We now come to the original Uthmanic Qur'an, which was supposedly compiled by Zaid ibn-Thabit in 652 AD, under the authority of Uthman himself.

Al Fadi as a Saudi Arabian Muslim grew up believing, like most Muslims, that the Qur’an he had in his hand was the same and complete Qur’an that was sent down from heaven in the 7th century to Muhammad, compiled in its final form under the authority of Uthman around 20 years after Muhammad's death, and then passed on through the generations as a preserved text. This story is well documented by Al Bukhari in 870 AD and can be found in Al-Bukhari, volume 6, hadiths 509 - 510.

According to Al Bukhari, which is part of what we know today as the Standard Islamic Narrative (S.I.N.), Uthman, due to confusion amongst various Muslims who had been fighting up in Azerbaijan, because different factions of Muslims were reciting the Qur'an differently from those who came from Medina, Uthman, the Caliph in Medina had the secretary of Muhammad, Zaid Ibn Thabit, re-write the Qur'an in the Quraishi Dialect, from which 5 copies were made and sent to 5 cities (Mecca and Medina which are in Arabia, Basra and Kufa which are in Iraq, and Damascus which is in Syria).

He then ordered that any other Qur'an which disagreed with his final Quraishi Medinan version be burned, including those from Iraq and Syria, so that there would only be one standard Qur'an.

Today, Muslims like to claim that the differences were only dialectical in nature; in other words these were only differences in pronunciation.

Dr Jay and Al Fadi quickly shut that discussion down in this episode, pointing out that in order to show different pronunciations in a written Arabic script you have to have vowels (i.e. the Dhamma, Kasrah and Fatah); yet these did not exist in the 7th century, so they would not have been written in any manuscript at the time of Uthman (i.e. in 652 AD).

So, the only differences would have to have been heard orally, which is exactly what the story says, since it was the oral recitation which Udaifa heard while up in Azerbaijan which was the impetus to then standardize the Qur'anic text in Medina.

So, what then was Uthman burning?

If these were nothing more than oral recitations, how then can they be burned, as they are done solely with one's mouth and tongue. You only burn papers and books. If he did burn Qur'ans which were written down, as al Bukhari clearly writes, then these would have had to be different scripts which only used the 16 consonants available to them, which means they would have had to be entirely different words, suggesting that they would have then been different Qur'ans, and not simply different pronunciations, which then explains why they needed to be destroyed.

But the story doesn't stop there, for a few decades later other Qur'ans began to appear further north, which had completely different Surahs from that of the Qur'an which supposedly came from Uthman's Standardized Qur'an.

According to the Standard Islamic Narrative, Ubay ibn Ka'b (a supposed companion of Muhammad who lived in Damascus, Syria) created a Qur'an with 116 Surahs, though Uthman's had only 114; while Ibn Masu'd (another supposed companion of Muhammad who lived in Kufa, Iraq) created a Qur'an with 110 or 111 Surahs; and a further companion, Ibn Musa, created yet another Qur'an with 114 Surahs, though some of his Surahs were different from Uthman's.

An Australian scholar named Dr Arthur Jeffreys in the 1930s did research on these 4 Qur'ans, using the Standard Islamic Narrative as his authority, and found over 15,000 differences between these 4 different Qur'ans, all supposedly from the 7th century.

Dr Smith and Al Fadi then conclude by asking the 'million-dollar-question', namely: With 5 standardized Qur'ans sent to 5 different cities by Uthman in 652 AD in order to make sure that there would only be one Qur'an, shouldn't we find at least one of these still in existence today in order to compare with what we do have currently?

You would hope so...

Stay tuned for the next episode where Dr Jay and Al Fadi look at the earliest 6 manuscripts in existence, and ask whether any of them is the original Qur'an which was compiled by Uthman in 652 AD. You'd love to know the answer, wouldn't you?

© Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2023
(78,000) Music: "Townsong" by Alexander Nakarada, from filmmusic-io