7 ways the Qur’an has been intentionally corrected - Quranic Corrections Ep. 4

After introducing and describing the 6 major early Qur’anic manuscripts (the Topkapi, Samarkand, Ma’il, Petropolitanus, Huseini, and Sana’a manuscripts), Jay and Al Fadi zero in on the Sana’a MS, the manuscript Al Fadi is working on for his doctorate, and point out how there are different dates even between the two pages pictured on the slide.

They then introduce the two best known Muslim scholars, Dr Tayyar Altikulac, and Prof Dr Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, who worked on and studied all of these 6 manuscripts between 2002 and 2007 AD. In their book on the subject, ‘Al Mushaf al Sharif’, both maintained that none of these earliest manuscripts are from the time of Uthman, nor are they complete, nor do they agree entirely with each other, nor entirely with our current 1924 ‘Hafs’ Qur’an.

Dr Dan Brubaker in his doctoral thesis looked at these 6 manuscripts as well and found 7 types of early Consonantal corrections scattered right through these manuscripts, pointing out that these variants are not the later ‘diacritical’ or vowellization corrections at all, but are corrections to the basic Arabic script itself, known as the ‘Rasm’, a salient point which Muslims are constantly confused by.

The 7 types of Consonantal Corrections Dr Brubaker found include:
1) Insertions: Words or letters which are inserted above the line, or between other letters, after the text had been finished. These often can be considered mere ‘copyist errors’, or ‘scribal errors’.
2) Erasures: Words or even sentences and verses which have been erased with nothing to replace them. These are more damaging because they show an intentional correction by a later scribe, censoring the text so that it corresponds with the current 1924 ‘Hafs’ canonical text.
3) Erasures, written over top: Words, or phrases which have been erased and then other letters, words and phrases written over top. This is even more damaging, because it demonstrates an intentional correction with the hope by the later scribe of standardizing the text.
4) Overwriting without erasures: Here the scribe hasn’t even tried to hide what they are correcting but has quickly (and often awkwardly) written over top of the existing text with new words or phrases, in order to standardize the existing text with our current 1924 ‘Hafs’ text.
5) Coverings: Like the erasures, this is an intentional censorship to the text by a later scribe who places elongated paper or animal skin patches over a word, or a phrase, or a verse, in order to hide what obviously disagrees with our current 1924 ‘Hafs’ canonized text.
6) Selective coverings overwritten: Here the scribe covers over an existing text with these paper or animal skin patches, and then writes another text on top of the covering. This again is an intentional censor of the text, but this time writing in what will now standardize that text to our current 1924 ‘Hafs’ text.
7) Tapings: Instead of an elongated covering a later scribe has applied a patch over top of the existing text in order to censor it, so that it now corresponds with our current 1924 ‘Hafs’ text. This is not due to a damage of the manuscript, as the back side shows no damage. What remains now parallels our 1924 edition.

Al Fadi and Jay then move on to introduce Dr Dan Brubaker’s book, entitled: ’20 Examples of Correction in Early Qur’an Manuscripts’.

Example 1: This first example is an Insertion within the Topkapi mushaf al-sharif, folio 122 (verso). It is found in Surah 9:72 where the word ‘Huwa’ (it is) has been added to the existing text, which used to say, “And Allah’s good pleasure is greater than the great triumph”. Now with the ‘huwa’ added, it now says, “And Allah’s good pleasure is greater, it is the great triumph”. While adding the huwa doesn’t change the meaning that much, and therefore, wasn’t needed; it is clear that they did add it so that the current text now corresponds to the canonical 1924 ‘Hafs’ which we use today around the world.

So, what is this 1924 ‘Hafs’ text? In 1924, in just the high schools within Cairo in Egypt they found that they couldn’t use standardized tests with the Qur’an, because they were getting so many different answers to questions they were posing from their students. Thus, they went to Al Azhar university and asked a committee headed up by Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Husayni al-Haddad to choose just one of the many variant Arabic Qur’ans (Hatun Tash, on our team in London has 31 of these variant Qur’ans in her possession in London alone).

Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Husayni Al Haddad chose a Qur’an put together in 792 AD by a student living in Kufa, Iraq, whose name was Hafs, and that became the standard, but only for the high schools in Cairo, from 1924 until today. All of the remaining variant Qur’ans the authorities in Cairo then took out on a boat and sunk them into the Nile river, where they still remain.

This proves that the Qur’an we are using today was chosen less than 95 years ago, chosen by men, a committee of them, and not by God.

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