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Thousands of people had the entire Quran committed to memory during the lifetime of Mohammad. The standardization of the written Quran, and the many "versions"

• keedot 11y ago
  This is absurd, where did you learn this?
  • Nemant 11y ago
    It's called history. Even to this day Arabic newspapers/books don't have the extra symbols to aid reading. These were introduced for non-arabs.
  • igammarays 11y ago
    Common knowledge among Muslims. I memorized the entire Quran word-for-word when I was 12 years old myself, as did many of my friends.
    • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      >Thousands of people had the entire Quran committed to memory during the lifetime of Mohammad. // Your comment doesn't address the claim. Once the canonical written version of the Koran had been established memorising the entire text is relatively easy. Prior to that you would have had to be present when Mohammed revealed the narrations or had a precise rendition of that oration conveyed to you. At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible. Conveying the general meaning is within the realms of possibility; surahs revealed to large groups might even allow the preservation of some of the actual wording too. Take an example - Armstrong's speech when stepping on to the moon, was it "one small step for a man" or was the "a" not spoken? This is probably the most pored over of all speeches ever, millions of witnesses. Did no camel ever brae in the tents of the Qureshi tribe in Mohammed's time? Abrogation causes further problems to this claim as not only do all "thousands" have to remember the exact wording used but the exact order too, and they have only a couple of months from the end of Mohammed's narrations to learn the last of them. Not only do they need to know the order, for abrogation purposes (to learn the way to act) but they have to remember the narrations in the same non-temporal order as everyone else. I can believe even that many of Mohammed's followers remembered surah, mostly that they agreed on wording, but not at all that they remembered it in the "wrong" (ie not the delivered order) and that the order it was remembered in was identical (ie was "the entire Quran"). Doesn't 2:106 say that Allah causes ayats to be forgotten, those ayats must have been in the original - else they wouldn't have been narrated by Mohammed - but aren't now remembered and so are not in the "entire Quran". Of course if surah 25:32 (http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=25&verse=32 http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=25&verse=32) that says the Koran was revealed piecemeal is wrong and surah 2:185 is right then the whole Koran was passed on in one month (including future conversations) which makes it easier to attain unanimous agreement but also means that [if tradition that the Koran was passed on in 10 days is correct] the hearers were remembering > 600 ayats of prose each day for 10 days in a row; quite a feat for illiterate desert tribesmen regardless of whether they had a tradition of oral history or not. I'm very interested in the Muqatta'at too - how were written character variations conveyed by the "thousands"?
      • igammarays 11y ago
        Very fair argument. However there also existed a consistent, full-time effort by significant numbers of people, around 70 in number, (known as Ashab as Suffa or People of The Platform) whose sole job was to memorize the Koran (and learn its interpretations) during the lifetime of Mohammed. They lived in the mosque pretty much all day, and did nothing else. Their learning was regularly checked, and presumably feedback given by Mohammed, until his death. It is not impossible to imagine that they were able to memorize and organize the current canonical text in the right order, even though it was revealed piecemeal. After Mohammed's death, these people went on to travel all over the Islamic world and teach students, giving rise to the "thousands" of memorizers within the 2nd generation of Islam, with no recorded incidents of version conflicts among the 7 established dialects. However even with that, it is understandably difficult to believe that no mistakes were made in transmission. That's why the Quran calls it a miracle, and calls it Allah's job, to safeguard the integrity the Quran. That fact there is an established canonical version today with zero conflicts among all major prints in all countries is somewhat of a miracle, considering the fact that Muslims across cultures argue and disagree about a lot of other things within the religion. As for the Muqatta'at, they are a part of regular recitation - they are not simply written characters.
        • millstone 11y ago
          There is an established canonical version today because Uthman set about the task of destroying all texts except the one he preferred. It's obvious why Muslims would wish a standardized text, but from a secular perspective, this was no miracle, but a tragic loss of historical sources and artifacts.
      • mkhattab 11y ago
        > At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible. And that's the point of why it is considered a miracle. Transmission of the Quran has always been orally and will continue to be. The general meaning is preserved within the text, however, the correct recitation(s) are not. You can't pick up the Quran and expect to be reciting it correctly.
    • istajeer 11y ago
      Ahh, but did you understand any of it? Many people, particularly Indians/Pakistanis do this without understanding it. It is a very odd thing for me to comprehend.
