Thursday, June 01, 2006

Many Variant Readings of the Quran

Muslims attack the Bible on the grounds that it sometimes has conflicting wording from different manuscripts. Yet this is exactly the case with the text of the Quran. There are many conflicting readings on the text of the Quran as Arthur Jeffery has demonstrated in his book, Material for the History of the Text of the Quran (New York, Russell F. Moore, 1952).
At one point Jeffery gives 90 pages of variant readings on the text. For example, in Sura 2 there are over 140 conflicting and variant readings on the text of the Quran.


All Western and Muslim scholars admit the presence of variant readings in the text of the Quran (Dashti, 23 Years, p. 28; Mandudi, Meaning of the Quran, pp. 17-18; McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia, V152).

Guillaume points out that the Quran at first "had a large number of variants, not always trifling in significance" (Islam, p. 189).

"It is interesting to note that in scholarly Muslim journals, there is beginning to be a grudging acknowledgment of the fact that there are variant and conflicting readings on the text of the Quran" (One example would be Saleh al-Wahaihu, "A Study of Seven Quranic Variants," International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies, Vol. V (1989), #2, pp. 1-57).

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