The Preservation of the Quran

the preservation of the Quran is one of the unique aspects of the Islamic religion and that&#39;s why you have a lot of other religions that are kind of envious of the Islamic tradition and how we have been able to preserve our tradition while other religions other Traditions have not been able to preserve the text and sadly there&#39;s a lot of uh misinformation and incorrect information that are widespread on the topic of the history of the quranic text is Preservation Etc is like tons of misinformation online and that is due to the fact that a lot of these people making these videos uh are relying on either like some Western historian that is like copying and taking text from here and there who doesn&#39;t like probably speak the Arabic language or understand the primary source material as well as many other people who actually have like alternative motives and and have a malicious intent towards the Islamic religion so they actually intentionally put false information out there to confuse the people so the purpose of this video is kind of to highlight the a breakdown of the history of the quranic text from the beginning from the revelation until the end until the compilation until us reading the Quran today and looking at the text in front of us today from Revelation until compilation that is the kind of the purpose of this video and I&#39;m going to rely on the primary source material like the narrations of the Prophet or the or the narrations of his companions to do with the Quran or the quranic text or the and all of these issues as well as some uh secondary sources well accept accepted secondary sources uh from the classical tradition of Muslim so this video is going to be divided into four parts the first part of the video is going to be talking about the first part of Revelation the revelation of the Quran until the end of the Revelation and then the second part is going to be talking about the the first compilation of the Quran done by Abu Bakr then the third part is going to be talking about and the stand standardization of the Quran that he did and then the last part is going to talk about the that we have today that we&#39;re reading so uh it&#39;s going to be a breakdown historical breakdown from the beginning until uh today so it&#39;ll be a beneficial video inallah for either people who are Muslims who are interested to understand how we have the today how we have the Quran that we have it today or people who have uh had misinformation false information widespread for them to correct uh their understanding of the quranic text so first I&#39;m going to begin speaking about the the beginning of the revelation of the Quran so prophet he lived among his people for 40 years uh before Revelation came down to him before any part of the Quran came down to him and he was known as the trustworthy the honest so he did not believe in idol worship so he used to go into a cave a secluded cave and he used to try to worship God in whichever way he could he used to go to a specific cave called the cave of har where he had the encounter with with the angel Gabriel uh the arch angel Gabriel which then the first few verses of the Quran were reveal read recite in the name of your lord so this was the first encounter the first part of the Quran the first revelation to be ever revealed of the Quran to the prophet and Angel Gabriel told the prophet to recite this Quran of course the prophet wasam he was frightened so he went back to his wife at that time khad and then she took him to her relative who was someone from the people of the book he was studying the books of the Christians and the Jews then he confirmed to the prophet he told him that that angel that came to you uh is the same angel that came to Moses I he brought to you Revelation and that was one or two one of the only one or two times the prophet wasam met because he passed away later on I thought I would mention that because a lot of Christians they seem to think that the prophet took the Quran from even though the first encounter of Revelation was not there and he died straight away after so this was the first part of the Quran then Angel Gabriel came to the prophet and other parts of the Quran were revealed likeah where Allah commanded the prophet to deliver the message so first was to recite the Quran and that&#39;s why the word the Quran is taken from reciting or reading uh this is how the Quran is to is meant to be understood and transmitted it is primarily an oral text and through this breakdown that that we&#39;re going to be talking about you will see that the main way of preserving the Quran was through the oral tradition it was not through the written text the written text was always looked at as a secondary uh Source but we will be talking about the written text and as well as the oral text inshah so uh this was the first Parts the first few Revelations that came down from the Quran then the Quran came down gradually on a period of 23 years as Allah he mentions in the Quran and the Quran that we divided so you can recite gradually on the people so people can gradually uh take it in embrace it and understand it so the Quran took at 23 year period of being revealed the first revelation was in the cave of of and then it took 20 2 3 years being gradually revealed circumstantial events took place and then the Quran was revealed talking about them Etc and whenever any part of the Quran came down the prophet always commanded someone to write it down like he mentioned in his narration that whenever any part of the Quran was revealed the prophet wasam brought someone to write the Quran down and he told him where to place these specific verses through the Revelation there was multitude of different people who are called specifically writers of Revelation and these people were people the prophet selected and whenever the Quran came down he called one of them to come and write the Quran one of them is for example that we mention multiple different Companions of the Prophet there were many many many companions and their job was to write down the Quran so they were wrri in the Quran on any part you know uh leather rocks wood whatever was available at that time CU that time like papers were not available deserts of Arabia so they were writing down on paraments wherever they could find any part uh whenever the Quran is revealed they bring a piece of leather piece of wood whatever it is and then they write the Quran down on that piece and then some of the companions of the Prophet wasam also had their own personal uh books where they were writing some of the Quran and they were writing also their interpretations their understanding so it was mixture between the revelation of the Quran as well as their understanding Etc and we&#39;ll come to that point later on so keep it in mind that some of the companions had their own personal kind of books and where they had the Quran as well as explanation understanding for example she had the Quran and one of the verses of the Quran she she was saying so there was an extra part there that she was adding as an interpretation in her own personal as well as and many of the other companions they also had their own uh personal personal M that they used to write interpretation as well as the Quran also in these M so uh after that after that gradual Revelation was coming down and the prophet commanded people to write parts of the Quran then Islam started to spread uh within the deserts of Arabia so the Arabs at that time they had multitudes of different dialects just like today you can look at the English or whichever language you want to look at and you have different people in different parts of the world they&#39;re also they&#39;re all speaking English but they are speaking different dialects of the same language so that was the same case for the Arabs at the time so when Islam spread to different uh tribes Arab tribes like tamim Etc and then you had quray you had different tribes of the Arabs and then when Islam spread it was difficult for these other tribes that speak other dialects other than than the dialect of quray which was the first dialect that the Quran was revealed then it was difficult for these individuals and these people to recite the Quran in a dialect other than their own so the prophet Alat what he did is that he started as asking an angel Gabriel that we need more different ways of reciting the Quran so basically after that happened and and after Islam spread in all of these different tribes there was a need for the Quran to also be easier for these people because these people you have the The Very Old Man you have the very young child and you have different people among them that cannot speak the dialect of Christ it was difficult for them so the prophet wasam he spoke with Angel Gabriel he requested he said I asked Angel Gabriel to uh or to ask Allah to make an easy way for us uh for those individuals that are from different tribes that cannot speak the D of qur so what happened is that Allah revealed the Quran in seven different dialects which are also known as the seven so Allah can make it easier for the people to recite the Quran in their own dialect if they&#39;re very old or they&#39;re a child and it&#39;s very difficult for them to recite the Quran in in a dialect other than their own so uh as the Hadith says that the prophet let me as and Angel Gabriel he said I kept requesting him to increase until he gave me seven and then Allah he said whichever whichever dialect you would recite the Quran and from these seven di you&#39;re correct you&#39;re correct there is no problem also gave the command recite whatever is easy for you so you can recite from these different dialects whatever is comfortable whatever is easy for you as an individual because the whole reason for the Quran to be revealed in these seven uh different dialects was to make it easy for the people so then you could recite from these different dialects whatever is easier is easier for your tongue as an Arabic person and here you can see a miracle that that people can look at and can see that this Quran cannot be from Prophet Muhammad because he was from the tribe of quray and as we know even today if you bring anyone like English or American or whatever it is and you start telling him start speaking to me in different dialects of of English started speaking to me in a Scottish dialect and Australian dialect they&#39;re not going to be able to do it they might do it for a few minutes but then they will make mistakes so how did the prophet wasam recite the same Quran or bring revelation of the same Quran in seven different dialects of the Arabs we&#39;re talking about 6,000 verses here of the Quran of of the most eloquent speech to ever exist so this by itself is a miracle for people understanding for people who have intellect to see that this text could not have been coming from the prophet Muhammad himself so the Quran came down and while it came down in these seven different dialects also Allah added more uh new features in these seven that was that was revealed for example he revealed certain words different from the first revelation that he revealed for example this word increase uh the meaning or bring an additional meaning that enriches the meaning of the Quran for example the Quran says Malik in the first the first chapter says Malik the owner of the day of judgment and the king of the day of judgment these two meanings do not contradict one another they enrich the meaning of the Quran further and also these dialects had uh different ways of reciting the same word so it&#39;s the same exact word with the same dialectical marks and everything but just the way you pronounce it is different like for example you say and you say so depending on the dialect of the Arab tribe of the time and also Allah had certain words read in a different way to also enrich and increase the meaning for example when Moses he came to Pharaoh in the Quran and he showed him the signs like the stick and all of the signs that Mo Moses showed Pharaoh he said to him in one recitation you know that no one revealed these signs except the lord of the heavens and the Earth so you know that no one can reveal these Miracles except the Creator so here in one recitation Moses is telling Pharaoh you know and in another recitation he says I know so Moses is speaking from the first person here that he knows that no one else can reveal these Miracles except the lord of the heavens and the Earth so here we have an enriched meaning added to to this verse that Moses himself he knows he believes he&#39;s certain that these signs came from the Creator and also the other recitation is that Pharaoh also knows this even though he&#39;s denying he also knows that these signs are coming from the Creator so that is