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When Muslims hear anything about Qur’anic variants, they assume these
variants are what is commonly known as ‘Ahruf’, or ‘Qira’at’, which are
nothing more than dialectic differences that have to do with the way
someone reads the text orally. According to tradition Muhammad permitted
7 different Qira’at, or readings while he was alive. These 7 ‘readings’
were then canonized 300 years later by a scholar named Abu Bakr Ibn
Mujahid, who died in the 10th century.
The confusion stems from a one-line reference written by Al Bukhari in
870 AD for the need to write the 652 Uthmanic Qur’an in the ‘Quraishi’
dialect; in other words, to write this Uthmanic text so that those who
speak the Quraishi dialect could read it correctly.
The problem is that no one could have read such a text that early (652
AD), because in order to read dialectical differences in Arabic, one
needs to have diacritical marks (dots above and below the line), and
vowels (which include the Dhamah = the oo sound, the Fatah = the ah
sound, and the Kasrah = the ii sound); but diacritical marks and vowels
had not yet been invented in Arabic. They would not be introduced for
another century or more. So, how could Zaid ibn Thabit have written
Uthman’s Qur’an in the dialect of the Quraish that early?
All he could use was the consonantal script (known as Rasm), made up of
17 - 28 consonantal letters (known as Harf) available to him. Those who
then attempted to read those words would add their own vowels (depending
on which dialect they were reading it aloud in) and try to guess which
of the 17 - 28 letters they were reading, by using the context.
The consonantal letters he used, however, would remain constant,
regardless of whom was reading the text, and regardless of which dialect
they were reading it in.
To explain this, Al Fadi and Jay looked at a number of the earliest
Sunni and Shi’ite manuscripts to prove that none of these earliest
manuscripts (the Samarkand, Sana’a, Topkapi, and Ali manuscripts) have
any diacritical marks (dots). Nor do they have any vowels. They are all
written only using the Rasm, or the basic consonantal script.
They then show how one can create up to five letters using just one
consonantal letter by simply adding dots above and below that letter,
and if one had three of those letters in a row, one could create up to
30 different words, again by adding the dots. This proves just how
inexact the Arabic script was back in the mid-7th century, and why
diacritical marks needed to be created and then used in the manuscripts
which followed.
But in these earliest manuscripts which were created during the 8th
century and later, there simply was no means of writing any dialectical
differences. Therefore, the argument of different Ahruf or different
Qira’at (i.e. different readings or different dialects) make no sense
this early, since there were no dottings, nor any vowels to see those
differences within a consonantal scripted text.
Jay and Al Fadi then introduced 26 different Qur’ans (out of a total of
31) which Hatun Tash was able to buy in market places situated in
Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen, each of which was created by a student
living in the cities of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa and Basra between
the 8th - 10th centuries. It is from these 26 to possibly 37 different
students that we get the differing Qira’at schools which are popular
today. When observing just the 26 Qur’ans they displayed, Hatun and her
team in London have already found almost 60,000 differences between them
(Note: Since this recording, the number has increased to 93,000
differences).
The Qur’an we are using today around the world was created by one
student living in the city of Kufa who died in 796 AD, which is 144
years after Muhammad.
It is surrounding these differing Qira’at Qur’ans that Muslims today
think the discussion concerning the changed Qur’ans lies. They couldn’t
be further from the truth. These diacritical differences, coupled with
the vowellization, were all created centuries later.
Thus, it is not these later Qira’at differences which we are talking
about at all, but the much earlier and more damaging consonantal
scripted differences. That is the focus of our discussion here.
Therefore, when Uthman (if that story is even true) decided to burn the
Qur’anic manuscripts which disagreed with his canonized Qur’an in 652
AD, he wasn’t burning them because of different Qira’at or Ahruf
readings as Muslims today suggest. He was burning them because their
Rasms (their consonantal) letters were different from that of his own.
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