this is one of the oldest parchments ever discovered for the Quran what you see here is identical to what we have today in any mus but if you look a little bit closer you will see that there is a shade of a text that used to exist researchers found out that there was an even older quranic text that was written below it before it was erased and a new familiar text was written on top of it when analyzed this erased lower text contained a that are rephrased some added words and other removed Words which are visible when scanned for traces of erased ink so is this really true well yes this is indeed true but then why was this quranic text erased why was it replaced by another quranic text does this mean that there was a different Quran that is older than what we have today well this is the story of possibly the biggest discovery of the oldest manuscript of the Quran in existence the manuscripts before we get started with this important and sensitive topic make sure that you watch the whole video because every piece of information is important in understanding this topic correctly and comprehensively after watching this video check the sources that I used to verify every piece of information now let us understand what is really going on in 1971 12,000 parchments were found in a mosque in Yemen these parchments belong to 926 muss some of these muss or manuscripts were almost complete and some were only only missing 10 or 12 Pages they differ in how old they are some of the oldest parchments date back to the first century of Hijra some were even dated to be 10 to 15 years after the passing of the Prophet peace and blessings be upon Him among these manuscripts was this this is C1 manuscript when you hear people referring to the manuscripts they are probably talking about this one the C1 manuscript and it has become very famous because of how much it was talked about unlike the other manuscripts they found this one was written on a palimpsest which is a type of material that can be used several times to erase and rewrite on it in Arabic it is called and so upon inspection they discovered that there was an older text that was erased and a newer text was was written on top of it by x-raying the parchments they were able to see the traces of ink for the erased Words which then revealed many differences ranging from rephrased aat missing words different words and so on this news was then celebrated by many attackers of Islam research papers started appearing articles pictures showing the differences between the older text and the above text all with the big claim that the Quran has been changed and naturally many Muslims got curious and decided to take a look which they mustn't and so they started doubting the Quran because of such claims so there is a lot to unpack here what is actually happening here has the Quran been really changed well the short answer is these are all false claims and just usual lies but didn't you just say that it was true well there is a difference between facts and drawing conclusions and their conclusions are just simply outright lies and can be very easily refuted from three aspects the Islamic tradition pure logic and the testimony of the researchers themselves and there is one big surprise that I will reveal at the end so don't miss out on this one let's start going through them one by one so as for the Islamic tradition first the Quran is an audio book it is not a text lost in time which was unheard of and then we discovered it one day in a cave and we were seeing the text for the first time no the Islamic tradition is that the Quran is passed down orally from generation to generation so we don't need books or Scrolls to tell us what the quranic text is second Quran as a text has the highest level of authentication which means that the chain of narration of how the Quran got to us has names of people that are known to be trusted honest and with other virtuous people testifying to their virtue and moreover we must also have their biography what this is called in Islamic tradition is which is a separate branch of knowledge specialized in assessing the ability to transmit information reliably and then next to this chain of narration we have many many chains of narrations of the same degree reporting the exact same text word for word which is then what we call so a lot of trustworthy people reporting the exact same text with the same degree of authenticity in each level and so according to this we ask a very simple question who do these parchments belong to where did they copy it from from who were they from the sahabah who has testified to the justice and the virtue of the writer what is their biography what is even their name do these parchments belong to a learner a child was he a Muslim a friend a foe obviously we have none of these answers and so we can just simply say we don't accept anything to be Quran if it came from an unknown source and so according to the Islamic tradition this manuscript is nothing but a piece of history and it has no religious obligation without any validation or verification so now for The Logical aspect first in this discovery they found 926 muss or manuscripts some were almost complete and 100% identical to what we have today now the C1 is one of these 926 now the question is why are they leaving 925 muss that are identical to what we have today letter for letter and we're focusing on the C1 manuscript and consider to be the original text is this logical for example if you have 1,000 copies of the same book 999 are the same but there is one has some mistakes in it is it then logical to dismiss 999 books and consider the one that is different to be the right one and the others to be wrong how does this make sense and this isn't even the case here the text found on C1 is identical to what we have today but it is the text that has been erased is what they are talking about so it is not even one book out of 999 that one book is also identical to the rest but it has some corrections in it now they took the mistakes before they were corrected and they decided that this is the original text so the score of logic here is really minus one second the C1 manuscript was quite special because as they themselves describe it a palmist so it gives you the ability to erase the text and rewrite on it you can compare it to a chalkboard or writing on paper with a pencil now if you today want to write