history of the Quranic text That this report was first mentioned by someone Named Hamad ibn Salamah In 167 Hijrah And that there's a major gap In the isht'na of this report Of at least two or three generations So Al-Alami calls this report Defective and spurious Nonetheless, let's look at these so-called surahs Okay The first so-called surah And here it is, I'll read the Entire Surah O Allah, we invoke you for help Bigger forgiveness and we believe in you And trust in you and praise you the best way we can And we thank you And we are not ungrateful to you We turn away from the one who disobeyed you So that's it, this is supposed to be a surah Not sure how many verses it is The second so-called surah is apparently called Suratul Haft O Allah, we worship you and prostrate ourselves Before you and we hasten towards you And serve you and we hope to receive your mercy And we dread your torment Surely the disbelievers shall incur your torment Okay Now, if you're listening to this right now Especially if you're Hanafi You must have immediately recognized What I just read is something called Dua Al-Qunut It's also called Al-Qunut Al-Hanafiya So this is a very popular prophetic invocation It was reported in numerous hadith That the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam Would often recite this supplication Dua Al-Qunut during the Audible prayers Okay, and these are just a few examples here Of hadith that are graded as A strong hadith Like the first one says An Ubey ibn Ka'ab On the authority of The same Ubey ibn Ka'ab who wrote The codex in question The Messenger of God used to pray Witer and recite Al-Qunut before bowing The second hadith In Sunan al-Nasa'i On the authority of The Messenger of God used to pray Witer and he would recite In the first Surah 87 In the second Surah 109 And the third Surah 112 And then Al-Qunut before bowing And then the hadith in Tirmidhi From Baray ibn U'azib The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam used to recite Al-Qunut In the morning and sunset prayer So this was something the Sahaba heard the Prophet say in prayer Right, now Dr. Sean Anthony Who's a professor at The Ohio State University You know an up and coming Academic secular Scholar of the Quran He's not hostile, he's not a polemicist But he's written on this topic Of the alleged two lost Surahs And he concludes This is a quote from him A horde of evidence strongly indicates That not merely Ubey ibn Ka'ab But also other companions regarded the Surahs As part of the Quran and therefore Part of the prophetic revelation given to Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam I don't necessarily disagree with him here I think it's certainly understandable Why some companions Could have thought that these were Surahs The Prophet used to recite them in prayer Okay, this is no doubt Why Ubey ibn Ka'ab and maybe others Wrote these supplications down In their mushafs Because the Prophet would recite them in prayer But then Anthony says this He says that these Surahs Quote, for whatever reason Came to be excluded from the canon In the process of Othman's collection And textual canonization of the prophetic revelation For whatever reason So I think the reason is more than obvious These so called Surahs Were not deemed genuine Surahs By the Codex committee Because the vast majority Of the companions always knew them To be special supplications That the Prophet would recite in prayer Nonetheless, but not as Quranic Surahs And the companions who did regard them As Surahs were simply wrong They were under a misapprehension So again, the Uthmanic textual tradition Was the most widely recited rendition Of the prophetic archetype Because it was Cold from the most widely attested reading Of the companions So why else would the committee exclude them Right Why would they exclude these So called Surahs if they're Surahs Do they contain some You know, aberrant or blasphemous teaching No, do they contain some You know, embarrassing grammatical errors No, do their meanings contradict The rest of the Quran in some way No, okay, so this is This is enough But for what it's worth Let's look at the internal evidence Of these so called Surahs Okay So there's a scholar Dr. Van Putin Marian Van Putin who says that No, I think they sound like the Quran And I think they're Surahs of the Quran And I really don't think that they sound like the Quran I think the style and diction Of these so called Surahs Contravene the Quranic idiom The reason is because they are the words of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam So what I mean is they're in correct Arabic The meanings are sound And they agree with the theology And message of the Quran But stylistically, they are not Quranic Okay So And I'll give you just two pieces Internal evidence of that So like the Both of these so called Surahs begin with Allahumma Right? Meaning oh God But Allahumma never appears in the Quran As the first word of any verse As it does in these so called Surahs In every occurrence in the Quran Allahumma is preceded by either Qul, Qala Or something equivalent Like da'wahum fiha Subhanak Allahumma Will be, in other words, God is quoting The people of Paradise So this is equivalent to saying Qalu Subhanak Allahumma So it's contrary to the Addiction of the Quran And then number two here And even Anthony calls this one Compelling evidence In so called Surah al-Khala it says Wala nakfuruka We don't disbelieve in you So if you go back here You see that Wala nakfuruka Nakfuruka Right? With the verb Nakfuru And then there's a second person masculine singular Pronominal suffix As a direct object Nakfuru ka However in the idiom of the Quran We should have expected to see Nakfuru bi ka The Quran always uses the preposition B Before the object of the verb kafara In other words, this verb always takes an Indirect object And at the bottom of the slide Those are just a few examples Kafa takfuruna billa Wala dina kafuru wa kathabu bi ayaatilla Fala ma ja'hum Ma arafu kafuru bihi Wa ma yakfuru biha ila al-Fasih There are hundreds of examples like this And every single time this happens So no, this is Dua al-Khunut It is the inspired speech of the Prophet It is not the verbatim or If Sean Anthony's contention is correct And some of the companions believe these words To be Quranic Suwar Then the Codex Committee corrected their misunderstanding Again, the solution is very simple So here I just make a point here I'll just go over this quickly That I talk about the guilt complex Of some of the Christian polemises So you should be aware of this I think This is a bit psychological I'm going to just go over this quickly Just kind of review it According to the Quran Surah Al-Baqarah, Allah SWT tells us That there are some Ahl al-Kitab Whose desire Is to make you kafar Because the truth of Islam has been manifest to them And they have envy Right? It's called the guilt complex In other words, I mean if you take A class on higher Biblical criticism In the academy They completely rip the Bible to shreds And they actually have now Like exit counseling Because you have people that go Like Christians who are very devout They go to the seminary And they take these classes on The Pentateuch and the four Gospels And source criticism, redaction criticism Because they want to get their Masters of Divinity Or something, they're M.Div And then they end up losing faith This happens a lot So they have to have this exit counseling So a