enriching and increasing the meaning of the Quran and now uh that&#39;s why you see Abdullah who was actually one of the four people that the prophet Alam recommended that people take the Quran from or take the recitations of the Quran from so there&#39;s a Hadith of the prophet he said take the Quran from four people I these four people are the best reciters so one of them is abdah and and right these four people the prophet said take the Quran from them they&#39;re the most eloquent in reciting so abdah he said that I&#39;ve seen the reciters in the beginning have seen I&#39;ve seen these different these different dialects of the Arab these different Revelations that came from Allah and they&#39;re very close they&#39;re like which both of the of these two words mean the same thing means come but it&#39;s just different ways to say the same thing and as we said different uh uh words that are also enriching the meaning like the king and the owner so this was essentially the seven the seven were seven dialects that also added more uh unique words that enriches the meaning of the Quran and and unique ways of reciting certain words that adds and increases the meaning of the Quran now the the very important thing to understand here is that these all of these different things are all considered Quran so when we say uh there&#39;s only one Quran there&#39;s only one Quran because that is the same text but it is recited in different ways that is the same text but these differences are all coming down from Allah so Quran is the recitation of the text of the Revelation that comes from Allah that&#39;s what the Quran is and all of these different all of these seven all of these unique words like Malik or all of these are coming from Allah from Angel Gabriel and the prophet recited them word for word so when you look at different and you look at different recitations of the Quran you look at these words or you hear different ways of reciting certain things like when you hear these things these are all coming from the prophet they&#39;re all coming from Allah they&#39;re all Revelation coming from Allah unlike the differences that you have in other religions and manuscripts these differences are Corruptions so they&#39;re not coming from the source the differences that you find in their manuscripts they&#39;re not coming from the source they are coming later on added by individuals now these differences that we&#39;re talking about in they&#39;re all coming from the prophet they&#39;re all coming from Allah and they&#39;re all consider Quran and Allah said recite that which is easy for you so you can recite from these seven different dialects whatever is easy for you from these words that are revealed you can choose to say Malik if you want to say Malik you can choose to say Malik if you want to say Malik that&#39;s up to you these are all uh things which are accessible because the the prophet he gave you that permission and the whole reason for them to be revealed is to make things easy for the people so towards the end of the life of the Prophet wasam because we said it was revealed in 23 years towards the the end of the life of the Prophet wasam Angel Gabriel he used to come to him every year in Ramadan he came to him two times so at the end when when Angel G came to the prophet he showed him uh the order of the verses of the Quran and the Order of the chapters so the order of the chapters of the Quran and the verses that we have today that was given at the last final Revelation it was called the last final Revelation the last final showing well Angel Gabriel came at the end of the life of the Prophet when the Quran was fully revealed and he told him exactly where to place each chapter exactly where to place each verse and also any verses of the Quran that was abated because there was previous verses of the Quran that was revealed that was abated and caused to be forgotten like Allah says in chapter 2 verse 106 that there is no verse that we abgate or cause to be forgotten so there was certain verses that were abated in the beginning or caused to be forgotten so in that last final Revelation Angel Gabriel showed the prophet any verses that were abated to be removed and the Order of the verses of the Quran Etc and and how the Quran is to be so that was the last final revelation of the Quran given by the prophet wasam and all of these instructions were given to the companions that this is how the Quran is uh 114 chapters that we have today and this is the order of the chapters and this is the or the order of the verses uh and now something to to keep in mind is that this final last Revelation had some verses as we said that were abated that the prophet told the people that were abated but if you remember before we said some of the companions had their own M so in these books that they had their personal ones perhaps some of them had some abated verses that they still did not remove Etc so keep that in mind because we&#39;ll come uh to that in the future inshallah so this was the first stage this this was the first stage of the revelation of the Quran Quran coming down on a period of 23 years uh the seven uh when when Islam spread to the seven different dialects of the Arab including some unique words that enriches and unique ways of reciting the enriches and make it easy for the people when they&#39;re reciting the Quran now a couple of years later after the death of the Prophet came the time of the first Cal of Islam Abu bakik and there was a battle called The Battle of yamama and within that battle uh there was a lot of the people who memorized the Quran at the time of the Prophet because when we said the Quran came on 23 years whenever a verse was coming down we said it was written down it was also memorized by the people there was multiple memorizers of the Quran like the four people we me we mentioned the prophet uh told the people to learn the Quran from because there was this tradition of people learning the Quran memorizing the Quran so there was people who are called the memorizers of the Quran and within the Battle of Yama which is like two years later or so after the the death of the Prophet a lot of these reciters of the Quran died so who was another close companion of the Prophet came to the first khalip Abu Bakr and he told him that there is a lot of people who died in this battle and I&#39;m afraid that all of the reciters will die and some of the Quran may be lost so now he&#39;s talking in future tense is because look we&#39;ve seen a lot of these reciters they died so I&#39;m afraid that they will continue to die and maybe a part of the revelation will be lost so he made a suggestion to Abu Bakr sik to collect the Quran in written form now something very important here to understand is look the companions here clearly looked at the Quran as a oral text because they looked at the main way of preservation at those people who were memorizers of the Quran they didn&#39;t look at preservation to do with written text that&#39;s why they didn&#39;t collect it from the beginning they looked at it from an oral tradition because people memorized the Quran and they were reciting it in each prayer so there is no worry that it will be lost and there was memorizes of the Quran tens and thousands of memorizes of the Quran so there is no worry for the Quran to be lost but when when they saw the primary method of preservation which is the oral transmission is in danger those people who are memorizing the Quran they&#39;re dying so they thought of an alternative way which is an extra way now to just make sure as as a backup to the oral tradition is let&#39;s also collect the written Quran so what happened is AB bakik he he brought Z who was one of the people who wrote the Revelation at the time of the Quran he&#39;s also one of the memorizers of the Quran and he was one of the people now that Abu Bakr sik he called and he said okay now I have a mission for you collect these Parish limits that was written at the time of the Prophet so you&#39;re talking about the par limits and all of the rocks and the leather and all of these things that was written at the time of the prophet he went and he collected the Quan and the written Quran the full written Quran to be preserved and compiled with Abu Bakr sik and they had a very strict criteria they said for each verse that you need to have each person who will bring a verse and say this is a verse of the Quran he needs to have two witnesses witnessing him take that Revelation from the prophet even though they were already memorizing the whole Quran but they still applied the criteria just to be completely sure and to have full transparency when it comes to the compilation of the Quran for each verse they require two witnesses to come and say that like we saw this specific verse we saw this individual take the specific verse from the prophet directly so this was now the second stage of the compleation of the Quran which was to bring all of these pars which was written down at the time of the Prophet Alam this is a second measurement as a backup plan of preservation just out of worry of those reciters of the Quran that were dying so uh these pars and this Quran which was written at the time of the Prophet his life was compil and was preserved and was kept with Abu Bakr and this was the second stage of the preservation of the Quran now after that came second caliph of Islam and and then after him the third caliph and Islam spread far and wide Islam spread all over the world and because Islam spread so far keep in mind that as we said the Quran was revealed in these seven different modes these seven different dialects uh of recitation people were reciting the Quran orally they were taking the Quran from their teachers from the companions Etc so just like he used to say and many of the companions they said is a tradition that you take from your teacher from his teacher going back to the prophet so they were they were always taking the Quran orally they did not they never looked at the text as the means of taking the Quran they only collected it as a backup plan for preservation but they always took the Quran orally from their teachers I.E from the companions from their teachers Etc going back to the Prophet Alam from the source so the people were reciting the Quran and learning from their teachers so when Islam spread far and wide those companions travel to different lands so you had a companion traveling into a specific land and another companion traveled to a different land and then the people in in that land started learning the recitation from that Companion now here there&#39;s something very important to explain and something very important to understand is that if you understand this comp concept properly you&#39;ll understand the the a lot more there something called the concept of choice and that concept of choice is that when Allah revealed these seven different dialects and modes of recitation uh with the words and and enriching the meaning of the Quran as we said in the beginning he allowed people to recite whatever is easy for them so what happened is the companions for example can recite a part of the first and a part of the second and a part of the third because all of these different dialects they are the Quran they&#39;re all the 100 the same 114 chapters but just different ways of reciting them so so a companion might recite 30% of the first dialect with with 10% of the of the other dialect Etc so these choices were completely open he might say another companion might choose so those Companions of the Prophet could choose whatever is easy for them to recite and that is what is now there&#39;s a difference between and so is the choices that a reciter makes so you have the the seven different and you can choose from these seven different whatever is easy for you to recite and then in the end you end up with your own you end up with a of the Quran so all of these companions had their their own had their own recitations of the Quran of collected and combined from the seven because as we said these seven are all Revelation from Allah so a companion he took 10% from one and 90% of another and then he had his his for example abdah had his had his Etc so these companion companions had their own K that they were reciting and that&#39;s why if you look at the Hadith of and which are two of the companions of the Prophet was reciting a part of the Quran and then he heard him reciting and then he heard him reciting something he didn&#39;t hear before because they were all taking the Quran from the prophet so he dragged him and he took him to the prophet and he said oh prophet of Allah look I saw this person this companion reciting the Quran in a different way to what I heard from you and this this here shows two things first is if anyone tries to