Nabeel Qureshi: The Text of the Qur’an - Apologetics to Islam

[upbeat instrumental music] >> So what we've done is we've taken a quick look at the scholastic approach to the historical narratives in Islam. We took a look at the way they are approached by skeptical scholars, by scholars who are working with critical view points, and then we applied that to Mohammed. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna basically apply that to the Qur'an. We're gonna take a look at the Qur'an, at its nature, and how it was put together. Yesterday, I did not actually get to cover the way Muslims see the Qur'an, the way they see it as having been compiled. So we'll do that now. If you we're to talk to a Muslim who's familiar with the way the Qur'an has been brought together, has been compiled, here's what they will say. They will say Muhammad received oral, they received orally dictated to him, through the Gabriel, the Qur'an. So Gabriel would come, recite it to Muhammad, Muhammad will receive it, and he would then dictate it to scribes. So scribes, amanuenses, whatever you wanna call 'em, would write down whatever Muhammad said. This they would write down on either stocks of palm leaf or on bones, or stones, or what have you. They would write down these verses however they could. Then when Mohammed died, Abu Bakr, the next khalifa, or his successor, the first caliph, the first khalifa, he ordered all of these, within the first two years of his caliphate, to be collected, all these stocks, these stones, these bones, what have you, and also, he had Muslims recite these Qur'anic verses from memory to verify the sources, and all of the Qur'an was then compiled in the form of a book. So during Muhammad's life, you had it all written down in various places, you had it memorized by people. Then when Mohammed died, the next caliph came, consolidated it into a book. However, that caliph, Abu Bakr, did not spread the book. He just had it written down. It wasn't until about 17 years after Mohammed when Uthman, the third caliph, the third successor of Muhammad, he received complaints from Muslims all around the Islamic empire who were disagreeing about the Qur'an. At this point, Uthman ordered for that book that Abu Bakr had compiled to be brought back and for people to come back and for all the manuscripts that people had in their possession to be brought back. From that book, a committee was put together, led by a man named Zaid ibn Thabit, Zaid is an important name, Z-A-I-D. Ibn, I-B-N, and Thabit, T-H-A-B-I-T. Zaid ibn Thabit comes together and puts a committee and takes a look at the book that was compiled under Abu Bakr, modifies it, writes it according to the dialect of the Koresh, the people in Mecca, and then he takes all the other sources, everything that was out there, all the other writings, everything, and he burns them, he destroys them. He makes five copies of the book that he made and sends them out to various Islamic provinces. Now that's the general contour of the compilation of the Qur'an that most Muslims will agree to. There are some differences that some people have. For example, was it Umar, was it Uthman who first decided to make one final version? Was it five books at the end, was it seven, was it three? Where were they sent out to, et cetera. But generally speaking, that contour is accepted by most Muslims. Any questions on the Islamic view? Yes, you heard me right. They do think that all the sources of the Qur'an before Uthman were burnt and destroyed and just those five remained. >> Man: I was just gonna ask that about Abdullah ibn Masud, if they believe that his stuff-- >> We'll be talking about that. It's a good question. So what we're going to look at then is we're gonna juxtapose that basic understanding of the Qur'an with a more critical approach to the Qur'an. For those of you who might wonder, most of what I just gave you, the view of how the Qur'an was brought together is found in Sahih Bukhari, book number 61. Book number 61 is about the collection of the Qur'an, for the most part. So when we take a look at the Qur'an here, what we're gonna be talking about first is the societal context. What was Arabia like at that time when the Qur'an was being composed? [high-tone static] History, we're gonna take a look at these two interesting points here: the ahruf and abrogation, then we're gonna talk about early disputes of the Qur'an. We're gonna talk about Ibn Mujahid and the qira'at, you'll learn about what the qira'at are, and then finally we're gonna end with today's Qur'an, and then a look at the Qur'an as an oral text. So this is what we're about to cover. Before I delve into this, I just remembered. Someone had asked me to talk a little bit more about the Satanic verses. Do you mind if we do that real quick before going forward? So the Satanic verses, as we had mentioned earlier, are verses where Muhammad talked about, you can accept al-Lat and al-Uzza and Manat as the exalted cranes. Here is how they read. "Have ye thought upon al-Lat and al-Uzza "ad Manat, the third, the other? "These are the exalted gharaniq, "whose intercession is hoped for," the gharaniq being translated cranes. The verse I told you where Allah said, "Don't worry. "This has happened to the prophets before you," that is still in the Qur'an. That's chapter 22 of the Qur'an, verse 52. It says: "Never sent we a messenger or prophet before you. "But when he recited, "Satan proposed in respect of that "which he recited thereof." In other words, whenever that prophet would say something from me, Satan would try to throw something in there. "But Allah abolishes that which Satan proposes. "Then as Allah establishes His revelation, "Allah is the All-knowing, the Wise." So this verse in the Qur'an comforts Muhammad, saying, "Don't worry. "This has happened to you before. "I'll take care of it," and then we have a modified version of what Muhammad originally said, still found in the Qur'an. It's found in chapter 53, verse 21, 53:21. It says: "Have you thought about al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat, "the third, the other? "Are yours the males and His the females? "That indeed were an unfair division. "They are but names which ye have named, "ye and your fathers, "for what Allah hath revealed no warrant. "They follow but a guess "that which they themselves desire "and now the guidance from their Lord has come unto them." So you can see, this is the stuff that's still found in the Qur'an, but read Shahab Ahmed's dissertation to get more on that. Back to the Qur'an. Let's look at the social context in which the Qur'an was written. I briefly mentioned yesterday we're gonna go into a little bit more detail right now, that the Qur'an was written at a time when the script had not been fully developed. It was still in its formative phases in the sixth century and the seventh century. The first Arabic inscription, so what we're talking about is the language, Arabic, it was written in other scripts before it had its own script. So it was written in Nabataean scripts, for example. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth century when the first script we have is dated. It's called the Qaryat Al Faw. I don't know how interested you are in this, but Qaryat-Al-Faw, Q-A-R-Y-A-T dash A-L dash F-A-W, Qaryat-Al-Faw. It's the first Arabic inscription that we have, and it is just that. It's an inscription. It's not a whole book. It's not much. I believe it is a kind of a eulogy for ones brothers. It's found on a tomb. You do not have clear Arabic here. You still have Nabataean influences. In the fifth century, you get three Arabic inscriptions which are a little bit more Arabic in nature. By the time the sixth century comes around, you're just beginning to get these Arabic writings. It's interesting to know, by the time the Qur'an comes, there is no literature in Arabic. None. There are no literary works at all. You do have poems, and you do have things that are called books, but they're not written. You're spoken. They're oral and they're passed down orally. There was no prose per se as we would understand it. There was plenty of oral poetry, but it was not written, and this is understood. By the time the Qur'an comes around, you still have a script that is very defective. It cannot capture the entirety of the Arabic language, and in fact, that's what it's called in scholastic treatments. It's called the scriptum defectivum. It just simply could not capture Arabic. Here's a look at some of the earliest Qur'ans that we have. This script is called kufic script. If you compare it with the modern Qur'an, you'll see [sighs] that the letters are all disconnected. There's not much connection between the letters. These red dots that you see are added later. These red dots, these were added later. These were not part of the original script. Those are called nukat, and they're extremely important 'cause, check it out. Some of these letters look very similar to one another. Some of these letters, you can't quite tell what they are, unless they have a dot to distinguish it from other letters. So, for example, you can't really tell the difference between a uh-fah and a gah-oth. You would have to have some kind of parallel oral tradition in order to be able to read this. That is one the first types of script. Here's another early type of script. This is called the Hijazi script. It's just not able to capture a lot that Arabic has, not just the nukat, but also the vocalics. If you read Arabic today, you'll see that there are lines above and below some of the letters and it tells you how to translate or how to read some of these letters. They did not exist at this time because the script had not been codified, the methods hadn't been invented and implemented universally. So what you have then was, early on, these were used basically as reminders for an oral text. This was used to basically remind people what ought to be read. This itself was not considered the Qur'an, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. At the very least, we can say that the scriptum defectivum at that time did not allow for fully capturing the Qur'an. The first revelation of the Qur'an was 610 A.D. and the last revelation of the Qur'an was 623, I got that backwards, 632 A.D. As we said, this is the term that's used often for the Qur'an. In scholarly literature, they'll call 'em aids memoirs. These were mnemonic aids to help you remember what you learned of the text orally. An interesting fact about the Qur'an is that according to the Islamic sources, Muhammad considered the Qur'an fluid, in a sense. You could read certain verses in multiple ways. This is called a harf or in plural is called ahruf, what you see up top there. Here's the hadith about the ahruf. "Jebriel," or the Angel Gabriel, "recited the Qur'an to me in one way. "Then I requested him to recite it in another "and continued asking him to recite it in other ways "and he recited it several ways "until ultimately he recited it in seven different ways." You might be asking, "What in the world is going on?" [woman laughing] In fact, a lot of Muslims scholars still ask that question. They really don't know what the ahruf are, but here's another hadith which might shed some light. Umar bin al-Khattab, now this is the second caliph, this is the second successor. Most Muslims say, "He's guided by God." Umar bin al-Khattab narrated, "I was sitting in the masjid when I heard "Hisham bin Hakim recites Surah Al-Furqan. "I was almost about to jump on him in his prayer, "but I waited until he finished." Umar's known to be very hot-blooded, by the way. [audience chuckling] "And then he grabbed him, "and then grabbed him by his garment and asked him, "'Who taught you to recite in this manner?' "He replied, 'It was the prophet himself.' "I responded, 'You are mistaken for indeed "'I learned the surah from the Prophet "'and it was different from your recitation.' "'Therefore, I,'" Umar, "'dragged him to the Prophet and complained to him "'that Hisham had been reciting the Surah Al-Furqan "'in a manner different from what Muhammad had taught me.' "At this the Prophet told me to let go of Hisham "and asked him to recite Surah Al-Furqan. "Hisham recited the surah in the same way "that I had heard him recite before. "When he finished, the Prophet said, "'It was revealed in this way.'" So Muhammad affirms how Hisham was reading it. "He then asked me to recite the surah. "When I had finished, Muhammad said, "'It was also revealed in this way.' "The Qur'an has been revealed in seven different ahruf, "'so recite whichever one is easy for you.'" So this sheds some light on the differences between each harf. It was enough for