lot of them, they become Very bitter Right? And turn on The Quran suddenly So they have this attitude of Well, if my book is going down in flames I'm taking your book down with it So they want us to sort of commiserate with them And this is why a lot of these Christian apologists are probing Into sort of the pre-Othmonic Quran and the companion codices And Drawing these wild conclusions And looking at these reports in our Traditional literature Anyway So I think I'll just Skip past this part So basically what they want to do Is They're looking for Some sort of Like holy grail when it comes to Quranic manuscripts Like in New Testament manuscripts Like they discovered that first I mentioned earlier, the only verse That describes the Trinity is not found In the best Greek manuscripts That's what they're looking for In our manuscripts, they're looking for An extra surah somewhere There's a surah That's Clearly a surah, not a dua Like clearly And there's an ayat It's clearly a surah That it's not in the Othmanic codex Or there's a version Of the verse that is completely different The wording is different The theology is different, something like that Because this is what happened to their own text This is what's happening in their own text So this is why they're also Obsessed with the sun'ah palimpsest That we'll talk about The manuscript found in sun'ah And you'll see how they Treat that manuscript Okay So anyway, we'll skip over that Now what is The Othmanic textual tradition So we can break this down a little bit more What is this The Othmanic textual tradition is the Quran we recite today What is it? It is a collection of the dominant readings of the Quran By the Sahaba in Medina In 650 of the common era Exactly, yeah At the latest And the committee, who was on the committee? Sahaba, eyewitnesses, ear-witnesses To the Prophet ﷺ Hufad of the Quran Hufad of the Prophet ﷺ Zaid was the neighbor of the Prophet ﷺ Alright So eyewitnesses So when Othman commissioned Zaid as director Zaid commanded that all Sahaba Who had any personal Quranic manuscripts Right, companion codices in their homes To bring them to the masjid Okay, again, we know that the Prophet ﷺ Had appointed scribes These are called Qutab al-Wahi And according to Muslim sources For every portion of the Quran presented Zaid demanded two witnesses What does two witnesses mean? So Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani He says Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani says Two witnesses, we testified That the verse, or literally that which was written Was written verbatim In the very presence of the Prophet In other words The two men who saw it written In the very presence Of the Prophet ﷺ So al-Alami clarifies Two men who saw it written under the Prophet's supervision Two of the official scribes Really And this was based on the verse in the Quran That says that whenever we enter into a contract Let two witnesses from your men bear witness Right So these men must witness the actual writing Of the contract So we can imagine then That there were many many manuscripts Submitted by different companions In the same verses So a lot of duplicates We can also imagine that due to the Quran Being revealed in 7 Ahruf That there were some variations of the same verses In the manuscripts of different companions So two witnesses does not mean That only two men were reciting those verses Or that only two men remember hearing the Prophet Recite those verses It meant that two men distinctly remember When those verses were ordered By the Prophet himself to be transcribed Those verses could have been recited By thousands of companions Hundreds of whom heard the Prophet recite them So why did Uthman choose Zaid To head the committee The answer is In addition to Zaid being The Prophet's close companion And his neighbor Zaid was also the chief scribe Of the Prophet Sayyidina And he was also a Hafid of the Quran And all men serving on the Codex committee were Hafad So whenever a manuscript was witnessed for By two men The committee then checked it against other manuscripts And then against their memories And the memories of the well known Hafad of the Quran And those readings that were deemed to be the most Widely recited among the Hafad The Quran masters Among the companions As well as among the generality of the other companions Those readings were officially transcribed In the Master Uthmani Codex So written and recited materials Were collated against each other To determine The most dominant readings Now why did Zaid do all of this Why the two witnesses Why not just write down What the committee was reciting Why look at the manuscripts And the answer is Zaid and the committee wanted to reconcile The written Quran with the recited Quran They wanted to make doubly sure That nothing was left unaccounted for So perhaps there were verses written down That were not being recited If so, why Perhaps there were verses being recited That were not written down If so, why He wanted to make He wanted to ensure total agreement and accuracy So Zaid said I gathered the Quran From various manuscripts And from the memories of men So let's say for instance For instance That a manuscript or two Was presented That contained the dua al-khunut The two so-called surahs That were found in the Musaf of Ube ibn Qaf At least as it's reported Why were these verses not transcribed In the Master Codex by the committee Were they somehow theologically offensive? No, we already covered that Perhaps these verses lacked A single witness among the scribes In other words, they could not verify That the Prophet SAW himself considered The verses to be the Quran Perhaps these verses were not Widely recited as surahs of the Quran In the end, the committee demanded Or deemed that these verses Constituted a prophetic supplication Not Quranic ayat And that the companions who considered them To be surahs were simply wrong So the committee did their due diligence They really could not have done A better job Now, according to the Muslim sources The last two verses of surah to Toba Were one witness Abu Khusayma al-Ansari Again, this did not mean that only one man Was reciting those verses Or that only one man heard the Prophet Recite those verses It meant that only one man remembered When these verses were transcribed By order of the Prophet SAW They went down and wrote these two verses In the Master Codex Despite having only one witness Precisely because these verses Were so widely recited amongst There really was no doubt about them So it appeared that the rule of two Was important to the committee But it was still secondary To what the committee regarded as being widely recited Or mass transmitted In recitation That's important for the companions The written word was important But it took a back seat to what was widespread In recitation Okay, so coming down the Rounding third base here Coming down home stretch Coming to the end Now Many modern anti-Muslim polemicists Like I said They enjoy sort of raising doubts and suspicions About the actions of the Codex Committee under Uthman And their claim is basically that The Uthmani textual tradition The Quran we recite today Is not what the Prophet used to recite That the Uthmani text is somehow Incorrect or corrupted And they'll appeal to two things To support their position So number one They will appeal to some of the radical claims Of the extreme elements Of the leaders of the Rafidah The Shia Who claim