  • jasimq 11y ago
    It's correct. There were thousands of people who memorized the verses at the time of Muhammad(pbuh). Muslims recite the Quran at least 5 times a day in the daily prayers from memory. Even today there are millions of people in all age groups who've memorized the whole Quran in Arabic
    • keedot 11y ago
      All evidence points to the contrary. The need of Uthman to canonize the text was due to the variation that existed. He ordered those variants destroyed, removing all evidence of their content. I even recall from college that the caliph ordered all verses, in any form, to be collected; some of the verse was from scraps of vellum, reed, antler, etc... If thousands of memorizers truly existed, such an exercise wouldn't be needed. He would only need to get a dozen of the people that memorized it to recite the exact verse again.
      • mkhattab 11y ago
        Variations existed in the written form not in the recitation because diacritics (tashkeel) were not standardized. It's a common misconception that the Quran is memorized through the written text. This is not how it is transmitted. Look up Tajweed, which are the rules of pronunciation of the Quran. Furthermore, memorizers of the Quran can trace the chain of narration back to Muhammad himself. So there couldn't be any forgery or manipulation. Uthman doesn't have the power to erase people's memories.
        • keedot 11y ago
          Since written word is far more reliable than oration, again there is absolutely no proof of any of this.
          • jasimq 11y ago
            In Arabic language different dialects/variations have different punctuations and pronunciations which changes how a word is pronounced but not what the word is or what it means.
• skissane 11y ago
  Shi'a traditions state that Ali had a different recension of the Quran - it contained the same text as the Uthmanic, but the Surahs were arranged in chronological order. So it seems plausible to me that, at least, different versions of the Quran pre-standardisation differed in the order of the Surahs.
• tjradcliffe 11y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. When we look at the actual history of the Quran--and it has one, just like any other book made my human hands--we find that the claims of its unaltered perfection don't look very plausible: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/01/what-is-the-koran/304024/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/01/what-is-... "As Muslims increasingly came into contact with Christians during the eighth century, the wars of conquest were accompanied by theological polemics, in which Christians and others latched on to the confusing literary state of the Koran as proof of its human origins. Muslim scholars themselves were fastidiously cataloguing the problematic aspects of the Koran—unfamiliar vocabulary, seeming omissions of text, grammatical incongruities, deviant readings, and so on. A major theological debate in fact arose within Islam in the late eighth century, pitting those who believed in the Koran as the 'uncreated' and eternal Word of God against those who believed in it as created in time, like anything that isn't God himself. Under the Caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833) this latter view briefly became orthodox doctrine. It was supported by several schools of thought, including an influential one known as Mu'tazilism, that developed a complex theology based partly on a metaphorical rather than simply literal understanding of the Koran." The claim that thousands of people committed the entire Quran to memory during Mohammad's lifetime--a time when the finished product didn't actually exist by most accounts--and then produced a generally agreed-upon version in an unbiased way is enormously implausible. Please note clearly: I am not saying that "thousands of people memorizing a book of seventy-odd thousand highly-repetitive words" is particularly implausible. As a feat of memory this is rather modest and uninteresting. That's completely unrelated to my point: as you say, a child of ten could do it. Big deal. What I'm saying is the claim that the book was complete and that there was unbiased agreement in the production of the written version based on many memorized versions is extremely unlikely given everything we know, and that there were such vigorous debates about the issue amongst early Muslims themselves makes it even more-so. Certainty about historical events rarely increases with time, and Muslims have done very little of the hard scientific work required to plausibly claim they know more about what happened in the 7th century than Muslims of the 8th and 9th did. They have in fact actively attacked and sometimes killed people who have dared to undertake any of that work. Furthermore, one of the most bizarre aspects of the Quran is the ordering of the suras, which is based on no literary or philosophical or temporal principle but (more-or-less) how long they are. Take the Bible and reorganize it that way and it would become even less coherent than it already is. So Muslims have to claim that the book is perfect, but its organizing principle is completely incoherent. God is supposed to work in mysterious ways, but this kind of incoherence is a good deal more consistent with human agency and the historical development of the final text under the auspices of ignorant men who were guessing at how best to put it all together. One final note: killing me does not change the truth or falsity of anything written above. Why I feel obliged to say that should be obvious to anyone who is remotely honest and aware, Muslim or non-Muslim. I believe everyone who is critical of Islam or the Quran should include a statement of this nature. It does not reduce the already-small chance any of us will get killed, but it will remind everyone that for every voice that speaks out there are many more that stay silent because they know that some deeply sincere religious person acting in accordance with the highest example of their prophet may murder them if they speak.