Who is Dan Brubaker, & why is his book so damning? - Quranic Corrections Ep. 2

Back in 2018, Jay and Al Fadi delved into the subject of changes to the earliest Qur’anic texts, which caused quite a stir. Now, in 2019, they are delving into this subject once again, but zeroing in on a special book which has just been released, entitled: “Corrections in Early Qur’an Manuscripts”, written by Dr Daniel Alan Brubaker.

So, who is Dr Brubaker exactly? He is a scholar of early Qurʾanic manuscripts of the 7th-10th centuries AD, the earliest period of the book’s existence. He defended his doctoral dissertation entitled “Intentional Changes in Qurʾan Manuscripts” and was awarded his PhD at Rice University in Houston in 2014.

Since then Dr Brubaker has continued his work researching corrections in early Qurans. To date, he has photographed and analyzed approximately 10,000 early Qurʾan manuscript folios, mostly in person, housed in institutions and libraries in Paris, St. Petersburg, Oxford, Cambridge, London, Dublin, Doha, Manama, Kuwait, Tashkent, and elsewhere.

Amongst those he has photographed are the six earliest manuscripts, which are found in Turkey (the Topkapi MS), Tashkent (the Samarkand MS), Sana’a (the Sana’a MS), London (the 2165 Ma’il MS), Paris (the Petropolitanus MS), and Egypt (the Husseini MS).

He was looking for around 7-8 corrections in any of these manuscripts in order to find out whether indeed the claim by Muslims was correct, that the Qur’an had never been changed, and that the Qur’an which we have in our hands today is exactly the same as that which is in heaven (see Surah 85:22), or that which was revealed to Muhammad between 610-632 AD, or even that which was finally written down by Uthman in 652 AD.

For Dan, this was only an academic exercise. For Jay and Al Fadi, it is much more, because their job is to take what the academics find and make it public, confronting the Muslims in public concerning their claims for textual fidelity. This is called ‘polemics’, the opposite of ‘apologetics’, the former going on the offensive, and the latter remaining on the defensive. Jay and Al Fadi’s responsibility, then, is to take the research of Dan and other academics and make it public, and that is what they are doing in these episodes, asking the question of whether the Qur’an was perfectly preserved, as Muslims claim.

Ironically, only in Islamic research are academics censored from going public with what they are researching, especially if it is critical of Islam, the Qur’an, or Muhammad, threatening those who dare go public by employing death threats and assassinations (i.e. Salman Rushdie, Tasleema Nasreen, Fazlur Rahman, etc…), or having them banned from universities by calling them ‘hate preachers’ or ‘Islamophobic’ (i.e. what happened to Jay in November in Hong Kong). This is why Jay and Al Fadi have to use YouTube to get this material out to the public.

Daniel Brubaker is the first to not only go to all of the museums and libraries physically, but to research each of the pages of all the earliest manuscripts and find the corrections. What’s more, though some of these corrections were known earlier, they have never been published. Thus, he is the first to go public and publish some of those he has found, and that is why Jay and Al Fadi are focusing on his book in this series.

In his first book Daniel has only offered 22 of the over 4,000 he has now discovered in these earliest Qur’anic manuscripts. He is not polemical and thus not interested in asking damaging questions, nor coming to conclusions on any of these corrections. Jay and Al Fadi, however, are interested in not only exposing these corrections, but in coming to conclusions concerning what this all means to the credibility of the Qur’an, and to the very foundations of Islam.

In studying early manuscripts there are three areas which researchers use; including:
1)Paleography (the study of the development of script styles which are used in manuscripts). Dr Francois Deroche is probably the best known for this area of study in Qur’anic manuscripts and has noted the differences between the early Ma’il (slanted) script and the later Kufic scripts.
2) Codicology (the study of the features of the page or book, as well as the writing material employed, or a study of the physical aspects of the codex itself). Areas here include the format of the page, the lines and ink used, and the illustrations as well as the bindings employed.
3) Radio-Carbon dating (the study of the degrading of the carbon from the skin of an animal, once it is dead). This is the most inexact of the three, because the span of years can be close to 100 years.

The first two are the areas Dan has used in his book, so join us as we delve with him in his study of just 22 of these damaging changes to the Qur’an.

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