that Uthman's committee corrupted the Quran And number two They will appeal to the fact That many of the readings of the Quran Recorded in the various companion codices Differed from the standard Uthmani Codex So let's look at the first So-called piece of evidence Now it is true that there have been a few Shiite scholars Who have claimed that Uthman's committee manipulated At least a couple of verses That praise the Ahl al-Bait At the Prophet's family In other words, the committee did What the Quran says that certain Jewish Scribes did to the Hebrew Bible The Quran says Which literally means They shifted words out of their Proper contexts So they decontextualized the text Which is a form of textual corruption And the Shiites actually identify These verses as What they call Ayatul Ghadir And Ayatul Tathir Which appear in Surahs 5 and 33 Of the Uthmanic Quran Respectively So their claim is that There are statements in these verses Which really belong in other Surahs By placing them In the present Surahs 5 and 33 The committee altered Their true contexts And their true meanings So when these anti-Muslim atheists Are Christian polemicists, they hear stuff like this They jump all over it, right? It's music to their ears, they say Ah, you see, even other Muslims are saying That Uthman's codex is corrupted And unreliable, so on and so forth And Wansbro, he pointed out That Muslims went from an interfaith Accusation of scriptural alteration To an intrafaith accusation Of scriptural alteration So basically, here's my two fold Response to this Number one, the vast majority Of Shi'a do not make this claim Okay, the vast vast majority This claim actually clashes With clear cut texts Within the Quran Surah al-Hijr, ayat number 9 We have revealed the vikr And we will I mean the Quran And we will preserve it I mean one would have to interpret this verse In very strange and very cryptic ways In order to maintain One's claim that the Quran Has been corrupted Based upon the very clear and Apparent meaning of this verse The Quran is preserved, and to say otherwise Is zandakais, is heresy So this is really a fringe Opinion among a few Shi'ite exigents Okay, that the overwhelming majority Do not endorse That's important to mention That's the first part Of my response, the second part is Historically and logically This claim completely implodes Into oblivion Let me show you why, think about this If the Codex committee of Uthman Manipulated or changed or corrupted verses Of the Quran, that praised Ahl al-Bait, then surely this would Have run afoul of Saydina Ali Right So Does Saydina Ali secretly reciting Some uncorrupted form Of these verses In his home with Imam Hassan Imam Hussein So if certain Shi'ites should answer This question with a yes Then when Ali became caliph And moved to the capital The Kufa, why didn't he call for another Codex committee To quote correct the Mushaf He could have done that, he was Khalifatul Muslimeen Why didn't he form a second Committee to restore These verses and correct The Uthmani Codex But what did Ali actually do He actually led the prayers in Kufa Every day by reciting the Uthmani textual tradition So he recited exactly What was presented to the Kufans Five years earlier by Abdul Rahman As-Sulami Who actually brought the Uthmani Codex In the Kufa So the claim that the Committee corrupted the Quran Because they wanted to disparage Or delegitimize The family of the Prophet is absolute Garbage, it's total garbage And again I think The few Shi'ite leaders That make this claim There's something else happening With them, there's something There's something else happening Now the second piece of evidence That the Muslim polemicists will use In order to throw suspicion Upon the Codex committee is the fact That some of the readings in the Uthmani Codex differed from the Uthmani Codex But now let's talk about The San'a Palim text This is the final part Of this presentation This is the This is something we really have to Be aware of Okay This is the only manuscript Ever found of the Quran That is different in its textual tradition Than the Uthmani Codex Okay So we talked about Ibn Mas'ud and Ibn Kaab Now the lower text Of the Yemeni Palim Cest is another example What do I mean by lower text? Okay so in 1972 The grand mosque in San'a In Yemen was being renovated And up in the roof They found this huge Mus'ha And they brought it down And it's about 41% Of the Quran And they read it and it's the Uthmani Codex It's just The Uthmani Codex And then they brought in scholars from Europe German scholars And they took it back and they analyzed it And they noticed that there's actually an under text Right So the word Palim Cest This is a technical term Palim Cest means An ancient sort of white board Right so To make a Codex A Codex is a book like a Q'aab Of parchment Of leather to make one Quran One Mus'ha you have to slaughter 300 animals For one book 300 animals So you can see how expensive it is To make one book So what you can actually do with a Parchment is you can erase it And write over it And when that happens The name of this text This Mus'ha is called a Palim Cest An ancient sort of white board So when they took it back To wherever they took it back They noticed under sort of ultraviolet light That there's an under text Okay And that this under text is slightly different Than the Uthmani Textual tradition that was written over it Okay No Yeah Because it's very expensive You know it's reused things You might have one artist Who had like three canvases his whole life And he's just painting over them They would definitely do this with manuscripts Okay Now according to the most Authoritative academic study Done on the Palim Cest So this was by two scholars named Saadiri And Goudarzi And one Stanford and one was at Harvard The lower text of the Yemeni Palim Cest Was most likely a companion codex It was a codex that belonged to a Sahabi So Saadiri calls it C1 The codex of an unknown companion Let me see Yes, here it is Okay, so it is the only manuscript As I mentioned The only manuscript of the Quran ever discovered That is not part of the Uthmani textual tradition Or Uthmani textual stemma Or family C1 is As I said 41% of the Quran Is most likely written between 617 And 647 Obviously before the codex committee Like right before the codex committee Now I've already explained why There are some differences among the Companion textual traditions According to our traditional sources So remember we said there's four reasons why Different spelling conventions Number two variants Due to the revealed Ahuruf With a Rustam it's slightly different Number three possible scribal errors Number four possible exegetical glosses Or notes made by the Companions So the lower text of C1 Is no different So just as our tradition perfectly explains The variants In the textual traditions of Ibn Mas'ud In Uba ibn Qab It also perfectly explains the variants In the textual tradition of C1 So at the end of the day C1 is You know what one of my colleagues Referred to as a big and nothing burger That it's The discovery of C1 actually supports The Muslim narrative So anti-Muslim polemicists they wanted Something so bad They wanted to find some additional Verses, additional surahs Or highly theologically Significant material In C1 when compared to the Uthmani textual tradition And there was really nothing Significant So let's look at some of The differences here Okay So By the way there's a really