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Message: <blockquote data-quote="anamnlmslmn" data-source="post: 14504847" data-attributes="member: 453369">About preservation of Quran:<a href="http://www.quranandscience.com/quran-is-the-word-of-god/165-the-preservation-of-the-quran.html" target="_blank">http://www.quranandscience.com/quran-is-the-word-of-god/165-the-preservation-of-the-quran.html</a>The Qur’an was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in sections throughout the twenty-three years of his prophethood. The Era of the Prophet (PBUH) 609-632 CEThe Qur’an was the main miracle given to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to prove that he was a true prophet of Allah and not an imposter. So, the Qur’an had to be saved to prove to the later generations that Muhammad (PBUH) was really the last prophet of Allah. All of the false prophets who came after Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) brought books which they claimed to be revealed from Allah, but none of them have the miraculous ability to be memorized by thousands, nor have they improved on the message of the Qur’an.One of the leading orientalists, Kenneth Cragg, said the following regarding the memorization and preservation of the Qur’anic text, “This phenomenon of Qur’anic recital means that the text has traversed the centuries in an unbroken living sequence of devotion. It cannot, therefore, be handled as an antiquarian thing, nor as a historical document out of a distant past.”[1] Another orientalist scholar, William Graham, wrote: “For countless millions of Muslims over more than fourteen centuries of Islamic history, ‘scripture’, al-kitab, has been a book learned, read and passed on by vocal repetition and memorisation. The written Qur’an may ‘fix’ visibly the authoritative text of the Divine Word in a way unknown in history, but the authoritativeness of the Qur’anic book is only realized in its fullness and perfection when it is correctly recited.”[2] Yet another, John Burton, stated: “The method of transmitting the Qur’an from one generation to the next by having the young memorize the oral tradition of their elders had mitigated somewhat from the beginning the worst perils of relying solely on written records...”[3] At the end of a voluminous work on the Qur’an’s collection, Burton stated that the text of the Qur’an available today is “the text which has come down to us in the form in which it was organised and approved by the Prophet....What we have today in our hands is the mus-haf[4] of Muhammad.”[5]With every succeeding generation of Muslims, the numbers of those who memorized all of the Qur’an has increased. Today there are literally hundreds of thousands of Muslims throughout the world who have done so.There is no other book, religious or otherwise, which has been memorized on this scale in recorded history. The Qur’an is about four-fifths the length of the New Testament of the Christians, yet not a single person in recorded history is known to have memorized the New Testament completely.  In fact, if all of the books in the world were somehow destroyed, the only book which could be rewritten, word for word, without a single mistake is the Glorious Qur’an.The Qur’an has been preserved in both the oral as well as written form in a way no other religious book in history has....The Methodology <a href="http://www.whyislam.org/submission/the-holy-quran/the-preservation/" target="_blank">http://www.whyislam.org/submission/the-holy-quran/the-preservation/</a>The Book has been handed down to our age in its complete and original form since the time of Prophet Muhammad (p) . From the time the Book began to be revealed, the Prophet (p) had dictated its text to the scribes. The written text was then read out to Prophet (p), who, having satisfied himself that the scribe had committed no error of recording, would put the manuscript in safe custody.The Prophet (p) used to instruct the scribe about the sequence in which a revealed message was to be placed in a particular Surah (chapter). In this manner, the Prophet (p) continued to arrange the text of the Qur’an in systematic order till the end of the chain of revelations. Again, it was ordained from the beginning of Islam that a recitation of the Glorious Qur’an must be an integral part of worship. Hence the illustrious Companions would commit the Divine verses to memory as soon as they were revealed. Many of them learned the whole text and a far larger number had memorized different portions of it.Method of preservation of the Qur’an during the Prophet’s timeBesides, those of the Companions who were literate used to keep a written record of several portions of the Glorious Qur’an. In this manner, the text of the Qur’an had been preserved in four different ways during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet (p):a) The Holy Prophet (PBUH) had the whole text of the Divine Messages from the beginning to the end committed to writing by the scribes of revelations.b) Many of the Companions learned the whole text of the Qur’an, every syllable of it, by heart.c) All the illustrious Companions, without an exception, had memorized at least some portions of the Holy Qur’an, for the simple reason that it was obligatory for them to recite it during worship. An estimate of the number of the illustrious Companions may be obtained from the fact that one hundred and forty thousands Companions had participated in the Last Pilgrimage performed by the Prophet (p).d) A considerable number of the literate Companions kept a private record of the text of the Qur’an and satisfied themselves as to the purity of their record by reading it out to the Prophet (p).Methods of preservation of the Qur’an after the demise of the ProphetIt is an incontrovertible historical truth that the text of the Glorious Qur’an extant today is, syllable for syllable, exactly the same as the Prophet (p) had offered to the world as the Word of God.After the demise of the Prophet(p), the first Caliph Abu Bakr, assembled all the Huffaz (those who have committed the Qur’an to memory), and the written records of the Glorious Qur’an and with their help had the whole text written in Book form. In the time of Uthman, copies of this original version were made and officially dispatched to the Capitals of the Islamic world. Two of the original manuscripts of the Qur’an prepared 1400 years ago still exist today; one is in the Topkapi Saray Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, and the other in Tashkent, Russia. Both of these are identical in content with the Qur’an available all over the world today.And how can one expect any discrepancy, when there have existed several million “Huffaz” (someone who has memorized the entire Quran, word for word, cover to cover) in every generation since the time of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and in our own time. Should anyone alter a syllable of the original text of the Qur’an, these Huffaz would at once expose the mistake.In the last century, an Institute of Munich University in Germany collected forty two thousand copies of the Glorious Qur’an including manuscripts and printed texts produced in each period in the various parts of the Islamic World. Research work was carried out on these texts for half a century, at the end of which the researchers concluded that apart from copying mistakes, there was no discrepancy in the text of these forty-two thousand copies, even though they belonged to the period between the 1st Century to the 14th Century of the Islamic era (roughly from the seventh to the twentieth century of the Common Era), and had been procured from all parts of the world. This institute, alas, perished in the bombing attacks on Germany during World War II, but the findings of its research project survived.Another point that must be kept in view is that the word in which the Qur’an was revealed is a living language in our own time. It is still current as the mother tongue of about a hundred million people from Iraq to Morocco. In the non-Arab world too, hundreds of thousands of people study and teach this language.The grammar of the Arabic language, its lexicon, its phonetic system and its phraseology, has remained intact for fourteen hundred years. A modern Arabic-speaking person can comprehend the Glorious Qur’an with as much proficiency as did the Arabs of fourteen centuries ago. This, then, is an important attribute of Prophet Muhammad (p). The Book that God revealed to him for the guidance of mankind exists today in its original language without the slightest alteration in its vocabulary.Some other links:<a href="http://www.answering-christianity.com/quran/textual.htm" target="_blank">http://www.answering-christianity.com/quran/textual.htm</a><a href="http://www.al-islam.org/tahrif_quran/" target="_blank">http://www.al-islam.org/tahrif_quran/</a></blockquote>

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