Quran Integrity Debate

Did Traditionalist ulama make a grave error with their complex theory of variant Qurans? We think so.

The ulama rely on sahih hadith to claim that the archangel Jibrael (Gabriel), upon whom be peace, revealed the Quran in 7 variants or ahruf (harf, singular). It was then written down as 7 textual variants and orally transmitted in different qiraat, or stylized recitations. If we trust the ulama (which we do not), the challenge is to decipher whether the extant Quran, which may or may not be based on a single harf, contains a subset of the information contained in the original 7-fold revelation?

Once again, the complexity problem, especially the abrogation muddle, strike at the heart of Traditional Islam.

A Singular Quran

We believe the Quran is a singularity, mirroring divine unicity. Ahruf are deviant variants, which emerged in the vast Islamic empire, shortly after it was hastily assembled after the Prophet ﷺ. This resulted in a morass that undermined Quranic integrity. To remedy this, the deviant variants were pruned back to the original singularity. We hope that Khalifa Uthman did a good job of pruning. However, if we are being intellectually honest, we can’t be entirely sure of that given the attendant controversies among the ulama, as discussed below. If they did not, the exact form of original revelation is unrecoverable, which will shock the lay Muslim who has grown up believing in the perfect preservation of the divine word. In that disturbing scenario, which we cannot rule out, BioIslam’s simple inductive process of Latent Principles is far better positioned to extract the true Quranic message (as opposed to the Traditional method of interpreting the Quran via the Hadith, in a complex mode of interleaved deduction). If the details below are too taxing, skip ahead to BioIslam’s Singularity Axiom.

Traditional 7-Ahruf Narrative

The discussion below is consistent with two salient papers by Yaqeen Institute, a bastion of Traditionalist ulama.1

  • God/Allah ﷻ made the Quran masoom, or innocent, to protect its pristine nature for posterity.
  • Whenever revelations appeared over 23 years, the pious sahaba memorized them and also wrote them down on crude materials (leaves, leather and bone fragments) since parchment was scarce and expensive.
  • The multiplicity of revelation via ahruf made it easier for a diverse population, sporting varied dialects and intelligence levels, to comprehend it. Each harf was additionally varied by qiraat. After the Prophet ﷺ, this variation resulted in interpretational chaos.
  • Two decades after the Prophet ﷺ, Uthman, the third Khalifa, ordered a standardized mushaf, or codex, which was produced over the period of 25-30 AH / 645-650 CE.

Complex 800-Year Debate

The Traditionalist sources reveal a raging debate about whether Uthman’s mushaf was based on a single harf, reflecting the dialect of Quraysh tribe, or a synthesis of all ahruf, since Uthman was obliged not to leave out any part of revelation. The ulama are utterly divided on this crucial topic, with famous scholars like al-Ṭabari (d. 310/923) and Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) in the first camp, whereas al-Baqillani (d. 403/1013) and Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064) in the second camp. After centuries of debate, the ulama converged onto a middle position, typified by Ibn Ḥajar (d. 852/1449), where a gentlemanly compromise was reached: that Uthman privileged one harf, in the dialect of the Quraysh, while accommodating some but not all of the differences in the other.

Regardless, ulama agree that Khalifa Uthman burned the other ahruf, with the notable exception of a second one by Abdullah ibn Masud (d. 32/652) in Kufa. He was a senior sahaba and held the key regional office of Chief Reader of the Quran. He was excluded from Uthman’s crucial ahruf-standardization committee. He protested loudly, and accused Uthman of nepotism for stacking the four-member committee with three sons-in-law.2 Masud’s recalcitrance is downplayed by the ulama as owing to his preference for his parochial dialect.

The existence of multiple qiraat (oral recitations of the textual ahruf) is less problematic than the existence of multiple ahruf in the pre-Uthmanic period, and can be understood as follows.

  • The Arabic script was underdeveloped at that time, lacking vowels and diacritics, so Uthman’s mushaf was ‘multiformic’ until much later.
  • About a half century later after the Prophet ﷺ, orthography was added to the Uthmanic rasm, the consonantal form of the Quran, to bring the text in line with the strong oral tradition of memorization.
  • In early Islam, dozens of qiraat existed, with multiple qiraat per harf. With the Uthmanic mushaf, the number of qiraat decreased but eventually remained one too many. So, after three long centuries, Ibn Mujāhid (d. 324/936) standardized them to 7 qiraat, one per major city. Later, other scholars added 3 more, resulting in 10 canonized Sunni ahruf.
  • A millennium later, one popular qiraat, the Hafs an Asim, was prioritized for mass printing, resulting in the popular 1924 Cairo edition. But another popular qiraat, the Warsh an Naafi, is preferred in some regions, such as Morocco.
  • Most importantly, the variations in qiraat are syntactic, there are no significant semantic differences. The ulama believe less than 1% of the 77,000 words in the Quran vary across the qiraat, but a similar statistic cannot be computed for the variation across the extinct ahruf.

Non-Trivial Variances

The variation in ahruf was substantial, since it included verb tense, word order, addition or omission of words, as seen in the figure below. This implies grammar and punctuation were not fixed either. This is definitely problematic. Grammar is key to meaning, as these two examples show. What if the second comma, the serial comma, were omitted in “I love my parents, Amir, and Asma.”? What if the second comma were omitted in “Let’s eat, before we hunt, baby”. Even minor variations in words and grammar can have large interpretational impact, as discussed in Dictionary-Grammar Problem. This problem is more acute with the sahih hadith, which are far more voluminous than the Quran. The ulama infer Quranic meaning through the Sunnah, or Prophetic guidance, as preserved in the hadith. However, even with the unlikely assumption of perfect grammar, this claim is dubious, as discussed in Historical Truth?