nice Short video on YouTube that explains Basically all of the differences It's like 15 minutes long It's called what do the San'a Mani scripts Tell us about the Quran It's by al-muqaddima Just put al-muqaddima and then San'a Mani script or something It should come up, a very good video I'll just summarize the major findings here Okay there are 35 Textual differences Between C1 and the Uthmani text Where instead of like a wa Instead of a lan it says la Or a definite article is missing From a word like that These are differences in prepositions Particles and definite articles There are also another 25 or so differences In nouns and verbs 18 of the 25 are with similar Sounding words These are very easily explained away as human error Like sometimes a word in C1 is missing When compared to Uthman This is again likely human error So people are much more likely to leave a word out When writing from memory Than add a word There are a few instances however Where C1 has an extra word when compared to Uthman But even these can be explained away As textual assimilation Which is another form of human error So for example in the Uthmani tradition Surat al-Baqarah verse 193 says C1 says So C1 has this extra word So word at C1 get this Word from It's very likely that the scribe confused 2193 with 839 Because in Surat al-Anfal Verse 39 We do have This is called textual assimilation Of parallel verses This is very common And if you ever memorize Quran You probably do this all the time That you confuse in your mind Similar sounding verses Because many of the ayat are very similar There might be a slight difference Is it this one or is it that one That's very clearly what's happening here So almost all of these additions in C1 Can be explained by textual assimilation Of parallel verses There are more instances where the Uthmani text Has additional words that are not in C1 And according to Sadri and Bergman In this paper they wrote on this called The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet And the Quran of the Prophet They say this means that the Uthmani tradition Is closer to the prophetic archetype Than C1 or Ibn Masrood Now from our perspective as Muslims We have sort of no problem saying that It is possible That many of these differences Between C1 and the Uthmani Codex Are due to the revealed 7 Aharuf In other words it's possible That al-Baqarah 193 Is revealed as That the Uthmani committee Stabilized the Rassam Based upon the most prevalent reading But with this verse specifically This just seems like a scribal error So here's the conclusion Of Behnam Sadri And Yui Bergman About the Yemeni Palimpsest This again the most rigorous Academic study ever done On secular study On the Yemeni Palimpsest This is their conclusion In any case, textual criticism suggests The standard version What do they mean by standard version? The standard version is the most Faithful representation Among the known codices of the Quran As recited by the Prophet This appears at first as a curious coincidence But on second thought, not surprising If anyone had the resources To ensure that a reliable version be chosen It would have been the caliph And if anyone had more to lose By botching up the task again would have been Uthman, whose political legitimacy And efficacy as caliph dependent completely On the goodwill of fellow distinguished associates Of the Prophet, the remarkable few And minor skeletal morphemic differences Among the codices Uthman sent To the cities is another indication Of the care that was put into the process Of standardization And I'll talk about those Minor skeletal morphemic differences But that's the Yemeni Palimpsest Any questions on The Yemeni Palimpsest It's just You know, it's everything Can be explained away To our tradition. There's nothing new There's nothing mysterious, nothing Grammatic. Okay, so Let's see here. Yeah, we're coming Coming down to the end of the chat I want to talk a little bit here about Let's see Yeah, okay So there's a little bit left here But I want to talk about the canonical Reading traditions The next topic that's really, really important So how do we go from the Uthmani Masahif To the 10 authorized Qura'at In other words, how do we go from the Uthmani textual tradition To the canonical reading traditions What are the canonical reading traditions? Like Hafs and Asim And so on and so forth Warsh Okay Hafs and Asim And Nafir and so on and so forth So The Caliph Uthman He sent out 4 or 5 or 7 up to 11 copies Of the Medinian master codex To these major Muslim cities There are various reports According to Suyuti, the most popular report states That Uthman made 5 copies Of the master codex He made 5 copies. That's the most popular report And he sent them to Mecca Basra, Kufa, Damascus And then another one in Medina But remember, we said these codices are not Voweled The diacritical system had not even been Invented yet Abu-Aswara-duali Would develop an early form of it A bit later So these These codices were unveiled They're also dotless. There are no dots And dots were used by the Arabs at that time So why didn't Uthman dot his codices? The answer again is very simple By leaving the Rusun The continental skeletons Of these codices undotted Uthman allowed for the Ahruf To be accommodated by the reciters So reciters in these Amsar These major cities, these regional areas Could plug into the text The divinely revealed Ahruf The recitational variances Given to the Prophet Salaam And definitively dotting the text Would have severely limited their abilities to do this So again, the text of the Quran Had always been multi-formic Not uniformic Since the time of the Prophet Salaam And so Uthman wanted that key aspect of the Quran To be transmitted to the next generation Does that make sense? Why he chose not to dot anything? There's no vowels But why did he dot them? It would have limited the Ahruf Now I said earlier that Uthman's community stabilized the text once and for all And this is true But how would all of the Ahruf In their totality be accommodated By the Uthmanic codices Hence the Uthmanic textual tradition So the most coherent answer is that They were not all accommodated in their totality So it is not the opinion Of our classical scholars That the totality of the Ahruf Must be preserved and recited In order for the Quran to be preserved As long as at least one Harf Is presented of any given verse Then the Quran is preserved This is Imam al-Jazari Ibn Hajj al-Asqalani Etc Not all of the Ahruf In their totality are contained Within the Uthmanic textual tradition This is not necessary So as you said earlier Maybe Suf al-Manfush Suf would have been revealed But we're not reciting it Because we have one Harf of that ayah And that's sufficient So remember, the Ahruf were given as a concession A ruqsa And so one may abandon a concession As we said, this is why for example All of the Uthmanic codices Read Ahn in Surah 101 Verse 5 And not Suf al-Manfush If Suf was revealed as a Harf It did not need to be recommedated And having again russum that were at odds Would have caused more turmoil in the provinces So the committee chose Ahn al-Manfush Because that was a more popular reading And so that's what they wrote in all of the regional codices Okay, but here's another question Oh, sorry But even with this said, Uthman did allow For a slight variance In the russum of his codices When it came to some particular variation So prepositions, particles But not