Umar to get furious at someone. So it's not small. It's different enough for Umar to get furious and to consider interrupting someone's prayer. At the same time, Muhammad considers it a legitimate alternative method for reciting a hadith. Volume three, number 601. Here's another one. By the way, the other one, the other hadith was found in Sahih Bukhari, so really, really strong hadith, and there's many of 'em in Sahih Bukhari. You can even find more of these, that book that I told you, book number 61 in Sahih Bukhari, volume six, book 61, extremely important. You'll find some of these in there. This hadith, I've had trouble tracing it to an original source, a primary source, but I've seen it quoted in multiple second sources. This source, where I got this from, was from an imam named ah-yet-doh-luh-ghoo-whee. He is Shia and he's using it polemically against Sunni Muslims. So take it with a grain of salt. According to this hadith, it says: "The Messenger of God used to dictate to him "sami'un 'alim or 'azizun hakim, "or something to that effect." By the way, if you get familiar with the Qur'an, you'll see that at the end of various verses, it says, "And God is all-knowing and wise," or "God is the beneficent and the merciful." It just ends with these epithets for God. Here it's saying that, "The Messenger of God used to dictate," "sami'un 'alim or 'azizun hakim," these are various epithets, "or something to that effect," used as a verse ending. "The man would sometimes inquire," speaking of a scribe, "the man would sometimes inquire from the Messenger of God, "saying, 'Is it 'azizun hakim, "'or sami'un 'alim or 'azizun 'alim?'" In other words, what was the ending you just said? Which one should I use? "The Messenger would say to him, "'Whichever you write is all right.'" In other words, go ahead and write whatever you want. The sources, by the way, are condemning this man for being infatuated with the fact that he could choose the words of the Qur'an. This man would then go around boasting, "I am able to write versus of the Qur'an," and the sources are condemning him, but it gives us a little bit more insight into ahruf. There's variability. In some of these endings here, there's variability, which is okay. There's some fluidity here in this text, and that draws an important distinction to what a lot of Muslims claim about the Qur'an. When they say that it is, even at this day, exactly as it always was, what does that mean? What does that even mean when there was this degree of fluidity in the text? We'll revisit that soon. So those are the ahruf. Like I said, Muslims scholars have been wrestling with the ahruf ever since Muhammad's time and they've come up with various explanations. Some other people say that the ahruf are synonyms. In other words, you can recite one word for another word, as long as it means the same thing, and this is found in hadith as well. There are various hadith which say, "As long as you don't replace justice with mercy or mercy with justice, "say whatever you like," and Muhammad says that of the Qur'an. There's lots of hadith that say that. This is found so deeply in the hadith that people are not able to throw them out. Shia tried to, but Sunnis don't throw them out. There was one Sunni scholar who spent over 30 years of his life trying to figure out what the ahruf are. By the time he was done, he still wasn't sure. So very, very interesting. There is another phenomenon in the Qur'an which accounts for a lot of interesting difficulties when we talk about the original text, and that is abrogation in the Qur'an. the doctrine of abrogation. We introduced it yesterday. Here is what it says in chapter 2, verse 106 of the Qur'an: "None of our revelations do we abrogate "or cause to be forgotten, "but we substitute something better or similar "know is though not that "God hath power over all things." Chapter 16 verse 101 has a similar statement. How this has been used classically in Islam is to say that Allah revealed certain versus, and then he replaced them with other verses. Muslims scholars, traditionalists, have taken these verses and have tried to categorize them and they will say, "There are three different types of abrogation." The first type is abrogation of both verse and command. In other words, there was something that was part of the Qur'an, and now the verse is gone and the command is no longer imputed to Muslims. That's one type. Another type of abrogation is abrogation of verse, but not command. The verse is not found in the Qur'an, but the command still applies to Muslims. The third type is abrogation of command, but not verse. The verse is still in the Qur'an, but you don't have to follow it anymore. These are three separate types of abrogations that Muslims scholars have come up with. I mean that's not laid out in any of the hadith or in the Qur'an itself. It's something that they've extrapolated from the hadith in the Qur'an. What is interesting here is the idea that there were verses in the Qur'an that are no longer in the Qur'an. So we're not worried about that third type of abrogation where the command no one applies, but the verse is still found. Theologically, that's interesting. But when we're talking about the Qur'an and its composition, what matters to us is verses which were at one point part of the Qur'an which are no longer a part of the Qur'an. Let's take a look at an example. This is found in Sahih Muslim, number 2286. It's a long one. "Abu Harb bin Abu al-Aswad reported "on the authority of his father "that Abu Musa al-Ash'ari sent for the reciters of Basra. "They came to him and they were 300 in number." So these were 300 people who recite the Qur'an. They teach the reciting of the Qur'an. "They recited the Qur'an and he said: "'You are the best amongst the inhabitants of Basra, "'for you are the reciters among them.'" So good on you for reciting the Qur'an. You are the best of the people there 'cause that's what you do. "'So continue reciting it, "'but bear in mind "'that your reciting for a long time "'may not harden your hearts "'as were hardened the hearts of those before you. "We used to recite a surah," so now he's saying, "Don't make the same mistake we did." "We used to recite a surah which resembled "in length and severity Surah Bara'at. "I have, however, forgotten it, "with the exception of this which I remember out of it: "'If there were two valleys full of "'riches for the son of Adam, "'he would long for a third valley, "'and nothing would fill the stomach of "'the son of Adam but dust." Well, this verse isn't found anywhere in the Qur'an. So what this man is saying is there's a surah that used to be as long as the Surah Bara'at, which is a long surah, and he forgot it and what he remembers out of it is not found in the Qur'an anymore. "And we used to recite," so now he's talking about another surah, "And we used to recite a surah which resembled "one of the surahs of Musabbihat "and I have forgotten it, but remember this much out of it. "'Oh people who believe, "'why do you say that which you do not practice "'and that is recorded in your necks "'as a witness against you "'and you would be asked about it "'on the day of resurrection.'" Two chapters, according to this hadith from Sahih Muslim, an important compilation, two chapters of the Qur'an which are not found in the Qur'an today. He's saying they are long chapters. Bukhari gives us some more, book 82, number 817. "Allah sent Muhammad with the Truth "and revealed the Holy Book to him, "and among what Allah revealed was the Verse of Rajam, "which is the verse of stoning a married person, "who commits illegal sexual intercourse, "and we did recite this Verse and understood it "and memorized it and Allah's Apostle did carry out "the punishment of stoning and so did we after him." Well, guess what? The verse of stoning is not found in the Qur'an anymore. Umar was recorded as having said, again, this is Umar, hot-blooded Umar, he's recorded as having said, as a caliph, as a khalifa, he said, "If I could write down this verse "into the Qur'an with my own hand, "I would if people wouldn't accuse me of "having altered the Word of God." Umar was so certain that this verse should be part of the Qur'an that he would've written it in had he not run the risk of being condemned for altering the Word of Allah. There's a lot more on this abrogation, by the way. If you have a Yusuf Ali translation of the Qur'an, all you have to do is go to chapter 33 verse six, and in the footnotes it will say, "Ubay had a different set of words that he used." Sahih Bukhari, by the way, Ubay ibn Kab, which Yusuf Ali is referring there, he was listed by Mohammed as one of the four best teachers of the Qur'an. So here you have a man, Muhammad has said, "If you're gonna learn the Qur'an, "learn it from one of these four." That man recited words in his Qur'an which are not in the Qur'an today. Sahih Bukhari refers to him and says explicitly that Ubay ibn Kab recites portions of the Qur'an that we do not recite, and he will not leave it for anything whatsoever. So he's certain that there are words in the Qur'an that other people didn't recite and he won't leave it 'cause he heard from Muhammad himself. So abrogation, a very interesting phenomenon. It adds a whole other dimension to the issue of Quranic preservation. Don't worry. I think they're just murdering someone out there. [audience laughing] Yes, sir. >> Man: How does abrogation then, was its picture of guidance men-een? We see [background noise drowns out other sounds]. We have [speaks off microphone] who see a change in God. [speaks off microphone] >> Muslims will often defend the concept of abrogation by saying it's part of the Qur'an's beauty, that Allah would guide his people with certain revelations, and then when it no longer applied to them, He would change the revelation. So they say that as kind of a mercy of the Qur'an and they don't see it as compromising the inspiration, the Qur'an, at all. I see a problem with that, a big problem with that, and they rarely talk about it and you can see that here. Look at the verse that say Muslim records, which is no longer in the Qur'an, "If there were two valleys full "of riches for the son of Adam, "he would long for a third valley "and nothing would fill the son of Adam but dust." Hold on a second. The Muslim scholars are saying that abrogation is either of command or verse. All the forms of abrogation have to do with commands and that's why it's seen as a mercy 'cause certain times, certain commands apply, other times, they don't, but you shouldn't be able to abrogate something that has a historical record. There's no change. It doesn't affect the Muslim community. If it's historical, it's historical. Why abrogate it? This verse is not a command at all. It's a historical account. Why was it abrogated? I have not seen an answer to that anywhere. The only answer that I've seen was by Yasir Qadhi in his book, An Introduction to The Sciences of The Quran. His response was, "Well, maybe there should be a fourth type of abrogation." It's kind of ad hoc. It is a difficulty they have to wrestle with. >> Man: You mentioned how the alternative beings like an infuriated, I think it was Umar. Could Muslim scholars respond and say, like, "The reason he was infuriated is because "a name was being mispronounced," or something like that as opposed to a doctrine or-- >> They could try, but there so many hadith along this line that that wouldn't be justified. Like we said, Mohammed said, "Even to the extent of, "you can say whatever you want, "as long as you don't replace justice with mercy and mercy with justice." In other words, don't turn around the meaning of the verse. Say whatever you want. Those hadith really make it impractical for a scholar to say that this is just names. Is a camera man still in here? Out of curiosity. >> Man: He just stepped outside. >> He just stepped out. I'm wondering, okay. Yeah. >> Man: I'm following up on the abrogation there. If they believe that God has to be changing the Qur'an, how does that play into their belief that they can't really know God if he's constantly changing? >> They don't see this as Him constantly changing. Again, they see it as Him providing mercy. Oh, so the question was, [audience laughing] so how can Muslims reconcile the unknow-ability of God with the changing nature of the Qur'an? They don't see this as God changing. They see this as God being merciful for His people and by accommodating for them. Hey, camera man, friend. >> Camera Man: Yes. >> Is the picture coming out all right? Is it too dark? >> Camera Man: Yeah, [speaks off microphone]. >> All right, that's an amazing camera. >> Camera Man: [speaks off microphone] >> Okay, thanks. >> Camera Man: [speaks off microphone] >> Cool. [audience laughing] I mean this tie's pretty snazzy. I wouldn't want it to [audience laughing] go to waste. Okay. Now I had mentioned Ubay ibn Kab and there's a lot more there. There were significant early disputes regarding the Qur'an. The reason why Abu Bakr ordered his first collection is found in Sahih Bukhari, again, book 61, number 510. A verse from Surah Ahzab was, oh, I'm sorry. This is a different, okay, I'm sorry. Let me backtrack real quick. Remember how I said that Abu Bakr had collected the Qur'an first, and then later Uthman came and brought that one back? >> Woman: Yeah. >> Well, when Uthman came back and made a final version, this is something that Zayd said. He said, "A verse from Surah Ahzab was missed "by me when we copied the Qur'an," the first one. He missed a verse. "And we used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it. "So we searched for it and found it "with Khuzaima ibn Thabit Al-Ansari." What's he saying? He's saying that they missed verses in the first record, very interesting. How did that happen? So as far as early disputes are concerned, Abu Bakr ordered the first collection and the collection was found faulty, it there's still a record of that in Sahih Bukhari. Then Uthman ordered a second collection and more disputes began to arise after the Uthmanic codification. So he mentioned Ubay ibn Kab. We mentioned how he would not leave certain verses out. He is one of two people that Mohammed picked out. I'm sorry. He's one of four people that Muhammad picked out as the best teachers of the Qur'an. So according to Sahih Bukhari, Muhammad says, "If you want to learn the Qur'an, learn from these four," and he names Abdullah ibn Masud first, then he named Salim and Muaz, and then he names Ubay ibn Kab. Two of those four people are right here: Abdullah ibn Masud and Ubay ibn Kab. We've already seen Ubay has said that he will not leave out certain verses that other people leave out. But even more interesting is ibn Masud. ibn Masud, named first by Mohammed, probably the best teacher of the Qur'an in his time and extremely well respected amongst Muslims for his knowledge of the Qur'an. According to Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqat, he says: "The people have been guilty of deceit "in the reading of the Qur'an. "I like it better to read according to "the recitation of Him whom I love "more than that of Zaid ibn Thabit." Now I've been called to account on this. I had a debate back in 2009 with a Muslim by the name of as-am zoo-ah-dih and he says that this is a poor translation: "The people have been guilty of deceit." I don't think so. I've looked into this. I've talked to Arab speakers about this. There are multiple ways you can translate it, but at the very least, let's concede that this is a poor translation, still, what ibn Masud is saying is that this translation of the Qur'an, Zaid's version, I'm sorry, of the Qur'an involves some level of hiding the truth, hiding the true version of the Qur'an. He ordered, not just, this is not just found in Ibn Sa'd, by the way. It's found in Jami at-Tirmidhi, it's found in various places, and Jami at-Tirmidhi is considered a very trustworthy book of hadith. ibn Masud said to his people that if they kept the manuscripts, "keep your manuscripts with you. "If you will, you will receive rewards in heaven." So here come Uthman's men. They're trying to get ibn Masud to give up his manuscript. They're trying to get ibn Masud students to give up their manuscripts. Where have ibn Masud and his students been? They've been in an area of the Islamic empire called Kufa. He went there to teach the Qur'an to those Muslims 'cause he was such a great teacher. Uthman's men come from far away later and they say, "You have to give up everything. "You have to give up your Qur'an, your manuscripts. "Your students have to give them all up too "and we're replacing it with this one." ibn Masud tells his students, "Do not give up your manuscripts. "Take them with you to heaven where you'll be rewarded." That's a big deal. Why does he disagree so much? Is it just minor words? Is it proper names? What is it? ibn Masud actually believed that there should be 111 chapters in the Qur'an. and today's Qur'an has 114 chapters. ibn Masud, the greatest teacher of the Qur'an, named first by Muhammad, if you're gonna learn the Qur'an, disagreed that Chapter 1 of the Qur'an should be a part of the Qur'an. He did not include it, chapter 113 of the Qur'an and chapter 114 of the Qur'an. So 113 and 114, he does not include in his Qur'an. Why? ibn Masud considered these chapters to be prayers that Allah had divinely inspired, so they are divinely inspired, but Allah did not intend for them to be a part of the Qur'an. So ibn Masud is coming at these chapters with a little bit more precision than Zaid did. For those of you who don't know, chapter one of the Qur'an, Sura Al-Fatiha, is kind of called the keystone for the Qur'an. Seven verses and it's understood to be basically an introduction to the entire Qur'an. When you read the Salat or when the Salat is read by Muslims, the five daily prayers, they read Sura Al-Fatiha first, they read the Fatiha first, and then they'll read a portion of the Qur'an. So liturgically speaking, you introduce the Qur'an, even in Salat, with Fatiha. ibn Masud didn't consider that introduction to actually be part of the Qur'an, whereas Zaid ibn Thabit did. Why is that? Because ibn Masud takes a look at the words in Fatiha and the words are not from Allah to men. The rest of the Qur'an is written in the voice of Allah to men. "And we did this, and we did that, "and we told you this, and we sent this." Sura Al-Fatiha doesn't read that way. It's a prayer to Allah from people. [speaks in foreign language] "All praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds." So it's people praising God and asking him for personal guidance. So ibn Masud says, "Yes, this is divinely inspired, "but it's a prayer that God sent. "It's not supposed to be part of the Qur'an." He says the same thing of Chapter 113 and Chapter 114. Now Chapter 113 and 114 are virtually all written in the voice of people back to Allah as well, but it starts with the word qul. So Sura Al-Falaq, Chapter 113, Sura An-Naas, Chapter 114 starts with the word qul, say, and then it's a prayer. ibn Masud said these are supposed to be prayers, not part of the Qur'an. Ubay ibn Kab, on the other hand, says not only are these chapters supposed to be part of the Qur'an, but two other chapters are supposed to be part of the Qur'an: al-huft and al-hul. Now al-huft and al-hul, one of those chapters is still recited by Muslims today. It's recited during the prayer that is offered after the last prayer of the night. So isha is the last prayer of the night. It's the last of the five obligatory prayers, but then there's another prayer which most Muslims consider obligatory. They're not quite as obligatory as the other five and it's called the witr prayer. During that witr prayer, you recite this chapter. So Muslims still recite it even today, but they don't consider it part of the Qur'an. Ubay did consider it part of the Qur'an. What is interesting here? I'm not saying that Zaid was wrong and one of these other two were right. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that there is disparity amongst the chosen teachers of the Qur'an. How can we be certain that Zaid is the one who got it right? If he is the one who got it right, why are the teachers that Muhammad chose wrong and why are they wrong in such a disparate fashion? Why was there so much disagreement here? Interestingly, there is some agreement between ibn Masud and Ubay ibn Kab over Zaid ibn Thabit. What do I mean by that? Well they both included the verse of stoning in their Qur'ans, and Zaid did not, very interesting. There were other agreements as well among the two. How do we know these things, by the way? Where do we find this in record? Why would Muslims have saved this? Why did they not destroy all the records of this? Well, in fact, they did. There were three major books that recorded the differences in various manuscripts, probably more than that, but three that we know of and all three of them were lost to history. One of them was found by a man named Arthur Jeffery in the early 20th Century. Arthur Jeffery's probably the Father of Modern Critical Quranic Studies. He recorded in his book Materials On The History of the Qur'an, we just call it Materials, Arthur Jeffery's Materials. He found this book. I have it written down somewhere. I'll just point it to you briefly. Help. Okay, I won't [chuckles]. I'll tell you the name and hopefully, can we figure this out, someone, why the projector went off? Do we have any, okay. Thank you very much. While we're working on that, the book is called Ibn Abi Daud, so I-B-N A-B-I, Ibn Abi, Daud, D-A-U-D. You can turn the lights on at any time. So, you might remember the name Daud. This is Sunan Abu Daud, the imam who wrote Sunan Abu Dawood. It's his son, Ibn Abi Daud. He made it his duty to collect differences in Quranic manuscripts. That's what he wanted to do. That was his form of worshiping Allah. We wanted to collect differences in the Quranic manuscripts and he recorded differences between not just these three, he also recorded others, for example, Abu Musa and Abu Musa's Qur'an. So we have that. We have Arthur Jeffery's copy of the discovery that he found of Kitabu'l-Masahif. >> Woman: The projector turned off. >> Okay. >> Woman: [speaks off microphone] >> Okay. Any question, by the way, at this point? Yes, sir. >> Man: Going back to abrogation, how do you reconcile that with the idea there's an eternal tablet and having the word of Qur'an? >> I have not seen, so the question was [audience laughing] how do we reconcile the fact that abrogation occurs alongside this tablet? I have not seen a good explanation. Yes, sir. >> Man: Uthman was the one that collected a bunch of the Qur'ans and then created the I guess the kind of like the [speaks off microphone], the canonized standard version of it, and then he destroyed the other ones that differed? >> Yes. >> Man: I guess how was that received by [chuckles] the people who would see those as authentic Qur'an? >> So that's a good question. Why is it that he was allowed to do this? I will tell you that Uthman was not well received by most Muslims. They didn't like 'em. I wouldn't say that's because of this. This might've been an additional factor or who knows, but he was not well received to begin with. The authority that he had to do this he basically derived from Abu Bakr 'cause Abu Bakr, when Umar said, "We should collect the Qur'an," Abu Bakr had said, "This is a good idea. "Let's do it." So he used that authority to continue on with the project. That's according to the Islamic sources. We can't know for sure whether that happened, but that's what they say. In addition, he was the caliph. He was officially in charge of the Islamic empire. So even though people didn't like him, he had a degree of authority and he used that. ibn Masud, there are some sources which say that ibn Masud actually got beaten because he would not give up his version of the Qur'an. Ultimately, he did give it up. Whether or not that's accurate, I'm not sure. I haven't actually seen that written. I've heard that that's in the sources. Regardless, ibn Masud was very, very much opposed to this version of Qur'an and the power that Uthman had to exert over him was significant in order for him to ultimately yield. Yes, sir. >> Man: Can you respell the [speaks off microphone], can you respell that for me again? >> Yeah. So it's ibn, I-B-N, Abi, A-B-I, Daud, D-A-U-D, and you can find his work saved still in the pages of Arthur Jeffery's Materials. I think it's Material For The History of The Collection of The Qur'an, Materials, something. Now in order to understand the extent to which early Muslims differed from modern Muslims, modern Muslims will tell you, "The Qur'an has never been changed "and we have all of it down to a "exact dot. "Nothing has been changed." Early Muslims differed with that. Let me read you a quotation from Umar's son. So we've been introduced to Umar. Again, he's the second caliph. This is his son, so ibn Umer, he says: "Let none of you say I have learned the whole of the Qur'an "for how does he know what the whole of it is "when much of it has disappeared. "Let him rather say, "'I have learned was is extant thereof.'" Whoa. Umer's son is saying, "Don't say you know the whole Qur'an. "How do you know what it all is? "A lot of it has been lost." This is found in Kitab al