change the Quran the companions straight away they&#39;re alert because they know the source they already memorize the Quran so they know any differences when they hear them that&#39;s number one number two that they also come back to the prophet wasam if there is any disagreement or there&#39;s any issues so they&#39;re very alert to the preservation of the Quran and that the preservation is oral they come back to the prophet to see okay why is this person reciting differently to me so then when brought him and he recited the Quran in front of the prophet and the prophet told Omar you also recite then Omar recited then the prophet he told him you are right and you&#39;re right these are different modes different ways of recitation that are all coming down as a revelation from Allah and you&#39;re allowed to choose to recite this way and you&#39;re allowed to choose to recite that way so this is the prophet telling these companions that you can have your you can have your choices from these seven different dialects and modes of recitation and words you can choose your choices whatever is easy for you as well as the other companion he can also choose his choices and then you end up with a you end up with the choices that you made your own recitation that are taken from what from the seven that are all Revelation and are all Quran an easier way to to bring it to the mind of the people listening is look at the Quran for example you have chapter 2 and chapter 3 imagine if chapter 2 and chapter 3 they were uh one chapter two is one half and chapter three is a different so you take a part of chapter two and you recite with it a part of chapter 3 so you end up now with a new chapter right other than chapter 2 and and chapter 3 because there combinations of these two but in the end what you end up with is just a combination of these two Revelation two chapters of Revelation so what you end up with is also a revelation because it is just combining these two chapters this is how the works this is how you come up with a you combine between the different different dialects that were revealed and you come up with a in the end so all of the companions had their their and then when they travel to different lands because as we said the Quran is taken orally the people started learning the Quran from the companion in their city in their country in their land the companions that were around them so they took the Quran from those companions so now uh the people who are learning the Quran they can learn from two companions and they can also do the same thing they can have their own but choosing some of the recitation of this companion as well as some of the recitation of this different companion so now you come up with a different but whatever they&#39;re combining from and this is the important thing to understand whatever a you come up with combining from from different or from different it is all in the Quran that is coming from Allah that you&#39;re just combining different parts of Revelation with each other reciting that which is easier for you what is most eloquent and easier for your tongue so there was tons of different so the was not only limited to seven or 10 there was many many different and the companions had their own and the many of them had their own and we&#39;ll come to that uh later on so uh when these companions travel and the people learned from them at the time of the Cal of Islam there was certain Wars that are taking place so the armies were were coming from different lands now when these armies came from different lands there was a problem happening here because as we said these companions had their own and in these lands people were learning from the companions so if abdah Abbas was was in one land andar was in a different land the people in this land learned from abdah abas his and the people here learned from so when the time of war came and the people came from this land the people came from this land now they have two different now they have two different recitations because they took from two different companions even though it&#39;s all Quran but the choices that these companions made from the seven is different so they will end up reciting the Quran slightly different from the other companion that is coming from the other land now when these armies met people started disagreeing with each other they&#39;re saying to each other what is this this is not the Quran that was listening and this happens even today now if some Muslims go today for example to certain parts of the world to Morocco and they are reciting the the recitation of H and they start listening to then they they don&#39;t recognize many of the words are being said so they think something is is is wrong here if you&#39;re not aware and these were new Muslims bear in mind because Islam spread far and wide so a lot of them were new Muslims so they were not aware of the seven and they were not aware of the concept of so then there was disagreements happening between the people so he came to and he said that the people are disagreeing about the there&#39;s a problem Happening Here people are disagreeing with each other because they learned from different companions their and now they they&#39;re not understanding why someone else is reciting a different way even though all of these ways of recitation are in the end Revelation coming from Allah so what did is he consulted the Companions and then he made a committee and what he did is he made a standardized text of the Quran why did he make a standardized text of the Quran so he can sent to these lands and then say to the people that look whatever you&#39;re reciting it has to be restricted to the standardized version of the Quran so what this standardized version of the Quran does is two things first it restricts the recitations of the people the choices that they can make to that standardized version of the Quran and then if there is any disagreement they can always come back to that specific standardized version of the Quran now where did this standardized version come from what did is he brought the same person Z who Abu Bakr made compile the Quran in the stage that we spoke about before he brought the same person Z and he brought that compiled Quran that was written at the time of the Prophet wasam his life and he used it to make that standardized text the standardized version of the Quran and then he did not put any dialectical marks so people can recite multitude of different recitations of the Quran using that same text so it&#39;s one text but you can recite in different modes different you can use different to recite the same text so that standardized text that was based on the same Quran that was written down at the time of the prophet in accordance to the final Revelation that was revealed and then what did is he sent it to the to different lands he said he sent the standardized text to different lands and then told the people that if they want to recite the Quran they have to stick to that specific text does not have dialectical marks so it can include multitude of different recitations but you still restricted to whatever that whatever is in the text you cannot go anywhere else you restricted to that specific text so it it kind of restricted uh the full seven so it&#39;s not all of them right now so there is a restricted version of them restricted version of the seven and something that is very important to understand here is that any is enough as the prophet said Each of it is enough if we just have one recitation or one half of the Quran that is enough for people because all of it is Quran and the end and all of it is the 14 different 114 different chapters but it&#39;s just different ways of reciting these 114 different chapters so that text skeletal text of that does not have dialectical marks you can have multitude of different that you can use to read that specific text but as we said something very important to understand they never learn the Quran from the text which is why he left it without dialectical marks because you cannot just pick it and start reading a specific recitation the learning was always oral and the text was always secondary so the purpose of the text is two things to combine the people at one textt and if there is any disagreement they can come back to it that was the only reason made that standard text and then what also did is he burnt any other copies now what copies did he burn he burned these personal that we mention in the beginning said in the beginning different companions had their own personal M and they had interpretation in there Etc so he said bring any of these M personal M of the people and we&#39;re going to remove them we just going to leave that standard text so people can come back to it and do not go to multitude of different sources only one source to come back to now a very important point to note here as well is we mentioned the Quran uh or the par limits that was written at the time of the Prophet his life these partials were still preserved even after made the standard text so these partials was there did not burn this if you want to call it original he did not burn these original paraments in fact he made the standardized version he burned the personal M but he did not burn this uh par limits that were written at the time of the Prophet they remained until 50 to 60 ah which is like 20 or 30 years later after but he didn&#39;t burn at that time they were still available all he did is that he made a standard text with the agreement of all of the companions like did that whatever did was under supervision of all of us so it was not a personal decision that made and and all of the four cats the prophet told us to follow their way and tradition so that standard text was then made and then it solved this idea of disagreement of different people coming from different uh parts of the land disagreeing on different recitations that they took from the companions so now here the people are restricted to the text but there&#39;s still many recitations that you can recite using the text because the text does not have dialectical marks you can recite Malik you can recite Malik you can recite you can recite and you can recite the these different words using the same text you can say you can say so there was still tons of different available but people are still restricted to one text one skeletal text that they come back to when it comes to the recitations of the Quran and this is the third stage of uh the recitations of the Quran and the preservation of the text the final stage of the recitations of the Quran now after we said there&#39;s a skeletal text now which is the text that standardized and he sent to different lands and now there&#39;s as we said tons of different that people took from The Companions and then from the student so the companions combined from the seven and then the students combined from different Companions and then the students of the students combined from different students and all of it is combining from Revelation coming with different uh so there was multitude of different so later on in history there was an individual called mujah and mujah he was a in in the Quran and recitations of the Quran what did is he looked who are where is the best recitations of the Quran so there&#39;s multitude of different recitations so let me look at the best reciters the people who are most eloquent in the recitation most eloquent in their understanding of the of the Arabic language have the best chains tracing back to the prophet the most authentic chains and what he did is he took uh seven of these uh recitations and he wrote a book about these seven different recitations so he took seven different recitations not the said the are different a recitation is combin combining between different or recitations of the companions so he did collected in that book Seven recitations not seven seven recitations and that book of The Seven recitations he collected the most eloquent and the best recitations that he found in the time people did not have to follow that book did not have to take information from that book that was just a personal decision that he made mujah so this was not like people have Muslims have to follow this or something there was still many other different recitations that people were reciting and taking but what happened later on is that book became so popular and and then the people uh started restricting themselves to these seven different recitations and a lot of people had a misconceptions they thought that the seven recitations of is the same as the seven which we&#39;ve already highlighted they completely two different things and that&#39;s why many of the scholars blamed mujah they said he could have collected eight recitations or six recitations or 20 recitations why did he have