words or phrases So according to Abu Urbaid Uthman's six codices Were in 99.999% agreement In the russum Okay, there was a difference of 43 characters Out of almost 374,000 characters And this was intentional So the committee did accommodate For a few of the well-attested Particular variations That very slightly altered the russum For example, in the Meccan Codex There's an additional preposition min In verse 100 of Surah Zatoba Okay, so that does not appear in the other codices So that's two characters, min and noon And there are a few more like this Totaling 43 characters Across six codices So again, these were intentional They were accommodating various authorized readings The other question is How did the reciders Living in these regional cities How did they know how to plug The ahruf into the russum? How did they know how to read An unvalued, undotted text? How did they know how to read it? Was it just guesswork? Saying, well, they were Arabs And they knew that that doesn't cut it That means nothing Right? If you give a newspaper That's unvalued to an average Arab He's going to struggle a bit trying to read it Those are words that he's very familiar with So classical orientalists like, you know Gold Zeier and Arthur Jeffrey They used to claim That indeed reciders were at Total liberty to vowel And dot the text however they wanted As long as the text sort of made sense to them It was all good And this is why there are different reading traditions Or this is why the different Reading traditions eventually developed According to the orientalists And today some neo-Orientalists And Christian polemists will say this So this is demonstrably false And I'll show you why, inshallah My clicker Okay, so But first, how What else do our sources say about what Uthman did? So Uthman, inshallah He did incredible service for this religion He did not simply send These codices to these cities Without guidance So he sent with each codex A master qari Who was trained A trained reciter of the Quran Who was either a companion of the prophet Or a student of a companion Who mastered how to read his respective codex Upon all of its possible And authentically transmitted ahruf So for example He sent al-Mughira ibn-u-Shihab To Syria with the damasin codex He sent Abdulrahman al-Sulami To Kufa with the Kufa in codex So it was these Committee appointed Qur'an Who taught the regional reciters The regional Qur'an How to read the codices And I'll demonstrate this in a minute I'll demonstrate this in a minute Ibn-u-Shihab said Al-Qira'ah sunnah Very important Recitation is sunnah i.e. it is from the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam So all of this was talaqee The recitation of the Qur'an was passed down Verbatim Teacher to student Until it reached us So imagine that Abdulrahman al-Sulami Arrives in Kufa with his codex Ibn-u-Shihab's textual tradition Was popular in Kufa When al-Sulami arrived However, many of the readings of Ibn-u-Shihab Were either abrogated by the prophet During his final mu'arada With Gabriel Or they were abandoned by the committee Because they were not strongly backed By the majority of the companions in Medina And Uthman wanted to stabilize the text However, by and large The Uthmani textual tradition And the textual tradition of Ibn-u-Shihab Were in total agreement The textual tradition was based upon The strongest readings of the companions Including many of the readings of Ibn-u-Shihab So this is why Ibn-u-Shihab is mentioned In the isnaad of Hafs and Asim Along with other Sahaba So the isnaad begins with the prophet Then Ali ibn Abi Talib And Ibn-u-Shihab And Ibn-u-Shihab And others But these are the most imminent And then Ibn-u-Shihab He was the Master Qari Who brought the Kufa and Kodex Then his most prominent student Asim And then his most prominent students One of his most prominent students Hafs ibn-u-Shihab So how did Asim vowel and dot his regional Kodex Asim when he was Reading the Quran Learning the Quran How did he dot and vowel it Did he have absolute free To vowel and dot whatever he wanted As long as the text made sense Or did he have no choice What so ever So the answer is in the middle He had something called He had the ability to choose But only from among a fixed Number of variants That all had origin in the prophetic Archetype In other words variants that were Talked to him by his teacher Abdulrahman Asulami With all of its various Ahruf These are variants that had strong And connected chains of transmission So The regional reciters were obligated To fulfill three conditions When they chose their readings In order for their readings To be correct and authorized They must fulfill three conditions Number one Their readings must be in agreement With the Rasim of at least Number two Their readings must be mass transmitted That is transmitted through generations After generations of reciters With uninterrupted chains of transmission Tracing back to the prophecy And number three Which is more secondary Their readings must be in correct Arabic Because there's nothing mass transmitted That agrees with the Uthmani That is an incorrect Arabic Everything's in correct Arabic Of course there's some Modern You know the polemicists Or critics of the Quran that will point out Certain things in the Quran and say This is a grammatical error but none of these things are Actually true and we can look into that In the next seminar inshallah Now in the fourth century Hijri an Iraqi scholar Named Abu Bakr ibn Mujahid Okay this is very important He wrote a famous book called Kitab-u-Saba'a The Qara'at He died in 936 of the common era Now during his time there were many many Correct reading traditions Different Qara'at within the Uthmani Textual tradition Dozens of Qara'at had risen to prominence Over the last couple of centuries So ibn Mujahid he chose seven of these Popular reading traditions That he documented in his book Kitab-u-Saba'a And these were ibn Amr, Abu Amr Ibn Kathir, Nafi, Hamza, Al-Qisa'i and Asim Okay So two points here number one Very popular even before ibn Mujahid Was born So this fact is mentioned explicitly by Asiyuti in his itqan That's why ibn Mujahid chose them His choosing of them probably made them More popular but they were already very popular Abu Urbay ibn Salam Made mention of them Before ibn Mujahid Asiyuti said that By the end of the second century People were upon the readings of Abu Amr, Hamza, Asim, Ibn Amr Ibn Kathir and Nafir So that's one point The second point is that each one of these Apanama-s-Quraa Highlighted by ibn Mujahid Had a multitude of students Who had been transmitting the Quran from them So these were huge vibrant Reading traditions So one of these Apanama-s-Quraa Ibn Amr He learned the Quran under The Sahabi Abu Darda This is according to ibn Asaqir In Tabi Khuddamash Ibn Amr learned the Quran from Abu Darda who had 1600 students So ibn Amr Was one of the 1600 students Of a companion named Abu Darda One companion had 1600 students So now imagine How many total students from the Tabi'een There were from all the Sahaba Who transmitted and taught the Quran So even if 10% of the Sahaba Were transmitting the Quran That's 10,000 Sahaba If each one just had 50 students That's half a million students In the second generation In reality the numbers are in the millions But this is what Tawatur means This is called mass transmission Okay Now this is very important to understand Over time Many people erroneously conflated The seven reading traditions In ibn Mujahid's book With the seven Ahruf Because it's the same number Okay And so many people started to say That there are only seven correct reading traditions Because the Prophet said That the Quran was revealed upon seven Ahruf So this of course was a major misunderstanding So this is very important The Qiraat and the Ahruf are not the same things But they started to say That Asim is one Harf And Nafi is one Harf And Ibn Amr is one Harf No, Asim and Nafi and Ibn Amr Are Qiraat that drew All of the seven Ahruf So that's very important Okay, so if you go into for example Hafs and Asim In that Qiraat You'll find all seven Qiraat In that one, all seven Ahruf Sorry, you'll find examples of all seven Ahruf in this one Qiraat These are not the same thing Um Yeah, exactly All seven So there's There's actually ten, so we'll continue here I'll get there, inshallah So then Abu Amr ad-Dani Right A few generations After Ibn Mujahid Um What he did was he chose two popular students From each of the seven Apanams Quraat And documented their readings So these are called The two Raawis or the canonical transmitters So okay, so in Kufa The reading tradition of Asim became popular We mentioned that, but how did it become popular? It became popular through his two top students One was Shubah And one was Hafs Okay, so the reading traditions Of Shubah and Hafs were documented By ad-Dani And eventually standardized with vowing and dotting So this really makes 14 Canonical and authorized Reading Tradition There's seven Apanams Quraat Through their respective two Raawis Right, so seven And ten times two is 14 And then about four centuries After Ibn Mujahid A scholar named Imam Shamsuddin al-Jazari Whom Suyuti considered to be the greatest scholar Ever in the field of Qura'a He wrote a masterpiece called Kitab al-Nashr in Qura'at al-Ashr He died in 1429 And so Ibn Jazari, he said that in fact The reading traditions of Yaqub al-Basri Abu Ja'far al-Madani And Khalif al-Baghdali Were also correct And mass transmitted, and multiply attested And so there are now 20 Canonical Reading Traditions So ten Apanams Quraat Through their respective two Raawis Okay So today about 95% of the Sunni world Read Hafs and Asim That's the reading tradition of Qari Asim Through his Raawi Hafs 3% Read Warsh and Nafir And the remaining 2% are divided between Qaloon and Nafir And probably Ibn Uthakwan And Ibn Amr And maybe Adduri And Abi Amr So really only five Are recited The other 15 are studied and memorized And known by Qura'an masters But they're not so much recited anymore In like public congregational prayers There's a good website called NQuraan.com The letter NQuraan.com It's in Arabic but You can actually go on the site And it shows you how all 20 transmitters Of the ten reading traditions Read every single verse of the Quran So another I'm gonna sort of Skip around here I'm gonna mention one more potential Shubha That's mentioned by Western academics Yeah, so So here's something that these Balaimis Just point out It's the fact that some traditional Muslim scholars, they criticize Hafs With respect to his knowledge of hadith So like 95% Of the Muslim Ummah, they recite the Quran according to who Hafs an awesome But there's also reports in our traditions That Hafs was weak in hadith Okay That he's rejected in hadith So they say, see, we're reciting From someone who's weak in hadith So the answer here is very basic Hadith was not his Taqasus, was not his specialty Okay Many of the best Qura today The best in the world are not Necessarily masters Or scholars of hadith Okay, so they're masters, they're Imma of the Quran And the focus of Hafs ibn Suleiman Hafs an awesome Was on the Quran That's number one, he was an absolute master Of the Quran, number two, the hadith Scholars who actually criticized His knowledge of hadith praised him In his transmission and recitation Of the Quran So these are two separate disciplines There is not a single example Of a traditional Sunni scholar Quoting a Qura'a Imam Hafs and then claiming that it's fabricated Or somehow falsified So these polemicists are here Really clutching its straws Another thing they'll mention Really coming onto the end here A popular claim Of modern polemicists is that Ibn Mujahid Using the apparatus of the Abbasid government, he used to prosecute Anyone who read outside of his chosen Seven traditions Okay, so this is a Bit misleading, so let me say two things About this, it's true that the state Authorities did prosecute certain Qura'a Okay, but only Really two types of Qura'a The first type would deviate From the Uthmani textual tradition And would publicly recite According to the textual traditions Of individual companions Such as Ibn Mas'ud or Ibn Ka'ab And others, for example there was a man Qari Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Ayyub Al-Baghdadi Who was more popularly known As Ibn Shanbud He would recite Ahruf That were known by solitary reports Which were not accommodated By the Uthmani codices Okay, so he was lashed a few times And he was released The second type was someone like Qari Abu Bakr Ibn Miksam Who stuck to the rasam of the Uthmani Mus'af And he knew the canonical readings But he believed that it was permissible To vowel and dot the rasam however he wanted As long as the Arabic was correct And without even the slightest consideration For issnad So he repented of this Okay So the point here is that Authorized readings Okay, were investigated From the very beginning Right So the claim of the The claim of the Orientalists That The Qari had free range He had an unvalued text, undotted text If we can just make up readings at will It doesn't make sense according to the evidence Because someone like Ibn Ushanbud Or Ibn Miksam was actually prosecuted For doing that That you were not allowed to use your isjihad When vowing and dotting the text You had to stick to handed down tradition There has to be a senate You cannot bypass Oral tradition Okay So just to finish up here I want to provide further evidence That the claim of the Orientalists is simply wrong So let me restate the claim of the Orientalists Here is the claim The big claim Decorah in these regional areas Were absolutely free to vowel and dot the text However they wanted without restriction Okay, as long as the context Meaning and grammar was sound And that this is why different Reading traditions came into existence So let me show you why this is false So asim al-Qisa'i Yaqub Khalaf Read al-Fatiha as Malik yawm ad-deen The other six said Malik yawm ad-deen Like mafia So it's a 60-40 split So here the Orientalist says You see the rasam allows for both So some Qorachos Malik And some Qorachos Malik They were free to make that choice And yes, this is true They were free to make this choice But here is the problem In surah 3 verse 26 Qulillahumma malik al-mulki Tu'iti al-mulki mantasha'a Malik al-mulki All ten Qorah Said Malik al-mulki It's unanimous Why? Why didn't the six Qorah who read Malik yawm ad-deen in al-Fatiha Recite this as Malik al-mulki It makes total sense According to the meaning It's contextually valid and it's in correct Arabic Why didn't anyone choose this reading? So it seems to me that They did not have that choice They were not authorized to read this word In this verse as Malik They did not have this recitational Latitude in this verse Why? What makes sense It makes perfect sense That the region of Qorah were