Fada'il. By the way, you guys are gonna receive in your email a copy of all my slides. So, don't worry about getting the spelling down exactly. As long as you're registered, you'll get a PDF form of the slides. So this is ibn Umer. It's found in Abu 'Ubaid's Kitab al Fada'il. Now Ibn Abi Daud, so the guy who wrote down the differences in manuscripts, this is what he said: "Many of the passages of the Qur'an that were sent down "were known by those who died on the Day of Yamama." What's the Day of Yamama? You remember yesterday I was talking about Abu Bakr? As soon as Muhammad died, a bunch of people left Islam. Remember that? Abu Bakr had to launch the apostate wars. Well, one of those wars, one of the battles during that war was called the Battle of Yamama. During that time, Muslims believed that Allah would guard the Qur'an, but not only would He guard the actual words of the Qur'an, he would guard the people who knew the Qur'an. That was kind of a belief. So they sent a bunch of people who knew the Qur'an very well into battle, and guess what? A lot of 'em died. The record say up to 500 of them died that day. That's what he's talking about here. "So many of the passages of the Qur'an that were sent down "were known by those who died on the Battle of Yamama, "but they were not known by those who survived them, "nor were they written down, "nor had Abu Bakr, Umar, "or Uthman by that time collected the Qur'an, "nor were they found with even one person after them." So Ibn Abi Daud is being very careful to say, "They're gone. "They're as gone as gone can be," a threefold repetition of the fact that those verses are simply aren't there. So we've got these early disputes. We've got early manuscripts which say that there were differences and you've got people who were actually recording the differences in the Qur'an. Some of these differences, by the way, extended not just in the words, in the verses, in the chapters that were included, but also the surah order. So the order of the surahs were different amongst these people, and you could find those in the records as well. Any questions so far? Yes. >> Man: How many years after Muhammad's death was it when this gentleman [speaks off microphone] made that statement? >> Ibn Abi Daud? >> Man: Yeah, the son of the caliph. >> So Sunan Abu Daud was, so Abu Daud, his father, okay the question was, [audience laughing] when does Ibn Abi Daud write? We remember the imam who wrote Sunan Abu Dawud, he died at the end of the ninth century. So this is probably late ninth, early 10th-century. Yes, sir. >> Man: So you're saying the verse, we get the verses have changed, they were saying there's changing, and you said there was one other change that showed that they're shifting? You said just a moment ago. >> I said that the surah order-- >> Man: Yeah, surah maybe. >> Yeah, so the order of the chapters in the Qur'an are different. Now remember how I said that the verses or the words in the Qur'an, the script wasn't able to capture all the Arabic. You didn't have the tashkeel. You didn't have the nukat. You didn't have the vocalics and the dots. People would therefore read the Qur'an differently. They read it as they saw fit. They tried to follow oral tradition, but they began to read it differently. Over time, there were dozens, and dozens, and dozens, if not hundreds of different ways to read the Qur'an. People began to read the Qur'an in all kinds of different ways because the script did not tell people how exactly to read it. These different ways to read the Qur'an were called qira'at. Today people will say, "Oh, they were simply different dialects." Well, that's not really true. There was more than dialectical differences in the qira'at. In the year 323 A.D., a man named Ibn Mujahid limited the number of canonical qira'at. He said, "We should cut down the number of qira'ats to seven." So he eliminated the vast majority of qira'at and said, "These seven are the ones that you can use officially." It's Ibn Mujahid. >> Man: The year? >> 323 A.D. So Ibn Mujahid at this point, it's argued that later Ibn Mujahid changed his mind and he allowed for 10 or maybe even more, but at least at first, he cut it down to seven different ways to recite the Qur'an officially. Up until then, people were reciting it in many many different ways as they had learned in their areas and as they could read it. Ibn Mujahid, when he cuts it down, after that point, if anyone read according to a previously accepted way but no longer accepted way, he was punished. We know this 'cause a year later, a man named Ibn Shanabud, you'll get the spelling for his name later, he tried to read the Qur'an according to an old qira'at and he was beaten for it. This was just a year later and he's trying to read the Qur'an according to ways that he had known since childhood and he was beaten for it. I consider this to be one of the three major milestones of the development of the Qur'an. So the first was the codification by Uthman. The second was this Ibn Mujahid's recension down to seven qira'at. Over time, by the way, each of these qira'at developed multiple ways of being read. So Keith Small who's a scholar out of London School of Theology, he has said that there were ultimately 10 qira'at that were each read eight different ways, 10 qira'at that were each read eight different ways. So what you have is someone's qira'a read according to someone's reading. 80 different ones, ultimately, by the time 1924 rolls around. So in 1924, there are 80 different ways to read things: 10 major qira'a, eight different ways to read them. In 1924, Muslims published the first printed Qur'an. Up until this point, there was no printed Qur'an except by Westerners, and even those Qur'ans were not really acceptable according to Muslims. So the printed Qur'ans first happened in 1924. What happened was a committee of people came together in Cairo and they chose an ancient looking orthography, so basically something that looked ancient in writing. They chose one and they used that. It wasn't really an orthography that existed before. They kind of made it for this purpose and they use that for the printing of the Qur'an. They chose one of the 80 different qira'a, the one called Hafs 'an Asim. So it's the qira'a of Hafs as read by'an Asim, Hafs 'an Asim. They chose that one and they printed that. That Qur'an has become the common Qur'an today. 97% of the Muslim world uses that Qur'an. The other 3% uses another qira'a called Warsh 'an Naafi. So certain places, in Yemen, for example, and other places in the Middle East use this other reading of the Qur'an, Warsh 'an Naafi. You can go there and you can get a Warsh 'an Naafi Qur'an and you can compare it to a Hafs 'an Asim Qur'an and you'll see the differences. It's still there. Aside from these two qira'a, most of the rest of them are gone. They're eradicated. You can go to these academic institutions and talk to a scholar and they might be able to recount older qira'ats for you, but practically speaking they've been eradicated. There's mainly one and I'm pretty convinced that the Warsh will be gone soon. It's just gonna go out of public use because Hafs 'an Asim has pretty much taken over. I think that's the third milestone in Quranic development, the 1924 printing of the Royal Cairo edition of the Qur'an. When a Muslim looks at his Qur'an today, he is looking at the 1924 edition of the Qur'an. If you were to press a Muslim, or anyone for that matter, and say, "When is the first," or "What copy of the Qur'an, "what manuscript do we have that looks exactly like this? "What is the first one that we have "that looks exactly like this?" There is none. The first time we have a manuscript that looks like that is in 1924. So, we're about to make a huge shift in our approach right now to the Quranic studies. So if there are any questions... Yes. >> Man: I guess practically is this the sort of stuff that you bring up in a catch-up conversation? Is this only things you, like you said before, you wanna bring up once you've established a pretty strong relationship and they trust you and things like that? >> I believe, okay so the question was, do you bring this stuff up in common conversation or only after you've developed a close relationship? I think that this information, it certainly has not reached the common Muslim. It definitely has not. I think that this information has the potential to shake the Muslim world. It's ineffable just how much stock Muslims take in the perfect preservation of the Qur'an. They see this as the vindication of their faith, that the Qur'an has been perfectly preserved is the way you can know Islam is true. It's the basis for many Muslims' faith and it's also their basis for rejecting Christianity. The Bible's been corrupted, et cetera. This is information that I honestly think will shake the Muslim world if it gets shared effectively. I don't profess to have a good model for doing it, but right now, I am not hesitant to share this publicly, and I share it with whoever I run across. Now I don't say to them, "Hey, your Qur'an's corrupt. "Check this out." [audience laughing] That's not how I would do it. I would wait until they would say, "The Qur'an has been changed. "Your Bible," I mean, "Your Bible's been changed, the Qur'an has not." I would say my response to that point is, "Really? "What do you mean by that? "Can you give me some details. "I'm really interested in that 'cause "I don't think that's true. "If it were true, then I might agree with you." Then they would say, "The Bible had verses that were added and taken out. "Oh, the Qur'an has had that. "No, it hasn't. "Here, look in Sahih Bukhari. "It says that right here. "Okay, well, "we know what the original Qur'an said "because we still have it today. "Really? "What's the oldest Qur'an that you have today? "We have Umar's Qur'an, we have the Qur'an," I'm sorry, "Uthman's Qur'an, "the Qur'an that he sent out. "We have that today. "You do? "How many of them do you have? "We have two of 'em. "We have one sent to this place and one sent to this place. "Are they exactly the same? "No. "The two that Uthman sent out that we still have, "they are different. "So which one's accurate?" I would start pressing. Now when it comes to public presentation, I did a presentation at Rutgers University a few weeks ago on this issue. So I'm trying to get this information out there. I do not have the credentials though. I'm not an Islamic scholar yet. I'm in the process. I'm hopefully gonna get there, but there is a man by the name of Keith Small. I mentioned his name earlier. He is a scholar on Islam and he wrote his dissertation on this topic and you can purchase it from Amazon. Keith Small, Textual Variants in Qur'an Manuscripts I think it's called, Textual Variants in Quranic Manuscripts. >> Man: Is that a more complicated version of his Holy Books Have a History? >> It is. So he wrote another book on the popular level called Holy Books Have a History, which you can purchase for five bucks. Just type it in online. That's for lay people. His book on textual variance, he emphasizes one portion of the Qur'an. It has a parallel on the Bible, it's a section about Abraham, and he really goes in depth on that. That's what you have to do as a scholar. You have to zoom, zoom in on one section. I think that's not as effective on the mass level. I think we need to talk about everything. We need to talk about the ahruf. We need to talk about the abrogation. We need to talk about what I'm about to talk about, which no one really does. So, yeah. Definitely get Keith Small's book, Holy Books Have a History. It compares the variance in the Bible to the variance in the Qur'an. I spoke to Keith a few months ago and I asked him, I said, "What you think about, "What did you think when you started writing "about the variance in the Bible "and the variance in the Qur'an? "Which is more problematic?" He said, "When I came into this, "I thought that the Qur'an and the Bible "had similar types of variance "and they're on equal footing." I said, "When you came out?" He says, "I think the Qur'an is on far worse footing than the Bible." So after careful scholastic research, he has concluded that the Qur'an is on more difficult footing than the Bible. I think so only because of the Uthmanic recension. I don't think we can take the Qur'an back before Uthman if the Uthmanic recension actually happened. For that reason, it's on worse footing, and also for what I'm about to share. In the back. >> Man: Here's a good question. So the information that you have now, even though it's valid, who is it that don't accept your information because you don't have the credential, is it the Islamic world or