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Is the Quran Perfectly Preserved?
When I was a Muslim I was taught that the Quran is perfectly preserved. That this was a distinguishing feature to differentiate it from other “man made” or “corrupted” religions.
What I didn’t realize is that when you go down the rabbit hole, things get nuts. Like the now Yasir Qadi trademarked “holes in the narrative” the more you look the worse it gets. You start to realize that this perfectly preserved “one text” is only a facade. A facade that was created by the scholars of Islam starting with the Caliph Uthman in the 7th century when he ordered all the other copies of the Qurans to be burned. Thing is, it didn’t quite work. You can burn papers, but memories remain. Stray copies survive. People talk and put the evidence together to see the truth.
I’m going to show you a variant that’s damaging to the narrative of single text and preservation. An example that has theological significance and is not just consonantal variants in individual words or different forms of these words. This is a whole extra phrase that is inserted into the text.
The relevance of this variant lies in the implications for understanding early Quranic transmission and interpretation. Its presence challenges the notion of a single, unchanged Quranic text, showing that different versions coexisted before the text was standardized under Uthman.