constrained By the living oral transmission Of the Quran The handed down recitational tradition Of the Quran Another example Malik al-mulki Have you ever heard anyone say Malik al-mulki? Why not? If you were free to say Malik or Malik Like we do in Fatiha Why didn't anyone do it here? Why? It's never happened There's no recitational latitude in this verse Why? Because readers were constrained By the Sunnah of Qorah Here's another example here on the slide The underlined Chapter 6 verse 83 What's underlined is So again The Uthmanic codices were dotless No dots Yet all ten Qorah read these two verbs As first person common Here's the question though If variant readings of the Uthmanic textual tradition Originated with the regional Qorah Were vowing and dotting These regional codices at will According to their ijtihad Why didn't anyone read this With the verbs in the third person This makes total sense According to the context of the verse Yet no one read it like this Why? Because they're not authorized to do that They were constrained by the Sunnah of Qorah So here's the point If reciters were free to dot and vowel Of the Uthmanic codices As they deemed appropriate Then there would have been tens of thousands Of variant readings throughout the Qorah Tens of thousands and there really isn't In reality reciters were extremely limited As to how to dot and vowel the rasam Because they were constrained by The Sunnah of Qorah This is the most convincing explanation Here's another question And this is probably the last slide Almost, second to last slide How many variants exist In the canonical Uthmani reading traditions In other words, how many total words In the Qorah are affected by the ahruf By words I mean Nouns, verbs and particles So not counting dialectical variations Because those don't change the meanings The answer is not very many Just a fraction, according to ibn Mujahid It's about 700 words Which is less than 1% of the Qorah A western scholar He says that number is too low He puts it at 2,000, which is 2.5% Of the Qorah, which is still very minimal If reciters were free To dot and vowel the rasam Of the Uthmani codices However they wanted, according to context There would have been tens of thousands Of words affected Tens of thousands But we have about 700 This means that they were Very much constricted As to what they were allowed to read What makes sense as to what was constricting them Is that handed down tradition A sunnah of Qorah I'll just give you one more example I think this is a good one This will drive the point home A da'i in the UK Use this example It strongly demonstrates our contention That Qorah is sunnah So the first verse of Yasin The first verse is Yasin So look at the word Yasin See how it looks in Arabic Now The Ya with the two dots Underneath connected to the letter Sin Now remove the dots Imagine What's known as the Haikal al-Kalima Just the rasam Without the dots The continental word, the void of dots This is what the Uthmani codices look like Yet everyone Without exception Recited this as Yasin They could have recited it as what Nunsin Tassin Thassin Nunchin Tashin Bashin and Yasin Yet all recited Yasin They had nine other choices Yet all Qorah And the Rawis Said Yasin Why? What are the chances of that? If they were free to vowel it What are the chances of that? They were constrained by the Sunnah of Quraa Okay The last slide And then we're done inshallah Okay, just wanted to mention this really quickly So Yuti mentions in the Itqan What he learned from Imam al-Jazari That there are several grades of authenticity With respect to reported Quranic recitations So I wanted to keep this simple So broadly speaking, there are four main grades Of recitation So if any particular reading Fails to meet even one of those three conditions Mentioned earlier Strong chain agreement with one With mani codex and sound Arabic And it's not considered an authorized Reading and it cannot be recited in prayer So let me Let's look at the first example here Mutawater means mass transmitted Okay So Yuti says most readings are of this type By consensus By consensus These are the ten canonical reading traditions As transmitted by their two main Rawis So for Nafiat For example, it's Qalnoon and Warsh For Asim, it's Shubah and Hafs These were reported by groups And groups of Muslim reciters with strong And verified chains of transmission Then you have Ahad readings These are readings that have strong chains But too few reciters So they don't have sufficient number of Authorities, for example In the Mustadrak Imam al-Hakim said that on the authority Thus, the Prophet s.a.w. would recite Surah 9 verse 128 As Okay, there is coming to you a messenger From the most noble among you In addition to the standard There is coming to you a messenger From among yourselves The Arabic is correct both ways The meaning is sound both ways And both agree with the Uthman-e-Rasim One of the canonical reading traditions Read this as An-Fasikum But you may not recite it in prayer Why? It was just not popular Could this have been revealed To the Prophet as a harf? Of course, it could have been But since this harf did not Gain prevalence, this reading Only has the strength of a sound hadith So it's not strong enough To be an authorized tira'ah Of the Quran Because even a sound hadith Is considered absolutely definitive There is still a chance of error It's not a delil khata'i For the Quran, we cannot take that chance You understand the difference between Mutawater and Ahad Mutawater means That absolutely sound Agreed upon, mass transmitted Can be recited in prayer Definitely the Quran Ahad is there's a chance of Doubt, it's a Dhunni It could have been revealed as Quran As a strength of a hadith Still has a sound chain Then there's shahd Shahd means isolated, unsound or anomalous So a shahd reading may be in correct Arabic It may even have a sound meaning And it might even agree With the Uthmani Codex But the istnaad is unsound Or somehow defective For example, instead of saying Someone says Someone says So instead of saying He says only you are worshiped He makes the verb into the passive voice And makes it third person Right So a reading like this Has no transmissional basis So if a reciter were to recite like this The authorities would ask him Where did you learn this And he says from so and so The authorities would go to so and so and ask him Where did you learn this And he would say I just heard it somewhere I vowed it myself Like this Or I don't know where I heard it from So authorities were very rigorous About particular readings About What reciters were reciting in public And then finally Of moldu are fabricated These are readings that are deemed fabricated by authorities So these readings have multiple problems So in addition to an unsound Or non-existent istnaad There are other issues such as Disagreement with the Uthmani Grammatical errors, unacceptable meanings For example Once heard a man recite A verse in the Quran Chapter 9 verse 3 Which says And he read it as Which gives it a Unexceptible meaning Right, so when you hear that You know Arabic you think There's no way that Allah SWT said that Right And who taught you your Qira'ah And he said I vowed it myself I said you can't recite prayer You have to learn how to recite So what's a lot of readings are without question Quran And maybe recited in prayer Ahad readings May have been revealed as Quran They may have been revealed as Ahrof