just the-- >> Oh, no one's told me I don't have the cre-den, the question was, who doesn't accept what you're saying because I don't have the credentials? No one's told me, "Nabeel, you don't have the credentials," but there's a reason why people publish on a peer-reviewed level. It's so that you can be vetted through the scholarly system so that what you say can be checked by others and so that you can establish a little credibility, which I don't have, not yet. So, why I'm referring you to Keith Small over me is because he's a legitimate PhD scholar in Islamic Studies. I'm just trying to take what they say, what scholars say, process it and share it with you, and hopefully I'm on my way there, but I'm not yet. Yes, sir. >> Man: I'm a pastor with a church where most of the people are from Indonesia. So when they talk about abrogation, the one that's really important to them has to do with passages where Muhammad taught peace and mercy, but then they're abrogated by wild, wild passages because that's what they experience, a lot of hostility and brutality. So how important is that with say most Muslims that live in America for that particular-- >> So the question is, abrogation and peace and violence, how does that all play together and how important is that to Muslims in America? That is stuff we're gonna be covering tomorrow. We're gonna be going into issues of jihad, peace, violence, terrorism, Islam today, basically. We're gonna be looking at that tomorrow. Yes. >> Woman: How did Muhammad die and how old was he? >> How did Muhammad die and how old was he? How about you write that question down. Let's deal with that tomorrow because I think we're on a good groove right now with the Qur'an. So let's keep going with the Qur'an, and then, are you gonna be back tomorrow? >> Woman: No. >> You're not? >> Woman: No. >> Okay, well, we'll address that then. [audience laughing] There is controversy on that issue. My friend, David, put up an interesting video on that. It's called Who Killed Muhammad? [audience laughing] It's [chuckles], David doesn't mind being a bit inflammatory. [audience laughing] You should go to his blog, very, very interesting stuff. So, he basically concludes that Allah killed Muhammad. The way he does, he says that Mohammed had said earlier on in his life that if Allah were to condemn a false prophet, he would sever his aorta. In other words, he would just drop 'em and kill 'em dead. Then Muhammad was actually, after he had defeated in battle a tribe of Jews, he was received in a reception by a Jewish woman. A Jewish woman from that tribe wanted to offer conciliatory dinner and so she makes food. Nothing suspicious about that. Turns out she [audience laughing] had poisoned the food. So Mohammed takes a bite of it. According to the sources, he takes a bite. He realizes that it's been poisoned. He says, "Allah has informed me that the lamb is poisoned," or "The lamb has informed me that it is poisoned," I don't remember, and he tells people, "Stop eating." Well one of his friends had already really dug in and he ended up dying. So Muhammad called the Jewish woman and he said, "What is this you've done?" She said, "I wanted to see if you're a true prophet. "If you were, you wouldn't have eaten it. "If you were not, you would've eaten it." Well, he kills her, and then he, ultimately, [audience laughing] as he is dying, there's a lot of Muslim sources that say that this death was a result of that poisoning. He was at the time 62 or 63. It says that the death was on account of the poisoning. What's interesting, and this is what David points out, is that some of the Islamic sources say as he was dying, he said, "I feel as if my aorta has been severed." So I'm quoting David Wood on virtually all of this. I haven't looked into the death of Muhammad that carefully, but I hope that answers your question. Unless you're gonna be not here tomorrow, let's stick with Qur'an questions. Yes sir in the back. >> Man: Regarding the 80 variants, from a literary perspective, do we know how much of a difference it will be? I mean are you talking about shifting articles or-- >> Yeah, they're not large differences. They are not large diff, the question was, how different are the different qira'at? They're not that different. Sometimes it did play out into meaning, the difference of the qira'at, and most of the time though it was just different ways of recitation, but we can see those. A lot of the qira'at, they're preserved in the record, at least those 80 are preserved in the records, especially the main 10 off of which they were a derivative. Yes. >> Woman: Can you bring up in debates the differences in how the Qur'an was preserved? What is the common response that you're usually getting? >> So I've only debated the issue of the Qur'an once, the textual preservation of the Qur'an, and it was with Bassam Zawadi. I have tremendous respect for Bassam. I think he is one of the great, greater Muslim-oh-po-lo-gists out there. He is careful with his work and he doesn't make ad hoc arguments as often as others do. His response was Allah intended the Qur'an to be changed exactly as it was changed. So his response is a theological one, which is what I pointed out in my conclusion. You can watch this debate online as well on my website. I was shocked. I was shocked he admitted as much as he did and that kind of caught me off guard. So you can see me kind of like, whoa. He just admitted everything. I don't know what to say at that point. [audience laughing] [chuckles] So you can watch the debate, but I pointed out in the debate, "Your defense is a theological defense. "We're talking historically. "Has the Qur'an been perfectly preserved? "The answer historically is no. "If you wanna say that the changes are what Allah intended, "that is a statement of faith, not an objective statement," but he's the only one I've seen debate that issue. Yes, ma'am. >> Woman: We now got the Dead Sea Scrolls, which the more and more they dig in to 'em, the more and more they match the Old Testament. We've added a few verses. I know Samuel's had a verse that got added that made the whole passage make sense just in the end and mid sentence. So we're not probably as corrupted as the Qur'an. How do Muslims answer that now that we're getting all the scientific information that at least the Old Testament from the Dead Sea Scrolls is pretty accurate? >> So the question is, how do Muslims respond to the fact that the texts of the Old Testament at least are probably more accurate than the text of the Qur'an? They don't think that. They will say that the text of the Qur'an was perfectly preserved because they will say Muslims had memorized the Qur'an. So many Muslims had memorized the Qur'an from the mouth of Muhammad that how could there have been any changes introduced? When it comes to statements like Ibn Abi Daud's and Ibn Umer's, they will say, "Ah, those are not from the hadith. "We can't trust those." So they'll often just throw them out and they'll just point to the Bible as having been corrupted. On that note, this is a total aside, I'm giving you this for free, we were in, oh, I'm not allowed to say where, I was somewhere a few weeks ago [audience laughing] and we uncovered, I think I can say who was there. I mean Lee Strobel was there. Mark Mittelberg was there. Dan Wallace was there. It was basically a cache of manuscripts were found and they're beginning to be vetted. Many of you may have heard that the first-century manuscript of Mark was found. Have you heard that? >> Audience: No. >> It's awesome. First century, well, it hasn't gone through the process of updating by many scholars' hands. That's happening right now, but there is a very well-known paleographer whose credentials are unsurpassable who said that he was certain that this is a first-century document. He, well, there's more to that story, but anyhow. There were also early second-century manuscripts of Romans, Luke that were found in this cache. We were invited to come and uncover a new portion of the cache and what I found, along with a friend of mine, Abdu, Abdu Murray, he's an an Apologist from Michigan, was the potentially the earliest Greek manuscript of Isaiah. >> Woman: Wow. >> Potentially first century B.C. or first century A.D., [person whistling] so that's really cool. There is some really cool stuff getting uncovered right now and the world of textual criticism of New Testament-Old Testament manuscripts is undergoing a quantum leap right now. You'll see this stuff coming out in the next few years. >> Man: [speaks off microphone] Isaiah and two separate universities using Carbon-14 dating dated about 150 to 250 B.C. >> Woman: Wow. >> The Greek Scroll of Isaiah, 150 to 250 B.C.? Using carbon dating? [man speaking off microphone] Okay. Pay-lig-- >> As well as [speaks off microphone] >> What did the paleography put it at? >> Man: Probably only 50. >> Okay. When was that? >> Man: When was it? >> Yeah. >> Man: It was I think in '85. >> Interesting, okay. I did not know about that. >> Man: University of Arizona, and you can check it on Google Scholar. University of Arizona and one other, I think it was Baylor University off the top of my head and did the dating. >> When we looked into the dating of Greek Isaiah manuscripts, we didn't see that. So perhaps that's there. Did it have a New Testament reference in it? >> Man: I don't know. >> Yeah. I think that was one distinguishing features of what we found was that it had a reference to the New Testament in it, not a reference to, I'm sorry. The New Testament referred to a verse that was here. So you have New Testament corroboration to a verse here. But anyhow, that'll be out in the next few years. Yes, sir. >> Man: Yes, so back to a little question from her. He said that Uthman was like, "Well, we poll-ded it so often." Wouldn't the Jews say the same thing about the Old Testament or their Holy Scripture? >> Yes, but, so the question was, don't the Jews also say that they had memorized portions of the Old Testament? Yes, but the Muslims don't really think that the Jews had memorized it as well as the Muslims had memorized the Qur'an. [audience laughing] Yes, sir. >> Man: Going back to what you said earlier about two of Uthman's text still being in our possession. These are the originals, these are copies? >> So I'm not convinced that they're Uthmanic and a lot of scholars are not convinced that they're Uthmanic, but Muslims generally are. They're called the Tashkent manuscript and the Samarkand manuscript. The Tashkent I believe is also called the Topkapi manuscript and they're found in Turkey. I think Samarkand is where the other one's found. There's actually a Turkish scholar who or two Turkish scholars who went through and compared the differences and they put out a book comparing the differences between the two, so Turkish-Muslim scholars. So you can just point-- >> Man: [speaks off microphone] >> I think it's in Samarkand. >> Man: Oh. >> So yeah, that's out there. It's interesting. There are actually multiple Qur'ans today which claim to be the Qur'an Umar was reading when he was murdered. So it's like, "Okay, how many Qur'ans [chuckles] "was he reading at the same time?" So, okay. All right, so what I'm about to, yes, sir. >> Man: Last question. I heard that Muslims believe the Old Testament is accurate and the The New isn't or do they think the whole Bible is corrupt? >> Oh, they think the whole thing's corrupted. >> Man: The whole thing? >> Yeah. So Muslims think both Old Testament and the New Testament are corrupted. We'll deal with that a little bit more tomorrow. So what I'm about to give you now is as far as the Apologetic World is concerned, I have never seen this introduced in Apologetics. I don't know why. This is a more or less cutting-edge conclusion and I wrote my thesis on this at Duke, but it's gonna take a moment, if you wanna really grasp it, how I wanna share it with you, it'll take some background. So I hope you don't mind. What we're now gonna talk about is the Qur'an as an oral text. To summarize, before we start, I think we can be fairly certain that Muhamed never intended the Qur'an to be written. I think we can be fairly certain Muhammad did not envision the Qur'an as a written book, but as a spoken book. I'm going to draw together a lot of the evidence we just talked about towards that end. First, what I wanna point out is that the Qur'an is written often using oral formulae. Where did I... Did I skip? Yeah, I did skip something. Oral formulae are understood as a feature that was found in extemporaneous composition. Here me out for a second. In the early 20th century, a man by the name of Milman Parry was studying the Homeric