Why are there over 30 different Arabic Qur’ans? - Quranic Corrections Ep. 3

When Muslims hear anything about Qur’anic variants, they assume these 
variants are what is commonly known as ‘Ahruf’, or ‘Qira’at’, which are 
nothing more than dialectic differences that have to do with the way 
someone reads the text orally. According to tradition Muhammad permitted 
7 different Qira’at, or readings while he was alive. These 7 ‘readings’ 
were then canonized 300 years later by a scholar named Abu Bakr Ibn 
Mujahid, who died in the 10th century.

The confusion stems from a one-line reference written by Al Bukhari in 
870 AD for the need to write the 652 Uthmanic Qur’an in the ‘Quraishi’ 
dialect; in other words, to write this Uthmanic text so that those who 
speak the Quraishi dialect could read it correctly.

The problem is that no one could have read such a text that early (652 
AD), because in order to read dialectical differences in Arabic, one 
needs to have diacritical marks (dots above and below the line), and 
vowels (which include the Dhamah = the oo sound, the Fatah = the ah 
sound, and the Kasrah = the ii sound); but diacritical marks and vowels 
had not yet been invented in Arabic. They would not be introduced for 
another century or more. So, how could Zaid ibn Thabit have written 
Uthman’s Qur’an in the dialect of the Quraish that early?

All he could use was the consonantal script (known as Rasm), made up of 
17 - 28 consonantal letters (known as Harf) available to him. Those who 
then attempted to read those words would add their own vowels (depending 
on which dialect they were reading it aloud in) and try to guess which 
of the 17 - 28 letters they were reading, by using the context.

The consonantal letters he used, however, would remain constant, 
regardless of whom was reading the text, and regardless of which dialect 
they were reading it in.

To explain this, Al Fadi and Jay looked at a number of the earliest 
Sunni and Shi’ite manuscripts to prove that none of these earliest 
manuscripts (the Samarkand, Sana’a, Topkapi, and Ali manuscripts) have 
any diacritical marks (dots). Nor do they have any vowels. They are all 
written only using the Rasm, or the basic consonantal script.

They then show how one can create up to five letters using just one 
consonantal letter by simply adding dots above and below that letter, 
and if one had three of those letters in a row, one could create up to 
30 different words, again by adding the dots. This proves just how 
inexact the Arabic script was back in the mid-7th century, and why 
diacritical marks needed to be created and then used in the manuscripts 
which followed.

But in these earliest manuscripts which were created during the 8th 
century and later, there simply was no means of writing any dialectical 
differences. Therefore, the argument of different Ahruf or different 
Qira’at (i.e. different readings or different dialects) make no sense 
this early, since there were no dottings, nor any vowels to see those 
differences within a consonantal scripted text.

Jay and Al Fadi then introduced 26 different Qur’ans (out of a total of 
31) which Hatun Tash was able to buy in market places situated in 
Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen, each of which was created by a student 
living in the cities of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa and Basra between 
the 8th – 10th centuries. It is from these 26 to possibly 37 different 
students that we get the differing Qira’at schools which are popular 
today. When observing just the 26 Qur’ans they displayed, Hatun and her 
team in London have already found almost 60,000 differences between them 
(Note: Since this recording, the number has increased to 93,000 
differences).

The Qur’an we are using today around the world was created by one 
student living in the city of Kufa who died in 796 AD, which is 144 
years after Muhammad.

It is surrounding these differing Qira’at Qur’ans that Muslims today 
think the discussion concerning the changed Qur’ans lies. They couldn’t 
be further from the truth. These diacritical differences, coupled with 
the vowellization, were all created centuries later.

Thus, it is not these later Qira’at differences which we are talking 
about at all, but the much earlier and more damaging consonantal 
scripted differences. That is the focus of our discussion here.

Therefore, when Uthman (if that story is even true) decided to burn the 
Qur’anic manuscripts which disagreed with his canonized Qur’an in 652 
AD, he wasn’t burning them because of different Qira’at or Ahruf 
readings as Muslims today suggest. He was burning them because their 
Rasms (their consonantal) letters were different from that of his own.

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