But they're outside the Uthmani Textual tradition So these were Ahrof that were either abrogated or abandoned So they may not be recited In prayer, but have the strength of a hadith It is possible, but very unlikely That Shad readings May also have been revealed as But they were abandoned or abrogated These readings really don't have any type Of authority other than Perhaps a minor exegetical function And then Maudua readings are definitely Not Quranic and have no authority Whatsoever Alright, well I think I'll end it here, inshallah It's a little past one No, that was a mouthful Hopefully You can go back and watch it back on tape And take some notes Slow things down And do some research And free to ask me questions Insha'Allah through email Yes, sir Well, he was reciting So Asim would recite in public And Hafs and Shorba would take what they heard from him And And he would recite in different ways Because you have that sort of That latitude amongst the Ahruf to do that But generally The two Rawis are very, very similar Like there's some differences between Hafs and Shorba Very rare, will there be a difference But that difference will come from Asim While there are only two, it's a simplify Things, right? These are the two top Rawis The two top students of the Apotomous Qur'an And there were a lot of things To sort of make things more manageable To limit the number of Qura'a Although there were other Qura'a that were I mean, Imam Atabari Documented some 25 Qura'at during his time And they were all sound Right? Yeah, you'd have to go to A Muslim bookstore somewhere in the Middle East Or order something online I guess I forgot about the internet Yeah, you can They do, and this is what Christians do They go to, what's that place called? Hyde Park in England And they bring like 10 Qura'an Mus'haf They bring like a, you know They bring like a wash And they bring like a Hafs, they say look There's different versions of the Qura'an And then a lot of Muslims there They don't even know about the Ahlul They don't even know about Qura'at Yeah, so they're like You made this This is the Qura'an you invented This is the Qura'an This is a different version of the Qura'an You don't even know about this The Qura'an is different And so that's how they present it And the Muslims suddenly they have this sort of Faith crisis I think I was always taught by You know The Khateem that And my dad and my uncle that The Qura'an is every dot, every letter Everything is exactly the same It's just not true But like I said 15 of them 16 of them are really just not recited anymore They just kind of fell out of use Hafs and Ahlul Probably because of the Ottoman Empire I'm guessing Maybe they Preferred Hafs and Ahlul So it just sort of blew up All over the world So the dominant opinion from the Ulama Is that the ordering of the Suras Was by the Prophet That's the dominant opinion Right from Fatiha to Nas He ordered it There's a minority opinion that The ordering was done by The committee of Uthman And it's basically the longest the shortest Although there's some exceptions to that Generally books in antiquity That's how they were ordered If you look at for example New Testament It's basically the longest the shortest The Kalamud is basically the longest the shortest But Allah Alham With the companion courtesies It's basically again longest the shortest Although there's some differences Like Ibn Mas'ud and They have Somewhere in the beginning Not necessarily in the exact order Of the Uthmani codec But it's basically longest the shortest But the dominant opinion is Every year would review The Quran with Jibril And that was not just The actual content Of each Surah But the actual order of all Of the Surahs That's the dominant opinion And there's a great book by His last name is Meir It's called Coherence in the Quran By Meir, it's an excellent book It's very short, it's on the methodology Of Al-Islahi Who was a great scholar Of the Natham of the Quran The sort of coherence of the Quran And he makes a very strong argument That the order Of the Surahs in the Uthmani codecs Has this miraculous Sort of aspect to it That He has this concept of like a Surah pair That Surahs are next to each other They complement each other in a really interesting way That he explains in that book Yeah, probably His last name is Meir His last name is Meir Coherence in the Quran It's basically on the So there was a scholar Named Islahi Who was a South Asian scholar A few generations ago Who Specializes in the Natham Which is sort of like the Structure of the Quranic discourse Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah, it's a good question So Some mentioned that That The first sort of Printed Quran ever Was the Cairo edition of 1924 And they happened to print Hafsanasim Right So that's why it became popular Because it was the first printed edition ever So they were able to mass produce it So that seems to be the answer I mean, I speculated The Ottomans, I don't know if that's true or not But this seems to be The more sort of historical response Is that the first printed Quran ever Were Hafsanasim In the Shia, they also recite Hafsanasim You know, so it's totally Agreed upon. Some of the Shia don't believe In the Ahrof But they'll say that Hafsanasim Is accurate because Saydina Ali Is in the chain Any of those 10 Is correct Any of them They can't change it because The text is stabilized It's known by tradition Yeah, it's not going to work It's just impossible to do that Yeah Yeah, I mean They can't change They can't change the actual Rasim of the Quran It's impossible They could mess with the meanings of it But even there, our belief is that The meanings are preserved as well So there's always going to be You know, a A Jama'a, and that's why we're Ahlus Sunnah And the Jama'a The protection of Allah is With the majority Don't go after these fringe elements Because every heretical group in Islamic history Used the same Quran To justify their positions All of the groups They used the Quran They take certain verses out of Context in the Quran That's how they abuse the Quran But changing the text is not going to happen Impossible Yeah Thank you so much Thank you for your patience I know you're sitting on the floor for A good three hours I don't think I can feel my legs Yeah, please let me know These are things that you emailed me Yes, sir Oh yeah So this one This one was a bit technical Because we're establishing Sexual credibility and things like that But the next one We're actually going to look at the content Of the Quran How is the Quran inimitable How is it Impossible to imitate What does that even mean when we say that What does that mean How do we substantiate that claim So we substantiate the claim the Quran has been preserved But how do we substantiate the Quran As being a literary Masterpiece And then certain Stories Mentioned in the Quran What is the Quran doing to the Bible The biblical stories Is it confirming, is it correcting, is it doing both And how is it doing it What does it have to do with actual Secular history As far as What secular historians Are saying about these stories of the past How does the Quran engage With those stories, like intertextuality Is a very important concept The language of the Quran Like why were certain verses revealed to the Quran So actually looking at the text Now that we've established the text What does it actually say That's just as important If not more important Thank you