epics, so basically the Iliad and the Odyssey. People had been studying the Iliad and the Odyssey for a long time and there were some portions of the Iliad and the Odyssey where people just said, "This doesn't make sense. "We don't see why things are working this way." A lot of people had issues with the Homeric epics. What Milman Parry did was he traveled through various places, through Slavic regions, and he listened to storytellers who had memorized stories and who used to repeat them extemporaneously. He determined that people would often compose this poetry on the fly. This wasn't stuff that they had memorized. They were general stories that they had memorized, but on the fly they would say portions that they remembered and they would add endings and whatnot in order to make the meter and the rhyme work. He said that essentially this is what happened with the Homeric epics, that what was going on at that time was people were composing this stuff on the fly. Word for word, verbatim stories were not necessary. In order for Homer's Iliad to be Homer's Iliad, it didn't have to be word for word the same. There was kind of a general motifs, set of verses, you could leave certain stuff out, you can emphasize certain stuff. You can elaborate, depending on the occasion, it would still be Homer's Iliad. It would still be the Odyssey, and that's what Slavic poets were doing at the time. So oral poetry had these oral formulae in it. So these are called oral formulae where you could take out certain words, replace them with other words, and it would still basically mean the same thing and it would still have the same meter and rhyme. It would still be the same poem. That created a revolution in thought. All of a sudden, people said, "Wait a minute. "We have always applied written dynamics," so dynamics of literate storytellers, of literate writers, "to these ancient works. "Perhaps people "before knowing how to write thought differently. "Perhaps they wrote differently," and by writing, they mean composed orally. They composed things differently. Their though was different. So the field of classical studies just took off in this direction of orality. A man by the name, so that was Milman Parry. You should know that name, Milman Parry and his work on the Homeric epics. P-A-R-R-Y, Parry. A man by the name of Walter Ong then went and took that a lot further and he said, "We can know that people who have not become literate "think very differently from people who are literate." For example, they don't categorize things the same way literate people do. They don't go in depth in arguments the way literate people do. When you're writing something out, you can write it and then you can go further and further in depth. Whereas preliterate people, they will make an argument, and then they will add to it and add to it. They'll emphasize in various ways. So they'll say the same thing in multiple angles, whereas in literate analysis, you'll go deeper, and deeper, and deeper. In preliterate compositions, you'll have a lot of repetition. You'll say a lot of the same thing over and over again. Why? 'Cause the people who are hearing the composition, they can't flip the page and look at something again. If you want them to remember something, they're not gonna be able to go back and look at it. You have to repeat it for them. So you're gonna have a lot of repetition in these compositions. You're gonna have a lot of antagonism. There's gonna be a lot of black and white. "We're the good guys. "They're the bad guys." That's how preliterate people see things. So you have these characteristics, these psychodynamics of preliterate composers. That's the work of Walter Ong. Very recently, about last year actually, a man by the name of Andrew Bannister who worked with RZIM and he was studying out of London School of Theology, he's now part of RZIM Canada, he wrote his dissertation on the fact that the Qur'an is composed in oral formulae. So the Qur'an itself is composed of a majority, oral formulae. Some verses he said or some chapters he said, even into about 74, 75%. I think it's at 74% oral formulaic. So the Qur'an is composed essentially in a manner we would expect someone to compose something on the fly, and that fits. Remember that hadith we saw where it says, "You can say 'azizun 'alim or sami'un hakim "or whatever you want." You can change the verse endings however you want. That fits this whole concept of oral formulae where you can switch words around and it's okay. The ahruf, the ability to replace certain versus, certain words, that fits this whole concept. Parallel to him, actually before him, a man by the name of William Graham, he's still around, he's still a scholar, he wrote that the Qur'an was intended to be in oral text and it wasn't until Uthman came that it became a written text, and that is kind of the theory that we're getting at right now. So I just gave you the contours of scholarship, basically, right now, how scholarship has gotten to this point, that the Qur'an was potentially not even a written text, just an oral text. We see that happening in a lot of other works. We see it happening in Homeric epics. We see it happening in African works, English works. They say Beowulf was of the same nature. So a lot of work has been done in that field and people are beginning to apply this theory to the Qur'an. Now let's look a little more closely at the internal features of the Qur'an which point that perhaps it was an oral text. We've already talked about the oral formulae. We've seen that a lot of the Qur'an was composed in oral formula. There's a lot of antagonistic thought in the Qur'an. According to Walter Ong, this antagonism is prevalent in preliterate thought, and that's what we see in the Qur'an. The side-by-side arrangement instead of going deeper and deeper, the side-by-side arrangement of arguments and of sections of a book, we see that too in the Qur'an. We see it a lot. In fact, the surahs themselves. What does the word surah mean? It doesn't mean chapter. It's how it's used, but that's not what it originally meant. The word surah meant basically a fence, a fencing, or the walls of a city or something that encompasses. So when Mohammed says, "Put these verses in that surah," he's using the term as kind of a genre. "Put these verses along with those, "just kinda throw it in there in that section of verses." He's not seeing this as a book where he's saying, "Okay, put it in this order, exactly here." No. He's kind of putting these verses together and they're gonna end up looking side-by-side. They're not deeper and deeper. They go side-by-side, just like oral compositions do. So the way the surahs are arranged and the fact that they are surahs points to the probability of the Qur'an was composed in oral composition. Another thing that Walter Ong pointed out, and this actually goes back to Milman Parry, he said that when Homer, when you read the Iliad, when you read the Odyssey, Homer's using words that had become obsolete by that point. He's using words that were imported from other places or that were just simply not in use where the Greek was being used. Why is that? Well Parry would say these oral traditions have been carried on from far before or from faraway places and these distant lands or times when these verses were first composed, the words are still there. So you end up having a foreign vocabulary. You end up having words that aren't part of the language in the text because they're carried. These are the important parts of the epics that `could not be changed. We look at the Qur'an, Arthur Jeffery has a book called The Foreign Vocabulary Of The Quran. This is the same Arthur Jeffery who had The Materials. You can buy this book off Amazon, The Foreign Vocabulary Of The Quran. He found 316 words in the Qur'an that in some way, shape, or form were foreign to the Arabic of the time. So where do these words come from? Again, it fits our theory of oral composition. These were imported from elsewhere. The word Qur'an itself is one of those words. It wasn't used in Arabic at the time. It was something that was important for Syriac, and we talked about that yesterday. Andrew Banister, the same guy who points out the oral formulae in the Qur'an, also points out that there are different versions of the same story found in the Qur'an. So in the Qur'an, for example, you've got the story of Satan not bowing before Adam. So the story is that Allah told Satan to bow down before Adam. Satan did not bow down before Adam and so he was cast out. He was rejected. He was accursed. This story's found seven times in the Qur'an while each of the seven has some differences. They're not verbatim, the same. Andrew Bannister says these are performance variants. In other words, or potentially, at least, performance variants. When Muhammad was recounting these, he slightly changed it each time, which was normal for oral composition. It wasn't expected to be verbatim. No one cared about verbatim precision. So essentially, Andrew Bannister's arguing this is the same story. It's not seven different versions of the same story. This is the same story, but it looks different through performance variants. That's something we would expect of oral composition. So internally then, we've got antagonism between people. You've got oral formulae. You've got paratactic arrangement of arguments and verses. You've got these surahs. You've got performance variances. You've got foreign vocabulary. All these things point to and accumulate and build up the case for the fact that the Qur'an was originally an oral composition, but let's take a look at some of the historical features we talked about. First off, we know that the Quran itself was revealed orally. We remember that first relation where the angel said, "Recite," and then he gave orally a statement to Muhammad, and then Muhammad would then orally share it with scribes. So we know orality is imbued in the dictation of the Qur'an, but there's actually a verse in the Qur'an that sheds a lot of interesting insight into the way the Qur'an was revealed. This verse is chapter 75, surah al-Qiyamah, verse 16 through 19: Allah is talking to Mohammed and he says, "Stir not your time tongue to hasten it therewith. "Lo! upon Us rest the putting together thereof "and the reading thereof. "And when We read it, follow thou the reading. "Upon us rests the explanation thereof." Yeah, what's going on here? Allah is saying, "Don't try to recite the Qur'an quickly "so that you can remember it. "Don't try to hurry up and recite it." After, Gabriel says it to you, "Don't hurry up and recite it "in order to remember it. "Upon us, upon Allah, "upon me "lies the responsibility of making "sure you will remember it. "So I will make sure you remember this. "So when we recite it, just recite it back to us, "and we'll make sure that you understand it." Let's stop and think about this for a second. In here, in this verse, apparently, Muhammad's worried that he's gonna forget portions of the Qur'an and that's why he's reciting it back as quickly as he can. Allah says, "Don't worry. "I'll make sure you remember it." Why does Allah not say, "Your scribes are writing it down, it's okay." [audience laughing] Where is that? In fact, in the Qur'an, anywhere, does it say that you're supposed to write this down? No. Now there is something in the Qur'an that talks about writing. I don't have it on hand, but I think it's surah 22 where Mohammed is telling people if they have a business transaction, a loan that's made, then someone should write down the terms of the loan and the scribe should not hesitate to write it. "They should not become weary of writing it," is what it says, "whether the terms are small or long," and they're supposed to obtain witnesses. So there's suppose to be witnesses and there supposed to be scribes. That's what the Qur'an says. Then later on it says, if you have a loan that's made or if you have a business transaction that's made that isn't a loan of the same nature, then you don't need the scribe. Just the witnesses will suffice. Okay, so what does this tell us? This tells us that people could write, but it also tells us that people grew weary of writing 'cause it says, "Don't grow weary of the writing "no matter how toilsome it is, "no matter how long or short it is." So people grew weary of the writing. But if we're very careful, we will notice that what's more important than the writing? The witnesses. The witnesses are more important because when you have to disperse with one, which one do you disperse with? Not the witnesses, the writing. The witnesses are still necessary, very interesting, and this makes sense. According to oral