Contemporary Issues: Is the Original Qur'an Preserved? - Dr. Joseph Lumbard

for all the criticisms that there have been the Koran and all the speculations there have been regarding the halation of the Koran within Western scholarship some which say that the Koran actually began earlier than the Muslims say it began or some would say that the whole history of it actually went another 200 years after the time of the Prophet Mohammed none of those are actually grounded in studies of the available manuscripts as more and more manuscripts have become available we have been able to confirm with greater and greater accuracy scientifically as empirically as one can that the story that the Muslims have of the compilation of the Koran is for the most part accurate as Carl Ernst has said it is a better explanation of the data that we have available to us than any other theory that anyone has proposed the most recent manuscript that was found and the earliest manuscript of the grant ever to be found are the ones that were found in Sunnah in Yemen in the old mosque in Sanaa and there was a lot of speculation when those manuscripts were first found in fact there was an article in the Atlantic Monthly about how this was going to tell us new things about the history of the Koran well nobody had studied them at that point this was just speculation now they've been studied not all of them but at least one folio has gone undergone rigorous analysis and that rigorous analysis has demonstrated through carbon dating one that that manuscript does come at about the time when Muslims say the Quran was compiled but then there's even an under script of the Quran that's shown that's on the parchment what happens is in the old days when you used parchment if you wanted to write something new on it you didn't throw out the parchment because it was so expensive you would erase what was on there and then you would write something new now the inks were also partially metal based so through infrared photography we can actually get an image of what that Arabic script was that was on that parchment before the Quran as we know it was written on that parchment that infrared photography has shown us that the surahs as we know them were there and intact furthermore they even show that the slight variations that are in the text are ones that Muslims have attested there wasn't anything that what we call a variant that Muslims have not attested was a variant of the Quran that had been transmitted by some Muslims now the other thing is if you think about it if somebody were to make up a history of the text you wouldn't have made it up the way that Muslims have the history written down you would have said well it was written at this time and then it was put down under the time of the Prophet Muhammad and hamdulillah that was that you wouldn't say well first after he died they didn't have it written down then under the Caliphate of Abu Bakr it was written in one form and then a few years later around the Year 650 it was put down another compilation and this was the final compilation nobody would make up that story so even there it is just it is really an act of distrust on the part of the Orientalists to try to find different histories a than what the Muslims first accounted for and be what the main scripts actually tell us

Channel: Bayan Islamic Graduate School

Views: 69,950

Rating: 4.6873784 out of 5

Keywords: Joseph E. B. Lumbard, Quran (Religious Text), Religion (TV Genre), contemporary issues, controversy, Textual Criticism (Literature Subject), Bayan Claremont, Koran, Islam, Muslim, Religion, Muhammad, Prophet

Id: klr3Jy2e3mk

Length: 4min 3sec (243 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I'm confused as to what's funny?

What he has said isn't anything new...

Actually I'm fully confused as to what your point is? Many books can be preserved and have been, it doesn't prove divinity.

[u/Atheizm]

This guy sounds like someone from the Discovery Institute talking about evolution.

[u/Volgner]

Hey, thanks for posting this. May it be a great month for you and your family.