to choose seven which confused many of the people thinking that these seven recitations are the seven so these seven recitations became mly popular among the people among the population people started reciting these seven uh of the Quran so some of the the scholars also came later on and what they did is the to clear that misunderstanding as well they added extra three recitations from the elequent reciters of the Quran the people who have the best chains Etc the most understanding of the Arabic language and they added extra three recitations of the Quran like in his book so then we have now 10 recitations these 10 eloquent recitations now as we said these recitations are all what they&#39;re combinations of the different they&#39;re combinations of the Revelation that came from the companions they&#39;re combinations from the oral text and all of the oral text traces back to the prophet with chains of narration so the the 10 uh recitations that we&#39;re reciting today uh they were not the only recitations available as we said there was tons of other recitations the only reason that they are popular today is because they became popular later on people started adopting them because of the because of their eloquencer of the Quran and something interesting for people to understand that even today if you become a scholar of and and highly eloquent in the Arabic language Etc you can even have a new you can combine between this different 10 different so even today you&#39;re not restricted to the 10 different why because all of them are are Quran all of them are Revelation all of them are coming from from Allah all of them for us are considered Quran these recitations of the Quran the 10 different recitations of the Quran they are highly Mass transmitted we&#39;re talking about tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of chains of narrations transmitting these 10 these 10 recitations of the Quran tracing back to the prophet and we have voluminous works that have has the names and biographies of the people in the chain the people transmitting the information not the information itself but just the people transmitting the information autobiographies of them like for example or all of these are books which contain the biographies of the narrators of the Quran and now the chains themselves are available as well you can see them in a and where you have a multitude we&#39;re talking about Mass transmission so individuals in the chain reporting these 10 different El trace him back to the prophet and anyone today who recites any of the has something which is called AA I&#39;m going to show an example of on the screen Ana is is you have a certificate and this certificate has the names of your teachers of one of the 10 that you recite the names of your teachers going back all the way to the prophet and today we have millions of these millions of memorizers of the Quran we have millions of certificates OFA of people transmitting that same text now it is very important to understand that whichever you recite the Quran with it is considered Quran because there are combinations from the seven which are all coming from Allah and the purpose of them is to just make the Quran easy for people to memorize easy for people to understand so today we have this Mass transmission of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of millions of certificates of people transmitting these 10 different recitations of the Quran that we so there is not a shadow of a doubt when it comes to the oral preservation of the Quran is that these 10 recitations that we&#39;re reciting are Quran and our combinations of the seven which is the Quran the Revelation that is coming from Allah so when we say the Quran is preserved letter for letter word for word yes it is preserved letter for letter word for word because each of the recitations is Quran and each letter and each vowel and each way to recite is Quran so the Quran is preserved letter for letter word for word vowel for vowel and will always be uh preserved in that way uh but just many people they do not understand the concept of which causes confusions sometimes for people when they&#39;re perceiving the different uh recitations of the Quran and now when you understand the history behind it the history behind the development of of the and that they are combinations of the that were read recited by the prophet and were Revelation coming down directly from Allah and they were the same 114 chapters with very slight different dialects of recitation and differences that enriches and increases the meaning of the Quran now what about the written text so uh regarding the the written text do we have any evidences that the written text is is also preserved now as we said the Quran was always a oral text and through my explanations you saw why it was a oral text this is how the companions understood it there was always these chains of narrations being preserved because we always looked at it as an oral text but even the written text if you look at it it&#39;s also another sign of the preservation of the Quran for example you have the Birmingham manuscript which is a par limit that was either written on the life of the Prophet or his companions that if you compare it with with what we have today it is the exact thing that we have today and this parment is is very likely could be one of the par limits that the prophet asked one of the the companions to come and write down when the Revelation was coming down because it&#39;s from his lifetime and and it is exactly in accordance to what uh we read today and we have the the Top Copy manuscript of the Quran which has the same exact Quran that we&#39;re reciting today when we talk about the written text has the same text as theic text there is no difference this manic skeletal text is the same exact thing but you have the manuscript and the is very interesting because the when it was discovered is 15,000 different par limits that traces to almost 950 different qurans from the first onwards and when you look at all of these manuscripts they show only one thing that the Quran that we&#39;re reciting today is the same Quran that was there from the beginning there was many non-muslim textual criticism Scholars who went to S and examined the S manuscripts and I&#39;ll put names now of some of them who examined and who didn&#39;t examine that all of them say that the Quran that we have today is the same Quran that exist at the time of the Prophet so some of the names I&#39;m going to put of these non-muslims they went and they actually invested and written books actually about the manuscript and how they show the preservation of the Quran okay now what about the manuscript and the fact that there is something called an upper text and a lower text a lot of people don&#39;t understand what is this upper text and lower text and why is there differences so as we said in the beginning the Quran was written on what parish limits and and bones and whatever was accessible so people didn&#39;t have papers so when they make a mistake they throw it away and then bring a new paper so what people used to do is they used to wipe the down the ink on whatever they had they used to wash it and then write again so that is what is the the upper and lower text that you find in some of these partial limits regarding the manuscript is because those people who were writing down they were wiping down the previous text and then writing a new text when they made a mistake on the same partially on the same bone so that&#39;s why you might find slide disagreements there in the lower text when you look at the the lower text Etc uh so that&#39;s one thing the other thing is as we said these were 950 different qurans and 15,000 parti limits these were not scribes professional scribes many of these parti limits were people personally writing for their own benefit like home or learning from their teachers learning in at a school writing down these were not professional scribes so they will have scribal errors because they&#39;re not professional scribes but how do we know that these are scribal errors and not changes in the text is a very simple way that any uh like uh any beginner textual criticisms Scholars know is that you look at the text you look at any change or difference within that text and then you compare it with with the with the something older than it a text older than it or a text from the same time or a text that came later on so if you look at the text from the same time text from before and text that came later on has the same chapter but does not have this extra mistake so now you realize that this is not corruption this is a scribal error because that error has not been copied has not been copied later on before it did not is not there other manuscripts from the same time does not have it and manuscripts later on does not have it so now we know that this is a scribed error if you compare with other religions for example the Christian tradition you see that that error is repeated in in manuscripts later on so you realize that there is a corruption taking place because that change now has been copied and copied and copied and copied and copied in later manuscripts and then have been put in the Bible and people are reading this is how you know that there is a corruption but the scribal error on the other hand you can know it&#39;s a scribal error but looking at previous manuscripts manuscripts from the same time and manuscripts later on do they contain that same mistake if they don&#39;t then you know this specific porish limit this specific writer who is not a scribe made a mistake so even but this is the thing that I&#39;m saying even though you can find you can look at the upper text and the lower text and you can look at certain scribal erors the conclusion of Scholars talking about non-muslim Scholars you know secular Scholars who went and studied the S manuscripts and written written works on it there conclusion is the same the Quran is preserved and these manuscripts whatever error it could have a manuscript could have from the 8th Century or the nth Century whatever it is any errors or mistakes that these have these were scribal errors and we can prove it because we can show you uh manuscripts other manuscripts from the same time before and after that does not have that same mistake which shows that the Quran is preserved even we&#39;re talking about from the written text so now whether you want to look at the written text or you want to look at the oral text is only only one conclusion that you can come to is that the Quran that we have today is perfectly preserved it is absolutely perfectly preserved from the oral text we don&#39;t even have to rely on any of these written manuscripts because yes someone can write and make a mistake so what does not mean anything and this is not the case we saying even if this happens this does not mean anything but even that is not the case whether you look at written uh manuscripts of the Quran and you compare them to what we have today or you look at the oral tradition of the Quran with these Mass Transmissions of tens of thousands thousands millions today of certificates that Trace back the Quran to the prophet the Quran is preserved and will always be preserved and you know we are in Ramadan right now it is a chance for anyone watching to see this preservation with their own eyes you can go to any mosque in Ramadan or most mosques let&#39;s not say any mosque maybe a mosque is shut down or something you know most mosque around the world and you will see that these mosques are reciting the Quran 30 parts of the Quran from memory and any mistakes that they would make they will be corrected and you will also see the these mus are reciting the Quran in different recitations the 10 different recitations that we talked about so you can travel anywhere in the world today and look with your own eyes and see the living preservation of the Quran so this tradition of reciting the Quran was always there and will always be there until the day of judgment and the Quran will always be preserved and we know that there is a lot of other religions are a lot of different faiths that are envious of this fact but these are the facts these are the primary source materials and these are testimonies from people who are unb looking at either the oral text or the written text they have to come to the same conclusion that the Quran that we&#39;re reciting today is preserved the same way that the prophet received it from [Music] [Music] Allah [Music] for