preliterate psychodynamics, it makes sense. All the same, why is it not written anywhere, especially in surah 75 that you have this written down, that your scribes will write it down immediately? "Make sure your scribes write it." It's not there. What does that tell us? That makes a lot of sense of the ahruf, does it not? When Mohammed would say, "You can recite it whatever way you want, "just don't substitute mercy for "punishment and punishment for mercy," all of a sudden this makes a lot more sense. Muhammad doesn't care about the verbatim words. He cares about the meaning, which is how people thought in preliterate days. Verbatim was not an issue. Even when people used to say in preliterate times, "I remember word for word what such and such said," when they recite it, it wasn't word for word. It wasn't verbatim, and then you could point out to them, "This isn't verbatim," but they wouldn't care. It's verbatim enough, basically. So the ahruf makes a lot more sense when you take a look at it in this oral milieu. What else makes sense? The abrogation. Let's stop and think for a second. If you consider a book to be a written book and Mohammed says, "Okay this verse is no longer a part of the Qur'an," you would have the kinds of questions we had here. How could Muslims not have cognitive dissonance when they're striking out a section of the Qur'an? Doesn't that cause problems for the Muslims? Yeah, it would, if it were written. But if Muhammad were saying, "Hey, remember that verse that you used to recite? "Stop reciting it," all of a sudden you've abrogated a section of the Qur'an without ever having to take pen to paper. That verse is gone and is not as hard, it's not as cognitively dissonant as striking things out. So abrogation makes a lot more sense when you take a look at it in an oral milieu. What else makes sense? When is it that we get disputes showing up in the canon of the Qur'an? Remember: ibn Masud, 111 chapters, Ubay ibn Kab, 116 chapters. When did these disputes start happening? >> Audience: When it was written. >> When it was written. When people had to make a decision on what is part of the Qur'an and what's not part of the Qur'an. Up until then, if people just didn't recite surah 114 and 113, the question wouldn't even come up, "Is this part of the Qur'an or not?" It wouldn't matter. No one's thinking about that. But when it comes time to codify exactly what is part of the Qur'an and what's not part of the Qur'an, all of a sudden it matters. Decisions have to be made. You have to stake your claim. So the fact that disputes happened exactly when they happened, in the manner they happened, when the Qur'an was being codified, that also points to the oral nature of the Qur'an. Okay, I was wrong. It wasn't surah 222. It was surah 2, verse 282. Surah 2 verse 282 is where you have this record of scribes writing things down. So that could be an objection. Here you have scribes writing things down. Why wouldn't they write down the Qur'an? Well I think it's because Muhammad didn't intend for the Qur'an to be a written book. By the way, we know Muhammad was illiterate according to the Qur'an. Surah 17 of the Qur'an says that Muhammad was illiterate. So Muhammad's illiteracy itself adds more weight to the fact the Qur'an was an oral composition and it was intended for oral purposes. >> Man: It's 217? >> Surah 17. >> Man: 17. >> There is one major objection to this point of view, and that is that the Qur'an calls itself a book, it's called Al-Kitab, The Book, but the response to that is actually fairly simple when you take a look at it. According to even Muslims scholars, for example, Taqi Usmani, he's a jurist out of Pakistan, he argues that the term book did not simply mean written things. It also meant what was on people's hearts, and William Graham agrees to that. William Graham's the one I mentioned earlier who started proposing this theory of an oral Qur'an. He agrees. He says that when Muhammad envisioned a book, what he was envisioning was things that were read aloud by the Jews and by the Christians. There were no Arabic books. So when the Jews and the Christians would read their book aloud, what were they doing? Were they actually reading a book? No. They were reciting portions of the New Testament. They were reciting portions of the Old Testament, and that's what Muhammad considered to be a book, these oral recitations. It's also interesting to note that there's a Muslim scholar named Mun-hers Sfar, S-F-A-R, who argues that today's Qur'an is corrupt because it was never meant to be the Qur'an. The Qur'an is the one in Heaven. That is Al-Kitab, not the one here. So Sfar goes through the Qur'an. Whenever the Qur'an says, "The book," the Qur'an is Al-Kitab, he says that Allah is talking about the book in Heaven. He's not talking about the recitations here. What's here are recitations of the book. It goes even further, by the way. The term Qur'an, if you take a look at the hadith, it wasn't really used as a proper noun, at least not uniformly. It was used as the word recitation. So it was said in one hadith, it is said, "Recite whatever Qur'an you have with you in prayer." What does that mean? It doesn't make sense if you see the Qur'an as a proper noun. But if you see the Qur'an as a lot of individual little recitations that you can recite in liturgy, each of which are recitations, the Arabic work for that being koo-rahns, then it begins to make sense. "Recite whatever Qur'an you have with you." Only after time did the Qur'an we have that we, the book, that we have get called the recitation, Al-Quran. Before that, all of the little liturgical recitations and they were all called koo-rahns, and that's another argument William Graham makes. So this is not, by the way, made it into the realm of Apologetics. I've never seen this argued anywhere. I actually thought I came up with a theory, and then I saw William Graham had written a whole book on it and I was very upset. [audience laughing] So, anyhow. The implications for this theory are that to simply ask, I'm sorry, to simply state that the Qur'an has been perfectly preserved, every letter is exactly how it was written originally at Muhammad's time is almost a category fallacy. It wasn't even intended to be a written book. That's really problematic for the Islamic polemic, that the Qur'an has never been changed. But even more important is that it provides a model that makes a lot of sense of the data that you have. Now the question still remains: Are the sources reliable? Were there such things as ahruf? Were there such things as abrogation early on? You don't remember. We can't. We don't really know with certainty how trustworthy those sources are. So that question still remains. But if we are to accept the contours of those sources, then we must conclude that this model makes a lot of sense of that data that the Qur'an was not envisioned to be a written book. The monumental contribution that Uthman made to the Qur'an was him turning it into a book. When he wrote it down, he radically changed the Qur'an, not just in the text that it had, but in its entire form and how it was understood by Muslims. Of course, apart from this, just looking at the data as it is, the whole claim that the Qur'an has never been changed, it's exactly the way it always was is just untenable, historically speaking. It just does not fit the evidence. You have to throw out a ton of evidence in order to make that claim. I would like to point out for the take of clarification that I would not argue the Qur'an has been radically altered. I wouldn't argue that. I would argue that we can't know how altered the Qur'an is, but we do know that there were early disputes. We do know that there's no reason to say it wasn't altered and we do have evidence that hundreds of verses are missing. Did that change the meaning of the Qur'an? Who knows, who knows, but according to the sources, hundreds of verses are missing. We don't know exactly how altered the Qur'an is and there is simply no basis to say it's exactly the way it was before. By the way, if any of you, I'm trying to decide whether I should do this. After a little while, if any of you would like my thesis which is on this issue, you can request it from me and I'll send it to you. Yes. >> Man: I was just thinking kinda like what those imams, you told a story the imams telling you about the spirit of the Qur'an. Even if you make the case that it is oral, that it's kind of it's never intended to be written down, so it could be imperfectly spoken and that's how it was to be received with, imperfectly in the sense that there may be certain parts missing, I take that when I'm retelling it myself, my performance, I change certain things, then is there, it seems like that they can say, "Then we still have the Qur'an today "'cause we're still speaking it imperfectly "and it's just like a representative of "the real Qur'an that's in Heaven." Do you kinda get what I'm saying? >> Yeah, so the question was, if we argue that the Qur'an was meant as an oral text and not as a written text, then Muslims would be able to say, "We still have the Qur'an today." I think that's correct. I think that's correct, but we would also have to say, I mean the issue of abrogation still remains, the issue of fluidity still remains, and really it takes away the whole Apologetic impulse of the Qur'an has never been changed. >> Man: Right. >> You'd have to say there was so much fluidity built into it that, in that sense, yeah, it wasn't changed, but not textually and you can't compare that to the Bible and the Old Testament then which were written works. >> Man: Right, and I think it seems like they could, I mean maybe they wouldn't want to, but it seems like they could fork it back to you but still say, "The true Qur'an's never been changed "and our retellings of it are fairly representative of it," and... >> That's not enough for a Muslims, no. >> Man: It's not, okay. >> That's not enough for a Muslim. They need the text to be exactly the same and [sighs] I wanna clarify. When I say that the Qur'an was never intended to be written down, I mean, by Mohammed, and I do think that people wrote stuff down in his time, but those were used to remind Muslims of the oral text. That wasn't the Qur'an itself. Those were reminders, which is pretty much the conclusion of scholarship. So I'm not denying that there were people writing things down at Muhammad's time, but I am saying those weren't necessarily comprehensive. It doesn't mean that all the Qur'an was written down and that those writings were not considered Qur'an. The actual recitation was considered Qur'an. Mita. >> Mita: The notion of the Qur'an having never been changed, is that why it's believed that the Qur'an is only true to the Qur'an when it's in Arabic and not if it's translated into other languages? You're not reading the true Qur'an. Is that where that comes from or does that come from something different? >> [sighs] That partially comes, oh, the question was, the notion that the Qur'an has never been changed, is that a derivative of the fact that it's only read in Arabic? I would say that Muslims think the Qur'an is so deep in its meaning and so infinite in its implications that if we were to translate it away, we would lose meaning and we would lose implication, and therefore, any translation is not true Qur'an. But I do think that the original impetus, you're right, is that the Qur'an was intended for oral recitation amongst Arabs, and so to recite it in a different language would lose some of its potency, but that's a very tenuous statement. I wouldn't stand by that if I had to. It's just a guess. Yes, sir. >> Man: But it was read in different languages. You can say it'd be translated back into Koresh as they did translation. >> They will say that the Koresh was a dialect. It wasn't a different language. >> Man: Oh, it's a dialect? >> Yeah, and that's probably accurate. Any other questions? Yes, ma'am. >> Woman: How many language, I mean I know we have the Qur'an, a [background noise drowns out other sounds] that's in English, but how many languages is the Qur'an translated into? >> Well, okay. So Muslims will not allow the term translation for Qur'ans, generally speaking. They will say, "an interpretation of the meaning." So they want to make sure that you understand that this is not original Qur'an. The original Qur'an has to be in Arabic. That's why most Qur'ans, if they're gonna be accepted by Muslims, have to be two-column: one column, Arabic, one column English or whatever other language. It wasn't until recent times when people endeavored to translate the Qur'an and certain sects translate the Qur'an far more than