The consequential ‘ways of varying’ in ahruf (Yaqeen Institute)

More Questions than Answers

The ulama’s complex system results in more questions than answers:

  • Is the number of ahruf, 7, a topos? Does it stand in for not 7 exactly, but loosely for ‘multiple’, as some ulama opine?
  • How can we be sure that Uthman’s destruction of 5 ahruf preserved the original intended meaning of the Quran?
  • How is it that prominent scholars ended up in radically different camps on the issue of whether Uthman sourced from a single harf or many?
  • Could it be that only one Quran harf was revealed and the hadith that indicate otherwise are fabricated?
  • Who do the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, i.e. at al-Aqsa Mosque, differ from the canonical harf? They were made in 691 CE, about 70 years after the Prophet ﷺ, and about 40 years after the standard Uthmanic mushaf was finalized. Since inscriptions are more reliable than text or oral traditions, this inconsistency invokes skepticism about the Traditionalist narrative. Were these inscriptions from a now-extinct harf?
  • The Quran may not have been written down during the Prophet’s lifetime, since some secular scholars starkly contradict the ulama and note that Abu Bakr said the Prophet ﷺ discouraged such writing. Since the sahaba strongly believed the apocalypse was imminent, perhaps saving the Quranic text for posterity was moot?
  • A goat may have eaten a very small but important portion of the Quran, according to a sahih hadith. If the sahaba routinely memorized the Quran, why were the destroyed contents not recovered verbatim?
  • Was the goat a divine instrument of abrogation? The flawed doctrine of abrogation, a key contributor to the complexity problem, is used to justify why certain ahruf were abandoned. As noted in the first of the Yaqeen papers cited above, “Allah in His infinite Divine Wisdom excluded from the composition of the Qur’an that would be recited until the end of time; i.e., the Qur’an was revealed with extra passages no longer found in it today… in the last year of the Prophet’s life that the wording of the Qur’an was finalized and much of the variants in the aḥruf were abrogated and excluded from the final recitation.”
  • When Uthman moved to eliminate variants, a major sahaba, Ibn Masud refused to comply. His harf was used in parts of Iraq for an extended period. Some scholars believe Ibn Masud was very critical of Uthman for allowing politics to dictate the members of the standardization committee. He also thought that 3 suras did not belong in the Quran, the first sura, Fatiha, and the last two, the suras of refuge, or al-Muawwidhatayn (numbers 1, 113, 114). Why the dissonance within the Sunni scholars?
  • A debate about why Ibn Masud was at odds with Uthman’s project continued for centuries, with major ulama taking sides: Shatibi (d. 790/1388) minimizes the dispute while ibn Kathir (d. 774/1373) fuels it. Why did the scholarly dispute last so many centuries?
  • Shia scholars believe Khalifa Ali compiled the Quran, and this is endorsed by some Sunni sources. Early Shia scholars said the Quran was longer than it is currently, and Ali’s name is mentioned in the Quran as a successor to the Prophet ﷺ. However, later Shia scholars, perhaps starting during the reign of a hardline Sunni ruler, al-Mutawakkil (d. 247/861), gradually realigned themselves with the notion of a masoom Quran and the integrity of the Uthmanic mushaf, perhaps due to political pressure.

BioIslam’s Singularity Axiom

Nobody knows what exactly transpired back then, and clarity will only emerge with the return of Isa/Jesus ﷺ. Meanwhile, it is most logical to assume that only a single harf (admittedly, an oxymoron) emerged from the revelation of Jibrael to the Prophet ﷺ, which would be consistent with how God/Allah ﷻ has spoken to other Prophets ﷺ in the past. This axiomatic assumption is most consistent with the divine unicity inherent to monotheism. Every faith relies on axioms; without this one we suffer the complexity problem, which contradicts the Quranic proclamation that it is a clear message (Q. 14:4, 16:82, 36:17).

It is likely that as truth was compromised – due to the pell-mell expansion of empire, followed by the first fitna (35-41/656-661) – and Quranic variations multiplied, the ulama were overwhelmed by interpretational chaos. They beat back the excess of ahruf and qiraat with a complex cover story of the seven ahruf, and fabricated sahih hadith to validate. To swallow the 7-ahruf cover story, and the contorted gymnastics of abrogation, as the ulama demand of us, is naïve. Regardless of what transpired, we must make the most of the Quran that we do have; the best way to do that is to celebrate the lofty aesthetics of reciting the Quran, in line with Traditionalists, but to radically depart from the ulama and use the Latent Principle method of extracting wisdom from it.

Footnotes

  1. See YaqeenInstitute.org, The Origins of the Variant Readings of the Qur’an, and The Uthmanic Codex: Understanding how the Qur’an was Preserved.
  2. The fourth member was Zayd ibn Thabit, the Chief Recorder of revelation during the Prophetic period. Interestingly, one of the sons-in-law was Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, who was also the son of a respected sahaba and maternal grandson of the first ruler, Abu Bakr. In a crucial pivot point in Islamic history, he was engaged in a long civil war against the famous Umayyad Khalifa, Abd al-Malik, and was brutally killed in 73/692. For his role on Uthman’s Quran rescension committe, see Yaqeen Institute’s paper, The ʿUthmānic Codex.