101 Contradictions in the Bible:

[Ruggedtouch]

Will the Muslims please contribute to our education? What's the difference between Ib'n Massuds codex & Uthmans recension? No joke, I heard that there are 150 variations in Sura 2 alone!!! I'm more inclined to believe you guys rather than the non-Muslim who stated this fact/claim. Please shed some light :)

That’s actually a good point. In fact (and this is one of the most amusing examples of the Muslim ability to ignore Islam’s internal contradictions) the history of the compilation of the Qur’an after Muhammad’s death as recorded by the ahadith and Muslim historians is inexplicable were such perfect “memories” real.


Rather than “numerous” sahabahs with perfect recollections of the Qur’an, there is compelling evidence that these earliest sahabahs had different and differentially complete memories. How else is one to make sense of the ahadith (repeated in one form or another at least seven times) concerning the last verse being found in the memory of only a single man; Abi Khuzaima Al-Ansari? Doesn’t that require the understanding that every other sahabah had an incomplete memory?


How does one further account for the conflicts among those sahabahs that required the Uthmanic rescension?


In fact, how does one account for Uthman’s rescension at all?


Given the fact we have a historical record of the event during which the Qur’an was standardized and competing versions burned, the maintenance of a standard since that time hardly qualifies as “miraculous.” The completely human engine for that standard is evident and obvious. We have in our possession, at best, the musshaf of Uthman. We really do not know what the musshaf of Muhammad contained, and how different the two might be.


Further, the Qur’an is not the oldest religious (or secular, for that matter) document that has been preserved unchanged for centuries. Do they all qualify for miraculous status? If not, why not? Are the older ones MORE miraculous than the Qur’an?


Muslims must not mistake their own allegiance to Muslim orthodoxy as a good reason for anyone else to credulously accept Islamic dogma as true. Historians and scholars have a higher intellectual standard than that.