a text a holy text to be preserved for future Generations will you write it using a pencil or chalk on chalkboard that seems to be quite careless and ridiculous to be honest unless you wrote that text with other purposes other than really preserving it so it is quite logical to conclude that the purposes of this manuscript is not preserving the text but it had other uses which leads us to number three third the C1 manuscript most probably belonged to a student using a palmist was a popular choice for Learners because they can erase correct or their teacher can correct their work once they are done they can erase it and use it for something else what also highlights this fact is that when compared to other parchments found you can clearly see that the writing in this parchment was not as neatly and carefully written as other pieces supporting the idea that it is a child's or a learner's piece but these are not the only two reasons why we think so on one of the parchments we find that the student started with Bas remember we're looking at the erased text but then next we find the words do not say so obviously he is getting corrected by someone telling him that or maybe he's telling that to himself not to say bismah in this position sometimes he even writes synonyms for a quranic word and then corrects the mistake without completely erasing the wrong word like here he first wrote which means children but the correct word is which means the child so he erased the part of the wrong word and wrote the correct one so now it reads as so these parchment contain notes mistakes Corrections writing mistakes which was then clearly used for learning purposes are we now supposed to take the Quran from a learning parchment fourth you will find many of these pictures on the internet comparing the alleged older Quran to the one that we have today but the simple question is after seeing how difficult it can be to see the erased text where did these complete sentences and phrases come from well they simply made it up most of it at least it is all depending on guesswork because of how much the folios are damaged or they are difficult to decipher still when you look at the reproduction of the folios so turning the folios into text you would think that they might be up to something but when you look at the legend to understand what all these symbols mean you will think that they are joking so here the text between parentheses it is only partly visible but it is still based on Guess work and if it is between brackets it is still conjectural in other words they have no proof for it and if it is between slashes then there are no traces of the text if it is between braces then the Folly is basically missing so when you look back at the reproduction of their text you'll find out that in most cases they essentially have nothing just some letters and the rest is guesswork they reconstructed entire alleged aat based on one or two erased letters and then they come out and say with a straight face that they found new a yet if any word could describe this perfectly it would be desperation finally what did the researchers themselves say about this and where did these claims come from well there was many people involved in this project along the years the Yemen scholar Al muhamed who was the chairman responsible for the yemeni Heritage and at the request of the yemenis a number of non-muslim German Scholars were involved in this project one of whom is an orientalist with the name of GERD puin after his research puing came out with some false claims about the Quran stating that the text isn't as stable as Muslims claim also coming up with the radical idea that the Quran existed before Islam however Professor Gregor Schuler another researcher at the same project came out to refute his claims and sent a letter reporting to the chairman this is the letter that he sent explaining his position from pu's allegations in it he clearly states that he did not find any changes that can affect the original text as we have it today he further refutes pin's claims and emphasizing the authenticity of the text he can read the full letter in detail which I left in the description another researcher Professor orsula D holds also shared her findings about the research and refuted Po's claims and emphasizing that there were no variations to be considered among the manuscripts they found afterward puin himself sent a letter to Al as an attempt to clear his name and so he retracted his previous statements stating that the muss of are not any different from the muss we have today and that there are some words that were spelled differently with no effect on the actual text whatsoever and so many people only heard the false claims because it is what they wanted to hear and they made an entire case around something that is only based upon some traces of erased letters from a student's training sheet perfectly embodying the phrase grasping at straws now here's a little surprising fact for such people when comparing the Bible to the Quran in terms of manuscripts we'll find something astounding since the Bible cannot be memorized it only depends on manuscripts and so the New Testament for example depends on around 5500 Scrolls and parchments written in Greek can you guess how many manuscripts date back to the 1st Century well that would be 0% in fact around 85% of the New Testament is depending on manuscripts from the 11th to the 15th century that is well over 1,000 years after they were written and only 2% are from the 2 to the 5th Century so every time they found a new manuscript throughout this thousand years they updated their holy book and that is why you get things like this Joshua in his own book Joshua 2429 stating that he died at the age of 110 so why am I mentioning this well this is to show you how things look when they go horribly wrong and to tell you that Muslims are the only people on Earth who can proudly and emphatically say that our book has remained the same to the dot for more than 14 centuries both orally and in writing for [Music] [Music] thanks for watching if you want to start reading and understanding the Quran in Arabic then you should start your journey right here and don't forget to check out my latest book which goes perfectly with this free course I'll leave the links for all of them in the description so check them out thanks for watching and I'll see you next time