others sects. The sect of Islam that my family comes from tries to translate it in tons of languages and it's a very missionary-oriented sect. Other sects will say that you can't and shouldn't. "You should teach whoever wants to learn it Arabic "and they would have to read it in Arabic." So I would say it's in a lot of languages. I don't know how many, but it's in a lot of languages, but that's based on the efforts of a few. Yes, sir. >> Man: I've read that one of the reasons that the belief of the illiteracy for the Prophet is so important is because therefore he could not have consulted sources for his content, but it looks pretty clear that the content is anything but original. He tells Bible stories. He tells Old Testament, New Testament stories. He tells some others and I don't wanna go into the list of four or five things because I could be overwhelmed there. How does this discussion that we've just had about the oral nature of the original Qur'an account for the content? >> So, the illiteracy of Muhammad, the reason why, okay, you want me to repeat the question? [audience laughing] That was a long question. [audience laughing] Give me the question one more time. I'll see if I can... [audience laughing] >> Man: [background noise drowns out other sounds] >> Yeah. >> Man: I've read that the Islamic world today will insist upon his illiteracy because he got it directly from God. He didn't consult. He didn't learn. His wife's priest who married him didn't teach him the Scriptures of the Christians and Jews. >> I see. >> Man: At the same time, when you read the stories, they're the same stories that are in the Bibles of the Jews and some of the other stories are in the books of the heretics or the agnostics. Where did he get the information if it's all oral because they're coming from written, unless we wanna maintain that in his day the people couldn't communicate these things to him were also memorizing it? >> Okay, so the question then is, the impetus for the emphasis on Muhammad's illiteracy is often for Apologetic purposes, to say that Muhammad couldn't have gotten these stories from anywhere 'cause he was illiterate. >> Man: I've read that in two or three of the things that I've been reading about. >> So where did he get this from? I would like to point out that the Qur'an actually gives that reason itself. So I said chapter 17 earlier. I was wrong. It was chapter seven, verses 157, 158, which says Muhammad was illiterate, and also chapter 29 verse 48 which says Muhammad was illiterate. In those verses it says that you accuse him of having written this stuff himself, but how could he? He's illiterate. He hasn't read anything like this and he couldn't if he tried. So that's found in the Qur'an itself. We need to remember that the society was starkly different from ours. You didn't have to read to get this information. You had to be able to hear, which virtually everyone did. I mean it's the same thing in first century Palestine, by the way, where the Gospels were written. They weren't sitting around reading the Gospels. 97% of people in first century Palestine were illiterate. Only 3% were literate. So to hear the Gospels what would happen was you have someone who would sit down and he would read it aloud. In order to hear the Gospel, someone would recite it aloud and others would hear it. It's the exact same thing for Muhammad. So if he's gonna hear these things, he could've hear them anywhere. We know that there were Christians in his area. We know that there were Jews in his area and we know that Muhammad was a merchant who traveled and he went all kinds of places and heard all kinds of stories and he spend time with people from other places. So that Mohammed heard these things from elsewhere is not difficult to account for at all. We'll talk about this a bit tomorrow when we talk about some of the Apologetic implications, but there are verses in the Qur'an which talk about Jesus that are from Gnostic sources: the Arabic Infancy Gospel, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, et cetera. There's literally, Mohammed, or the Qur'an says these things happened, but these are Gnostic sources. Where did he get them? Well, he heard the Gnostic sources. Did he read them? Probably not. 97% of people didn't. They heard them. It'd be interesting, actually, if you want to look in Acts, what chapter? I don't know. Towards beginning of Acts, you have the Ethiopian. Is he Ethiopian? He's traveling in a caravan. [audience speaking off microphone] Is it Philip? Philip who hears him. It says he overheard him reading Isaiah. I mean are his eyes that loud he overhear him reading it? [audience laughing] No. The way people read stuff was people read them aloud. It was read aloud to them. So I could say, "Hey, I was reading such and such." What I mean is someone was reading it aloud to me and we see that even in the New Testament. So Mohammed having read this stuff, heard this stuff, it's not hard to explain, especially considering his travels and the people who's hanging around. >> Man: But is that indeed the Muslims claim about how he got this-- >> No, no, no. Okay, so the Muslim, the Muslims claim on how he got this stuff is definitely, Muslim will say that Allah revealed it to him directly. They don't need to say that. I mean it doesn't really add much to their case, but that's what they'd argue, he got it directly. >> Woman: Did Muhammad, was he a religious man before this? Was he a Christian, a Jew, a pagan? What was-- >> yeah so the Islamic sources will say that Mohammed was a monotheist and that's about it. He just believed in one God before his ministry. >> Woman: So he wasn't part of any formal religion or type? >> Not that it says anywhere. Again you've got people like Patricia Crone and Michael Cook who would argue that he was actually a heretical Christian, but the vast majority of scholars and all Muslims would say no. He was just a monotheist. Do you have any other questions? Yes, sir. >> Man: Doesn't this fit in as well with the role of poets or that it was supposed to have been in pre-Islamic Arabia? They were kinda the commentators on what was going on in society, just some poets who would improvise any poetic commentaries on politics or religion or-- >> Yeah, there is a, so the question was, doesn't that kind of play in with the role of poets in early history? I wanted to read this for you. This is a classical Islamic commentator, Ibn Rashiq, who says: "When there appeared a poet in the family of Arabs," so talking about Arabs right before Muhammad, "when there appeared a poet in the family of the Arabs, "the other tribes roundabout would gather to that family "and wish them joy for their good luck. "Feasts would be gotten ready. "The women of the tribe would join together in bands, "playing upon lutes, as they were won't to do at bridals, "and the men and boys would congratulate one another "for a poet was a defense to the honor of them all, "a weapon to ward off insult from their good name "and the means for perpetuating the glorious deeds "of establishing their fame forever." So poets were extremely important in the society and again, oral society, makes sense. That Mohammed was just a poet was a common accusation. According to the Qur'an, if we can read the Qur'an in a documentary fashion which skeptical scholars would say we can't, but if we can, the Qur'an often responds to the claim that Muhammad is just a poet and that's part of the reason for the challenge. If you think he's just a poet, then you try to write something like this. You'll see that you can't. That's how that all works together. >> Man: Wasn't there an early account as well of a poet in Mecca accusing Muhammad of borrowing? >> Wasn't there an account of an early poet in Mecca who had accused Muhammad of basically borrowing poetry and being a forger? Again, that's in the Qur'an. It says, "They accuse you of forgery," but if they knew better, essentially the Qur'an is saying, so yeah, it seems so. There's all kinds of stories of poets battling with Muhammad at that time. Yes, sir. >> Man: I was thinking about the the world practice of putting things side by side rather than the written practice of going in deep. So I was thinking about a lot of biblical text, and especially the Book of Proverbs. You see that all the time. So I'm wondering, just off the cuff, what would you say about comparing and contrasting that phenomenon in the Qur'an and the Bible? >> Actually Genesis is given as a common example, Genesis 1, of an oral text 'cause if you actually look at Genesis verbatim from the Hebrew, it'll say, "And then God did this, "and then God did this, "and then God did this, and then God did," and you see a lot of ands in there used as conjunctions which is supposed to be a hallmark of oral composition. The difference here is the Islamic claim versus the Christian claim. It doesn't pose a problem for Christian inspiration at all if it was an oral text later written down. >> Man: Yeah, yeah. >> It does pose a problem for the Islamic polemic, that the Qur'an has never been changed. So, you're right. When it comes to the literary quality of the Bible, there are certain portions of the Bible that seem to have been composed in oral composition, but it does not compromise the claims of inspiration and inerrancy for Christians whereas it does for Muslims 'cause Muslims have a higher view of their inspiration and inerrancy. That was a great point. Ma'am. >> Woman: I'm not sure if I can word my question, but I'll try [chuckles]. [audience laughing] Your statement about the language and how the Qur'an recitations were for the Arab peoples, then what gives them the impetus to take their beliefs or the message of the Qur'an to the other peoples? >> Well, I wouldn't say it was for the Arab people. So the question was, what gives them the impetus to take the message elsewhere when it was developed for the Arab people? I don't think that, well, first, I don't think Muhammad thought it through that carefully. [audience laughing] I don't think he realized what the implications would be, but at the same time, Mohammed did say that you could read the words however you want it to. He introduced an element of fluidity into the text. So he allowed for people to read however they needed to read in order for them to learn it. Plus, from the very beginning, you had Muhammad telling people to go and conquer others, and this is in surah 9, to go, and unless they accept Islam, to fight them. Now what does that mean? That means Islam was intended for evangelism, if you will, for spreading along those lines [audience laughing] in its own remarkable way. [audience laughing] So I wouldn't say that it was intended just for Arab people, but I would say that it was crafted in the Arab language for an Arabic milieu. So that's what I mean by I don't think he thought it through. It wasn't crafted in a universal way, but it was intended for people of all sorts. Any other questions? We have covered a lot today. We have looked at a lot of the issues with critical scholarship. We've looked at a lot of the sources. This was a very heady day. I gave you a lot of the names of scholars so you can do further research on your own, but this stuff is important to wrestle with because most people who engage in Apologetics with Muslims haven't dealt with this stuff. Most believers who work with Muslims, they just don't know the complications when it comes to Muhammad's life, when it comes to Qur'an, the level of disagreement even among scholars and the truly problematic nature of the sources. Now that you've wrestled with this and understood it, we're gonna go back to mainly a descriptive approach when we talk about Apologetics because, again, that's the basis off which to build a bridge to discuss with Muslims. So you've wrestled with this. You've grappled with it. Keep it in your storehouse of knowledge. Learn from it. But tomorrow when we're talking about Apologetics, when we're talking about discussions with Muslims, we need to work off of a common bridge. So we're gonna be talking from a more or less descriptive approach. [upbeat instrumental music] >> Narrator: Biola University offers a variety of biblically-centered degree programs, ranging from Business, to Ministry, to the Arts and Sciences. Visit biola.edu to find out how Biola could make a difference in your life. [upbeat instrumental music]

Channel: BiolaUniversity

Views: 275,487

Rating: 4.3830113 out of 5

Keywords: Biola, MCA, Christian Apologetics, Nabeel Qureshi, islam, ucm_openbiola:true, ucm:captioned_contingency_june2018

Id: F03JVB-7gqs

Length: 114min 49sec (6889 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 09 2012