the preservation of the Quran is one of the unique aspects of the Islamic religion and that&amp;#39;s why you have a lot of other religions that are kind of envious of the Islamic tradition and how we have been able to preserve our tradition while other religions other Traditions have not been able to preserve the text and sadly there&amp;#39;s a lot of uh misinformation and incorrect information that are widespread on the topic of the history of the quranic text is Preservation Etc is like tons of misinformation online and that is due to the fact that a lot of these people making these videos uh are relying on either like some Western historian that is like copying and taking text from here and there who doesn&amp;#39;t like probably speak the Arabic language or understand the primary source material as well as many other people who actually have like alternative motives and and have a malicious intent towards the Islamic religion so they actually intentionally put false information out there to confuse the people so the purpose of this video is kind of to highlight the a breakdown of the history of the quranic text from the beginning from the revelation until the end until the compilation until us reading the Quran today and looking at the text in front of us today from Revelation until compilation that is the kind of the purpose of this video and I&amp;#39;m going to rely on the primary source material like the narrations of the Prophet or the or the narrations of his companions to do with the Quran or the quranic text or the and all of these issues as well as some uh secondary sources well accept accepted secondary sources uh from the classical tradition of Muslim so this video is going to be divided into four parts the first part of the video is going to be talking about the first part of Revelation the revelation of the Quran until the end of the Revelation and then the second part is going to be talking about the the first compilation of the Quran done by Abu Bakr then the third part is going to be talking about and the stand standardization of the Quran that he did and then the last part is going to talk about the that we have today that we&amp;#39;re reading so uh it&amp;#39;s going to be a breakdown historical breakdown from the beginning until uh today so it&amp;#39;ll be a beneficial video inallah for either people who are Muslims who are interested to understand how we have the today how we have the Quran that we have it today or people who have uh had misinformation false information widespread for them to correct uh their understanding of the quranic text so first I&amp;#39;m going to begin speaking about the the beginning of the revelation of the Quran so prophet he lived among his people for 40 years uh before Revelation came down to him before any part of the Quran came down to him and he was known as the trustworthy the honest so he did not believe in idol worship so he used to go into a cave a secluded cave and he used to try to worship God in whichever way he could he used to go to a specific cave called the cave of har where he had the encounter with with the angel Gabriel uh the arch angel Gabriel which then the first few verses of the Quran were reveal read recite in the name of your lord so this was the first encounter the first part of the Quran the first revelation to be ever revealed of the Quran to the prophet and Angel Gabriel told the prophet to recite this Quran of course the prophet wasam he was frightened so he went back to his wife at that time khad and then she took him to her relative who was someone from the people of the book he was studying the books of the Christians and the Jews then he confirmed to the prophet he told him that that angel that came to you uh is the same angel that came to Moses I he brought to you Revelation and that was one or two one of the only one or two times the prophet wasam met because he passed away later on I thought I would mention that because a lot of Christians they seem to think that the prophet took the Quran from even though the first encounter of Revelation was not there and he died straight away after so this was the first part of the Quran then Angel Gabriel came to the prophet and other parts of the Quran were revealed likeah where Allah commanded the prophet to deliver the message so first was to recite the Quran and that&amp;#39;s why the word the Quran is taken from reciting or reading uh this is how the Quran is to is meant to be understood and transmitted it is primarily an oral text and through this breakdown that that we&amp;#39;re going to be talking about you will see that the main way of preserving the Quran was through the oral tradition it was not through the written text the written text was always looked at as a secondary uh Source but we will be talking about the written text and as well as the oral text inshah so uh this was the first Parts the first few Revelations that came down from the Quran then the Quran came down gradually on a period of 23 years as Allah he mentions in the Quran and the Quran that we divided so you can recite gradually on the people so people can gradually uh take it in embrace it and understand it so the Quran took at 23 year period of being revealed the first revelation was in the cave of of and then it took 20 2 3 years being gradually revealed circumstantial events took place and then the Quran was revealed talking about them Etc and whenever any part of the Quran came down the prophet always commanded someone to write it down like he mentioned in his narration that whenever any part of the Quran was revealed the prophet wasam brought someone to write the Quran down and he told him where to place these specific verses through the Revelation there was multitude of different people who are called specifically writers of Revelation and these people were people the prophet selected and whenever the Quran came down he called one of them to come and write the Quran one of them is for example that we mention multiple different Companions of the Prophet there were many many many companions and their job was to write down the Quran so they were wrri in the Quran on any part you know uh leather rocks wood whatever was available at that time CU that time like papers were not available deserts of Arabia so they were writing down on paraments wherever they could find any part uh whenever the Quran is revealed they bring a piece of leather piece of wood whatever it is and then they write the Quran down on that piece and then some of the companions of the Prophet wasam also had their own personal uh books where they were writing some of the Quran and they were writing also their interpretations their understanding so it was mixture between the revelation of the Quran as well as their understanding Etc and we&amp;#39;ll come to that point later on so keep it in mind that some of the companions had their own personal kind of books and where they had the Quran as well as explanation understanding for example she had the Quran and one of the verses of the Quran she she was saying so there was an extra part there that she was adding as an interpretation in her own personal as well as and many of the other companions they also had their own uh personal personal M that they used to write interpretation as well as the Quran also in these M so uh after that after that gradual Revelation was coming down and the prophet commanded people to write parts of the Quran then Islam started to spread uh within the deserts of Arabia so the Arabs at that time they had multitudes of different dialects just like today you can look at the English or whichever language you want to look at and you have different people in different parts of the world they&amp;#39;re also they&amp;#39;re all speaking English but they are speaking different dialects of the same language so that was the same case for the Arabs at the time so when Islam spread to different uh tribes Arab tribes like tamim Etc and then you had quray you had different tribes of the Arabs and then when Islam spread it was difficult for these other tribes that speak other dialects other than than the dialect of quray which was the first dialect that the Quran was revealed then it was difficult for these individuals and these people to recite the Quran in a dialect other than their own so the prophet Alat what he did is that he started as asking an angel Gabriel that we need more different ways of reciting the Quran so basically after that happened and and after Islam spread in all of these different tribes there was a need for the Quran to also be easier for these people because these people you have the The Very Old Man you have the very young child and you have different people among them that cannot speak the dialect of Christ it was difficult for them so the prophet wasam he spoke with Angel Gabriel he requested he said I asked Angel Gabriel to uh or to ask Allah to make an easy way for us uh for those individuals that are from different tribes that cannot speak the D of qur so what happened is that Allah revealed the Quran in seven different dialects which are also known as the seven so Allah can make it easier for the people to recite the Quran in their own dialect if they&amp;#39;re very old or they&amp;#39;re a child and it&amp;#39;s very difficult for them to recite the Quran in in a dialect other than their own so uh as the Hadith says that the prophet let me as and Angel Gabriel he said I kept requesting him to increase until he gave me seven and then Allah he said whichever whichever dialect you would recite the Quran and from these seven di you&amp;#39;re correct you&amp;#39;re correct there is no problem also gave the command recite whatever is easy for you so you can recite from these different dialects whatever is comfortable whatever is easy for you as an individual because the whole reason for the Quran to be revealed in these seven uh different dialects was to make it easy for the people so then you could recite from these different dialects whatever is easier is easier for your tongue as an Arabic person and here you can see a miracle that that people can look at and can see that this Quran cannot be from Prophet Muhammad because he was from the tribe of quray and as we know even today if you bring anyone like English or American or whatever it is and you start telling him start speaking to me in different dialects of of English started speaking to me in a Scottish dialect and Australian dialect they&amp;#39;re not going to be able to do it they might do it for a few minutes but then they will make mistakes so how did the prophet wasam recite the same Quran or bring revelation of the same Quran in seven different dialects of the Arabs we&amp;#39;re talking about 6,000 verses here of the Quran of of the most eloquent speech to ever exist so this by itself is a miracle for people understanding for people who have intellect to see that this text could not have been coming from the prophet Muhammad himself so the Quran came down and while it came down in these seven different dialects also Allah added more uh new features in these seven that was that was revealed for example he revealed certain words different from the first revelation that he revealed for example this word increase uh the meaning or bring an additional meaning that enriches the meaning of the Quran for example the Quran says Malik in the first the first chapter says Malik the owner of the day of judgment and the king of the day of judgment these two meanings do not contradict one another they enrich the meaning of the Quran further and also these dialects had uh different ways of reciting the same word so it&amp;#39;s the same exact word with the same dialectical marks and everything but just the way you pronounce it is different like for example you say and you say so depending on the dialect of the Arab tribe of the time and also Allah had certain words read in a different way to also enrich and increase the meaning for example when Moses he came to Pharaoh in the Quran and he showed him the signs like the stick and all of the signs that Mo Moses showed Pharaoh he said to him in one recitation you know that no one revealed these signs except the lord of the heavens and the Earth so you know that no one can reveal these Miracles except the Creator so here in one recitation Moses is telling Pharaoh you know and in another recitation he says I know so Moses is speaking from the first person here that he knows that no one else can reveal these Miracles except the lord of the heavens and the Earth so here we have an enriched meaning added to to this verse that Moses himself he knows he believes he&amp;#39;s certain that these signs came from the Creator and also the other recitation is that Pharaoh also knows this even though he&amp;#39;s denying he also knows that these signs are coming from the Creator so that is enriching and increasing the meaning of the Quran and now uh that&amp;#39;s why you see Abdullah who was actually one of the four people that the prophet Alam recommended that people take the Quran from or take the recitations of the Quran from so there&amp;#39;s a Hadith of the prophet he said take the Quran from four people I these four people are the best reciters so one of them is abdah and and right these four people the prophet said take the Quran from them they&amp;#39;re the most eloquent in reciting so abdah he said that I&amp;#39;ve seen the reciters in the beginning have seen I&amp;#39;ve seen these different these different dialects of the Arab these different Revelations that came from Allah and they&amp;#39;re very close they&amp;#39;re like which both of the of these two words mean the same thing means come but it&amp;#39;s just different ways to say the same thing and as we said different uh uh words that are also enriching the meaning like the king and the owner so this was essentially the seven the seven were seven dialects that also added more uh unique words that enriches the meaning of the Quran and and unique ways of reciting certain words that adds and increases the meaning of the Quran now the the very important thing to understand here is that these all of these different things are all considered Quran so when we say uh there&amp;#39;s only one Quran there&amp;#39;s only one Quran because that is the same text but it is recited in different ways that is the same text but these differences are all coming down from Allah so Quran is the recitation of the text of the Revelation that comes from Allah that&amp;#39;s what the Quran is and all of these different all of these seven all of these unique words like Malik or all of these are coming from Allah from Angel Gabriel and the prophet recited them word for word so when you look at different and you look at different recitations of the Quran you look at these words or you hear different ways of reciting certain things like when you hear these things these are all coming from the prophet they&amp;#39;re all coming from Allah they&amp;#39;re all Revelation coming from Allah unlike the differences that you have in other religions and manuscripts these differences are Corruptions so they&amp;#39;re not coming from the source the differences that you find in their manuscripts they&amp;#39;re not coming from the source they are coming later on added by individuals now these differences that we&amp;#39;re talking about in they&amp;#39;re all coming from the prophet they&amp;#39;re all coming from Allah and they&amp;#39;re all consider Quran and Allah said recite that which is easy for you so you can recite from these seven different dialects whatever is easy for you from these words that are revealed you can choose to say Malik if you want to say Malik you can choose to say Malik if you want to say Malik that&amp;#39;s up to you these are all uh things which are accessible because the the prophet he gave you that permission and the whole reason for them to be revealed is to make things easy for the people so towards the end of the life of the Prophet wasam because we said it was revealed in 23 years towards the the end of the life of the Prophet wasam Angel Gabriel he used to come to him every year in Ramadan he came to him two times so at the end when when Angel G came to the prophet he showed him uh the order of the verses of the Quran and the Order of the chapters so the order of the chapters of the Quran and the verses that we have today that was given at the last final Revelation it was called the last final Revelation the last final showing well Angel Gabriel came at the end of the life of the Prophet when the Quran was fully revealed and he told him exactly where to place each chapter exactly where to place each verse and also any verses of the Quran that was abated because there was previous verses of the Quran that was revealed that was abated and caused to be forgotten like Allah says in chapter 2 verse 106 that there is no verse that we abgate or cause to be forgotten so there was certain verses that were abated in the beginning or caused to be forgotten so in that last final Revelation Angel Gabriel showed the prophet any verses that were abated to be removed and the Order of the verses of the Quran Etc and and how the Quran is to be so that was the last final revelation of the Quran given by the prophet wasam and all of these instructions were given to the companions that this is how the Quran is uh 114 chapters that we have today and this is the order of the chapters and this is the or the order of the verses uh and now something to to keep in mind is that this final last Revelation had some verses as we said that were abated that the prophet told the people that were abated but if you remember before we said some of the companions had their own M so in these books that they had their personal ones perhaps some of them had some abated verses that they still did not remove Etc so keep that in mind because we&amp;#39;ll come uh to that in the future inshallah so this was the first stage this this was the first stage of the revelation of the Quran Quran coming down on a period of 23 years uh the seven uh when when Islam spread to the seven different dialects of the Arab including some unique words that enriches and unique ways of reciting the enriches and make it easy for the people when they&amp;#39;re reciting the Quran now a couple of years later after the death of the Prophet came the time of the first Cal of Islam Abu bakik and there was a battle called The Battle of yamama and within that battle uh there was a lot of the people who memorized the Quran at the time of the Prophet because when we said the Quran came on 23 years whenever a verse was coming down we said it was written down it was also memorized by the people there was multiple memorizers of the Quran like the four people we me we mentioned the prophet uh told the people to learn the Quran from because there was this tradition of people learning the Quran memorizing the Quran so there was people who are called the memorizers of the Quran and within the Battle of Yama which is like two years later or so after the the death of the Prophet a lot of these reciters of the Quran died so who was another close companion of the Prophet came to the first khalip Abu Bakr and he told him that there is a lot of people who died in this battle and I&amp;#39;m afraid that all of the reciters will die and some of the Quran may be lost so now he&amp;#39;s talking in future tense is because look we&amp;#39;ve seen a lot of these reciters they died so I&amp;#39;m afraid that they will continue to die and maybe a part of the revelation will be lost so he made a suggestion to Abu Bakr sik to collect the Quran in written form now something very important here to understand is look the companions here clearly looked at the Quran as a oral text because they looked at the main way of preservation at those people who were memorizers of the Quran they didn&amp;#39;t look at preservation to do with written text that&amp;#39;s why they didn&amp;#39;t collect it from the beginning they looked at it from an oral tradition because people memorized the Quran and they were reciting it in each prayer so there is no worry that it will be lost and there was memorizes of the Quran tens and thousands of memorizes of the Quran so there is no worry for the Quran to be lost but when when they saw the primary method of preservation which is the oral transmission is in danger those people who are memorizing the Quran they&amp;#39;re dying so they thought of an alternative way which is an extra way now to just make sure as as a backup to the oral tradition is let&amp;#39;s also collect the written Quran so what happened is AB bakik he he brought Z who was one of the people who wrote the Revelation at the time of the Quran he&amp;#39;s also one of the memorizers of the Quran and he was one of the people now that Abu Bakr sik he called and he said okay now I have a mission for you collect these Parish limits that was written at the time of the Prophet so you&amp;#39;re talking about the par limits and all of the rocks and the leather and all of these things that was written at the time of the prophet he went and he collected the Quan and the written Quran the full written Quran to be preserved and compiled with Abu Bakr sik and they had a very strict criteria they said for each verse that you need to have each person who will bring a verse and say this is a verse of the Quran he needs to have two witnesses witnessing him take that Revelation from the prophet even though they were already memorizing the whole Quran but they still applied the criteria just to be completely sure and to have full transparency when it comes to the compilation of the Quran for each verse they require two witnesses to come and say that like we saw this specific verse we saw this individual take the specific verse from the prophet directly so this was now the second stage of the compleation of the Quran which was to bring all of these pars which was written down at the time of the Prophet Alam this is a second measurement as a backup plan of preservation just out of worry of those reciters of the Quran that were dying so uh these pars and this Quran which was written at the time of the Prophet his life was compil and was preserved and was kept with Abu Bakr and this was the second stage of the preservation of the Quran now after that came second caliph of Islam and and then after him the third caliph and Islam spread far and wide Islam spread all over the world and because Islam spread so far keep in mind that as we said the Quran was revealed in these seven different modes these seven different dialects uh of recitation people were reciting the Quran orally they were taking the Quran from their teachers from the companions Etc so just like he used to say and many of the companions they said is a tradition that you take from your teacher from his teacher going back to the prophet so they were they were always taking the Quran orally they did not they never looked at the text as the means of taking the Quran they only collected it as a backup plan for preservation but they always took the Quran orally from their teachers I.E from the companions from their teachers Etc going back to the Prophet Alam from the source so the people were reciting the Quran and learning from their teachers so when Islam spread far and wide those companions travel to different lands so you had a companion traveling into a specific land and another companion traveled to a different land and then the people in in that land started learning the recitation from that Companion now here there&amp;#39;s something very important to explain and something very important to understand is that if you understand this comp concept properly you&amp;#39;ll understand the the a lot more there something called the concept of choice and that concept of choice is that when Allah revealed these seven different dialects and modes of recitation uh with the words and and enriching the meaning of the Quran as we said in the beginning he allowed people to recite whatever is easy for them so what happened is the companions for example can recite a part of the first and a part of the second and a part of the third because all of these different dialects they are the Quran they&amp;#39;re all the 100 the same 114 chapters but just different ways of reciting them so so a companion might recite 30% of the first dialect with with 10% of the of the other dialect Etc so these choices were completely open he might say another companion might choose so those Companions of the Prophet could choose whatever is easy for them to recite and that is what is now there&amp;#39;s a difference between and so is the choices that a reciter makes so you have the the seven different and you can choose from these seven different whatever is easy for you to recite and then in the end you end up with your own you end up with a of the Quran so all of these companions had their their own had their own recitations of the Quran of collected and combined from the seven because as we said these seven are all Revelation from Allah so a companion he took 10% from one and 90% of another and then he had his his for example abdah had his had his Etc so these companion companions had their own K that they were reciting and that&amp;#39;s why if you look at the Hadith of and which are two of the companions of the Prophet was reciting a part of the Quran and then he heard him reciting and then he heard him reciting something he didn&amp;#39;t hear before because they were all taking the Quran from the prophet so he dragged him and he took him to the prophet and he said oh prophet of Allah look I saw this person this companion reciting the Quran in a different way to what I heard from you and this this here shows two things first is if anyone tries to change the Quran the companions straight away they&amp;#39;re alert because they know the source they already memorize the Quran so they know any differences when they hear them that&amp;#39;s number one number two that they also come back to the prophet wasam if there is any disagreement or there&amp;#39;s any issues so they&amp;#39;re very alert to the preservation of the Quran and that the preservation is oral they come back to the prophet to see okay why is this person reciting differently to me so then when brought him and he recited the Quran in front of the prophet and the prophet told Omar you also recite then Omar recited then the prophet he told him you are right and you&amp;#39;re right these are different modes different ways of recitation that are all coming down as a revelation from Allah and you&amp;#39;re allowed to choose to recite this way and you&amp;#39;re allowed to choose to recite that way so this is the prophet telling these companions that you can have your you can have your choices from these seven different dialects and modes of recitation and words you can choose your choices whatever is easy for you as well as the other companion he can also choose his choices and then you end up with a you end up with the choices that you made your own recitation that are taken from what from the seven that are all Revelation and are all Quran an easier way to to bring it to the mind of the people listening is look at the Quran for example you have chapter 2 and chapter 3 imagine if chapter 2 and chapter 3 they were uh one chapter two is one half and chapter three is a different so you take a part of chapter two and you recite with it a part of chapter 3 so you end up now with a new chapter right other than chapter 2 and and chapter 3 because there combinations of these two but in the end what you end up with is just a combination of these two Revelation two chapters of Revelation so what you end up with is also a revelation because it is just combining these two chapters this is how the works this is how you come up with a you combine between the different different dialects that were revealed and you come up with a in the end so all of the companions had their their and then when they travel to different lands because as we said the Quran is taken orally the people started learning the Quran from the companion in their city in their country in their land the companions that were around them so they took the Quran from those companions so now uh the people who are learning the Quran they can learn from two companions and they can also do the same thing they can have their own but choosing some of the recitation of this companion as well as some of the recitation of this different companion so now you come up with a different but whatever they&amp;#39;re combining from and this is the important thing to understand whatever a you come up with combining from from different or from different it is all in the Quran that is coming from Allah that you&amp;#39;re just combining different parts of Revelation with each other reciting that which is easier for you what is most eloquent and easier for your tongue so there was tons of different so the was not only limited to seven or 10 there was many many different and the companions had their own and the many of them had their own and we&amp;#39;ll come to that uh later on so uh when these companions travel and the people learned from them at the time of the Cal of Islam there was certain Wars that are taking place so the armies were were coming from different lands now when these armies came from different lands there was a problem happening here because as we said these companions had their own and in these lands people were learning from the companions so if abdah Abbas was was in one land andar was in a different land the people in this land learned from abdah abas his and the people here learned from so when the time of war came and the people came from this land the people came from this land now they have two different now they have two different recitations because they took from two different companions even though it&amp;#39;s all Quran but the choices that these companions made from the seven is different so they will end up reciting the Quran slightly different from the other companion that is coming from the other land now when these armies met people started disagreeing with each other they&amp;#39;re saying to each other what is this this is not the Quran that was listening and this happens even today now if some Muslims go today for example to certain parts of the world to Morocco and they are reciting the the recitation of H and they start listening to then they they don&amp;#39;t recognize many of the words are being said so they think something is is is wrong here if you&amp;#39;re not aware and these were new Muslims bear in mind because Islam spread far and wide so a lot of them were new Muslims so they were not aware of the seven and they were not aware of the concept of so then there was disagreements happening between the people so he came to and he said that the people are disagreeing about the there&amp;#39;s a problem Happening Here people are disagreeing with each other because they learned from different companions their and now they they&amp;#39;re not understanding why someone else is reciting a different way even though all of these ways of recitation are in the end Revelation coming from Allah so what did is he consulted the Companions and then he made a committee and what he did is he made a standardized text of the Quran why did he make a standardized text of the Quran so he can sent to these lands and then say to the people that look whatever you&amp;#39;re reciting it has to be restricted to the standardized version of the Quran so what this standardized version of the Quran does is two things first it restricts the recitations of the people the choices that they can make to that standardized version of the Quran and then if there is any disagreement they can always come back to that specific standardized version of the Quran now where did this standardized version come from what did is he brought the same person Z who Abu Bakr made compile the Quran in the stage that we spoke about before he brought the same person Z and he brought that compiled Quran that was written at the time of the Prophet wasam his life and he used it to make that standardized text the standardized version of the Quran and then he did not put any dialectical marks so people can recite multitude of different recitations of the Quran using that same text so it&amp;#39;s one text but you can recite in different modes different you can use different to recite the same text so that standardized text that was based on the same Quran that was written down at the time of the prophet in accordance to the final Revelation that was revealed and then what did is he sent it to the to different lands he said he sent the standardized text to different lands and then told the people that if they want to recite the Quran they have to stick to that specific text does not have dialectical marks so it can include multitude of different recitations but you still restricted to whatever that whatever is in the text you cannot go anywhere else you restricted to that specific text so it it kind of restricted uh the full seven so it&amp;#39;s not all of them right now so there is a restricted version of them restricted version of the seven and something that is very important to understand here is that any is enough as the prophet said Each of it is enough if we just have one recitation or one half of the Quran that is enough for people because all of it is Quran and the end and all of it is the 14 different 114 different chapters but it&amp;#39;s just different ways of reciting these 114 different chapters so that text skeletal text of that does not have dialectical marks you can have multitude of different that you can use to read that specific text but as we said something very important to understand they never learn the Quran from the text which is why he left it without dialectical marks because you cannot just pick it and start reading a specific recitation the learning was always oral and the text was always secondary so the purpose of the text is two things to combine the people at one textt and if there is any disagreement they can come back to it that was the only reason made that standard text and then what also did is he burnt any other copies now what copies did he burn he burned these personal that we mention in the beginning said in the beginning different companions had their own personal M and they had interpretation in there Etc so he said bring any of these M personal M of the people and we&amp;#39;re going to remove them we just going to leave that standard text so people can come back to it and do not go to multitude of different sources only one source to come back to now a very important point to note here as well is we mentioned the Quran uh or the par limits that was written at the time of the Prophet his life these partials were still preserved even after made the standard text so these partials was there did not burn this if you want to call it original he did not burn these original paraments in fact he made the standardized version he burned the personal M but he did not burn this uh par limits that were written at the time of the Prophet they remained until 50 to 60 ah which is like 20 or 30 years later after but he didn&amp;#39;t burn at that time they were still available all he did is that he made a standard text with the agreement of all of the companions like did that whatever did was under supervision of all of us so it was not a personal decision that made and and all of the four cats the prophet told us to follow their way and tradition so that standard text was then made and then it solved this idea of disagreement of different people coming from different uh parts of the land disagreeing on different recitations that they took from the companions so now here the people are restricted to the text but there&amp;#39;s still many recitations that you can recite using the text because the text does not have dialectical marks you can recite Malik you can recite Malik you can recite you can recite and you can recite the these different words using the same text you can say you can say so there was still tons of different available but people are still restricted to one text one skeletal text that they come back to when it comes to the recitations of the Quran and this is the third stage of uh the recitations of the Quran and the preservation of the text the final stage of the recitations of the Quran now after we said there&amp;#39;s a skeletal text now which is the text that standardized and he sent to different lands and now there&amp;#39;s as we said tons of different that people took from The Companions and then from the student so the companions combined from the seven and then the students combined from different Companions and then the students of the students combined from different students and all of it is combining from Revelation coming with different uh so there was multitude of different so later on in history there was an individual called mujah and mujah he was a in in the Quran and recitations of the Quran what did is he looked who are where is the best recitations of the Quran so there&amp;#39;s multitude of different recitations so let me look at the best reciters the people who are most eloquent in the recitation most eloquent in their understanding of the of the Arabic language have the best chains tracing back to the prophet the most authentic chains and what he did is he took uh seven of these uh recitations and he wrote a book about these seven different recitations so he took seven different recitations not the said the are different a recitation is combin combining between different or recitations of the companions so he did collected in that book Seven recitations not seven seven recitations and that book of The Seven recitations he collected the most eloquent and the best recitations that he found in the time people did not have to follow that book did not have to take information from that book that was just a personal decision that he made mujah so this was not like people have Muslims have to follow this or something there was still many other different recitations that people were reciting and taking but what happened later on is that book became so popular and and then the people uh started restricting themselves to these seven different recitations and a lot of people had a misconceptions they thought that the seven recitations of is the same as the seven which we&amp;#39;ve already highlighted they completely two different things and that&amp;#39;s why many of the scholars blamed mujah they said he could have collected eight