Islam versus Europe

While the Bible is Man’s attempt to express the word of God, Islam asserts that its sacred text is the word of God, as the opening verses of chapter 43 make clear:

[43:1] Ha mim. [43:2] By the Glorious Book! [43:3] We have revealed the Koran in the Arabic tongue that you may grasp its meaning. [43:4] It is a transcript of Our eternal book, sublime, and full of wisdom.

Muslim tradition has it that the contents of the Qur’an were revealed to the Prophet Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel over a period of 23 years. Mohammed memorized the revelations and recited them to his followers, some of whom wrote them out on ‘the leafless stalks of the date-palm tree’, ‘pieces of leather and hides’, and on stones. After Mohammed’s death, one of his secretaries was given the task of compiling the text of the Qur’an from those written fragments and from the verses that he and others had memorized.

With some passages committed to imperfect human memory and others written on odd scraps by people of varying literacy, the chances of the earthly Qur’an being a perfect copy of its heavenly twin are not looking good, and they are about to look very much worse.

Only a few consonants of the Arabic alphabet can be recognized entirely by their shape. The remainder have to be written with dots; otherwise, telling one consonant from another would be a matter of guesswork. For example, the Arabic equivalents of b, n, t, th and y, when written at the beginning or in the middle of a word, are exactly the same shape and it’s only the dots that differentiate them.

However, for the first two hundred years of Islam—easily encompassing the period when verses were being written down and the Qur’an compiled—dotting was scarcely used (see the above illustration for an example of the Qur’an in undotted Arabic), and it was even later that a system of writing vowels was perfected.

The absence of dots and vowels meant that reading was a matter of trial and error. That uncertainty, together with the vagaries of memory, gave rise to thousands of variations of individual verses, and even alternative Qur’ans, in the early years of Islam. To restore order, the third caliph ordered the production of a standard text and the destruction of all other texts.

What chance now of that standard text being a perfect copy of its heavenly twin? In fact, the Arabic Qur’an as it exists today is described by scholars as disordered and incoherent. It uses non-Arabic words; it has numerous grammatical errors; it contains passages that have been interpolated, others that have been revised and some that are out of context and must have been transposed; and, on average, one sentence in five is incomprehensible.

Far from being the perfect word of Allah as revealed to Mohammed, the Qur’an bears every sign of human frailty. As Professor R Stephen Humphreys said:

Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless.