Quote:
Originally Posted by brother
THE QURAN
[Yusuf Estes]
Quran Means "Recitation"
The word "Quran" means "that which is recited; or that which is dictated in memory form." As such, it is not a book, nor is it something that reaches us only in written form. The documentation in writting about the Quran has been preserved in museums thoughout the world, including the Topekopi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, the museum in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and also in England. Keep in mind also, the Quran is only considered "Quran" while it is in the recitation form, not in the written or the book form.......
Only One Version - Arabic
There are No different versions of the Quran in the Arabic language, only different translations and of course, none of these would be considered to hold the value and authenticity of the original Arabic Recitation. .....
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Really?
Origins of the Koran
"...While modern Muslims may be committed to an impossibly conservative position, Muslim scholars of the early years of Islam were far more flexible, realizing that parts of the Koran were lost, perverted, and that there were many Thousand variants which made it impossible to talk of 'the Koran'.
ie. As-Suyuti (d 1505), one of the most famous/revered of the commentators of the Koran, quotes Ibn Umar al Khattab as saying:
"Let No one of you say that he has acquired the entire Quran, for how does he know that it is all? Much of the Quran has been Lost, thus let him say, "I have acquired of it what is available"
Aisha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, says, also according to a tradition recounted by as-Suynti,
"During the time of the Prophet, the chapter of the Parties used to be 200 verses when read. When Uthman edited the copies of the Quran, only the current (verses) were recorded".
As-Suyuti also tells this story about Uba ibn Kaíb, - great companion of Muhammad:
This famous companion asked one of the Muslims, "How many verses in the chapter of the Parties?" He said,
"73 verses." He (Uba) told him, "It used to be almost equal to the chapter of the Cow (about
286 verses) & included the verse of the stoning..."
As noted earlier, since
there was No single document collecting all the revelations, after Muhammad's death in 632 CE, many of his followers tried to gather all the known revelations and write them down in codex form.
Soon we had the codices of several scholars such as Ibn Masud, Uba ibn Kaíb, ëAli, Abu Bakr, al-Aswad, & others (Jeffery, chapter 6, has listed Fifteen primary codices, & a large number of secondary ones). As Islam spread, we eventually had what became known as the metropolitan codices in the centers of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa, Basra.."
Uthman's codex was supposed to standardize the consonantal text, yet we find that many of the variant traditions of this consonantal text survived well into the fourth Islamic century. The problem was aggravated by the fact that the consonantal text was unpointed, that is to say, the dots that distinguish, for example, a "b" from a "t" or a "th" were missing. Several other letters (f & q; j, h, & kh; s & d; r & z; s and sh; d & dh, t & z) were indistinguishable.
In other words,
the Koran was written in a scripta defectiva..."
cont'd in more detail at:
http://www.sullivan-county.com/x/koran_prob.htm