recitations or six recitations or 20 recitations why did he have to choose seven which confused many of the people thinking that these seven recitations are the seven so these seven recitations became mly popular among the people among the population people started reciting these seven uh of the Quran so some of the the scholars also came later on and what they did is the to clear that misunderstanding as well they added extra three recitations from the elequent reciters of the Quran the people who have the best chains Etc the most understanding of the Arabic language and they added extra three recitations of the Quran like in his book so then we have now 10 recitations these 10 eloquent recitations now as we said these recitations are all what they&amp;#39;re combinations of the different they&amp;#39;re combinations of the Revelation that came from the companions they&amp;#39;re combinations from the oral text and all of the oral text traces back to the prophet with chains of narration so the the 10 uh recitations that we&amp;#39;re reciting today uh they were not the only recitations available as we said there was tons of other recitations the only reason that they are popular today is because they became popular later on people started adopting them because of the because of their eloquencer of the Quran and something interesting for people to understand that even today if you become a scholar of and and highly eloquent in the Arabic language Etc you can even have a new you can combine between this different 10 different so even today you&amp;#39;re not restricted to the 10 different why because all of them are are Quran all of them are Revelation all of them are coming from from Allah all of them for us are considered Quran these recitations of the Quran the 10 different recitations of the Quran they are highly Mass transmitted we&amp;#39;re talking about tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of chains of narrations transmitting these 10 these 10 recitations of the Quran tracing back to the prophet and we have voluminous works that have has the names and biographies of the people in the chain the people transmitting the information not the information itself but just the people transmitting the information autobiographies of them like for example or all of these are books which contain the biographies of the narrators of the Quran and now the chains themselves are available as well you can see them in a and where you have a multitude we&amp;#39;re talking about Mass transmission so individuals in the chain reporting these 10 different El trace him back to the prophet and anyone today who recites any of the has something which is called AA I&amp;#39;m going to show an example of on the screen Ana is is you have a certificate and this certificate has the names of your teachers of one of the 10 that you recite the names of your teachers going back all the way to the prophet and today we have millions of these millions of memorizers of the Quran we have millions of certificates OFA of people transmitting that same text now it is very important to understand that whichever you recite the Quran with it is considered Quran because there are combinations from the seven which are all coming from Allah and the purpose of them is to just make the Quran easy for people to memorize easy for people to understand so today we have this Mass transmission of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of millions of certificates of people transmitting these 10 different recitations of the Quran that we so there is not a shadow of a doubt when it comes to the oral preservation of the Quran is that these 10 recitations that we&amp;#39;re reciting are Quran and our combinations of the seven which is the Quran the Revelation that is coming from Allah so when we say the Quran is preserved letter for letter word for word yes it is preserved letter for letter word for word because each of the recitations is Quran and each letter and each vowel and each way to recite is Quran so the Quran is preserved letter for letter word for word vowel for vowel and will always be uh preserved in that way uh but just many people they do not understand the concept of which causes confusions sometimes for people when they&amp;#39;re perceiving the different uh recitations of the Quran and now when you understand the history behind it the history behind the development of of the and that they are combinations of the that were read recited by the prophet and were Revelation coming down directly from Allah and they were the same 114 chapters with very slight different dialects of recitation and differences that enriches and increases the meaning of the Quran now what about the written text so uh regarding the the written text do we have any evidences that the written text is is also preserved now as we said the Quran was always a oral text and through my explanations you saw why it was a oral text this is how the companions understood it there was always these chains of narrations being preserved because we always looked at it as an oral text but even the written text if you look at it it&amp;#39;s also another sign of the preservation of the Quran for example you have the Birmingham manuscript which is a par limit that was either written on the life of the Prophet or his companions that if you compare it with with what we have today it is the exact thing that we have today and this parment is is very likely could be one of the par limits that the prophet asked one of the the companions to come and write down when the Revelation was coming down because it&amp;#39;s from his lifetime and and it is exactly in accordance to what uh we read today and we have the the Top Copy manuscript of the Quran which has the same exact Quran that we&amp;#39;re reciting today when we talk about the written text has the same text as theic text there is no difference this manic skeletal text is the same exact thing but you have the manuscript and the is very interesting because the when it was discovered is 15,000 different par limits that traces to almost 950 different qurans from the first onwards and when you look at all of these manuscripts they show only one thing that the Quran that we&amp;#39;re reciting today is the same Quran that was there from the beginning there was many non-muslim textual criticism Scholars who went to S and examined the S manuscripts and I&amp;#39;ll put names now of some of them who examined and who didn&amp;#39;t examine that all of them say that the Quran that we have today is the same Quran that exist at the time of the Prophet so some of the names I&amp;#39;m going to put of these non-muslims they went and they actually invested and written books actually about the manuscript and how they show the preservation of the Quran okay now what about the manuscript and the fact that there is something called an upper text and a lower text a lot of people don&amp;#39;t understand what is this upper text and lower text and why is there differences so as we said in the beginning the Quran was written on what parish limits and and bones and whatever was accessible so people didn&amp;#39;t have papers so when they make a mistake they throw it away and then bring a new paper so what people used to do is they used to wipe the down the ink on whatever they had they used to wash it and then write again so that is what is the the upper and lower text that you find in some of these partial limits regarding the manuscript is because those people who were writing down they were wiping down the previous text and then writing a new text when they made a mistake on the same partially on the same bone so that&amp;#39;s why you might find slide disagreements there in the lower text when you look at the the lower text Etc uh so that&amp;#39;s one thing the other thing is as we said these were 950 different qurans and 15,000 parti limits these were not scribes professional scribes many of these parti limits were people personally writing for their own benefit like home or learning from their teachers learning in at a school writing down these were not professional scribes so they will have scribal errors because they&amp;#39;re not professional scribes but how do we know that these are scribal errors and not changes in the text is a very simple way that any uh like uh any beginner textual criticisms Scholars know is that you look at the text you look at any change or difference within that text and then you compare it with with the with the something older than it a text older than it or a text from the same time or a text that came later on so if you look at the text from the same time text from before and text that came later on has the same chapter but does not have this extra mistake so now you realize that this is not corruption this is a scribal error because that error has not been copied has not been copied later on before it did not is not there other manuscripts from the same time does not have it and manuscripts later on does not have it so now we know that this is a scribed error if you compare with other religions for example the Christian tradition you see that that error is repeated in in manuscripts later on so you realize that there is a corruption taking place because that change now has been copied and copied and copied and copied and copied in later manuscripts and then have been put in the Bible and people are reading this is how you know that there is a corruption but the scribal error on the other hand you can know it&amp;#39;s a scribal error but looking at previous manuscripts manuscripts from the same time and manuscripts later on do they contain that same mistake if they don&amp;#39;t then you know this specific porish limit this specific writer who is not a scribe made a mistake so even but this is the thing that I&amp;#39;m saying even though you can find you can look at the upper text and the lower text and you can look at certain scribal erors the conclusion of Scholars talking about non-muslim Scholars you know secular Scholars who went and studied the S manuscripts and written written works on it there conclusion is the same the Quran is preserved and these manuscripts whatever error it could have a manuscript could have from the 8th Century or the nth Century whatever it is any errors or mistakes that these have these were scribal errors and we can prove it because we can show you uh manuscripts other manuscripts from the same time before and after that does not have that same mistake which shows that the Quran is preserved even we&amp;#39;re talking about from the written text so now whether you want to look at the written text or you want to look at the oral text is only only one conclusion that you can come to is that the Quran that we have today is perfectly preserved it is absolutely perfectly preserved from the oral text we don&amp;#39;t even have to rely on any of these written manuscripts because yes someone can write and make a mistake so what does not mean anything and this is not the case we saying even if this happens this does not mean anything but even that is not the case whether you look at written uh manuscripts of the Quran and you compare them to what we have today or you look at the oral tradition of the Quran with these Mass Transmissions of tens of thousands thousands millions today of certificates that Trace back the Quran to the prophet the Quran is preserved and will always be preserved and you know we are in Ramadan right now it is a chance for anyone watching to see this preservation with their own eyes you can go to any mosque in Ramadan or most mosques let&amp;#39;s not say any mosque maybe a mosque is shut down or something you know most mosque around the world and you will see that these mosques are reciting the Quran 30 parts of the Quran from memory and any mistakes that they would make they will be corrected and you will also see the these mus are reciting the Quran in different recitations the 10 different recitations that we talked about so you can travel anywhere in the world today and look with your own eyes and see the living preservation of the Quran so this tradition of reciting the Quran was always there and will always be there until the day of judgment and the Quran will always be preserved and we know that there is a lot of other religions are a lot of different faiths that are envious of this fact but these are the facts these are the primary source materials and these are testimonies from people who are unb looking at either the oral text or the written text they have to come to the same conclusion that the Quran that we&amp;#39;re reciting today is preserved the same way that the prophet received it from [Music] [Music] Allah [Music] for

Transcript for:The Preservation of the Quran

Transcript for:
The Preservation of the Quran