Claim that the Qur’an is not preserved
Some of them asked: How can the Qur’an be preserved by God and has not changed since the time of the mission until now, when we see that it has been added by dots and diacritics? Isn't this a change? Or does it not contradict the Almighty’s saying : { Indeed, it is We who have sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will preserve it } ( Al-Hijr: 9).
We respond to the question: Why did God Almighty send the messengers?! Why did I post books?
This was God’s care for His creation, His kindness to them, and so that His account would be for them - so that the doer of good and the wrongdoer would not be equal - and His reward to them for their actions was pure divine justice in accordance with the Almighty’s saying : { so that people might not have any argument against God after the Messengers } ( An-Nisa: 165 ) . Before the message of Muhammad, the task of preserving the books of messages and laws was entrusted to the nations of these messages as part of their assignment and a test of their integrity in this assignment. The Almighty said: “ Indeed, We have sent down the Torah, in which is guidance and light, by which the prophets judge those who have submitted to those They, the rabbis and the rabbis, were guided by what they had memorized of the Book of God, and they were There are witnesses over Him ( Al-Ma'idah: 44 ) .
But they neglected to fulfill the obligation of preserving the Books by forgetting at times and by distorting and concealing them at other times. The Almighty said: ( And because they broke their covenant, We cursed them and made their hearts hard; Whoever created it, and they forgot a portion of what they were reminded of. ( Al-Ma’idah: 13 ) And when the distortion occurs Or forgetting these books, God Almighty sends a new messenger with a new book . But when God Almighty wanted to seal the prophecies and messages with the prophecy of our Master Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, and his message, it was necessary for the book of the final Sharia to be preserved by a memorizer who could not be neglected, who would not be subject to distortion, and who would not be allowed to forget. That is, it was necessary to preserve the eternally infallible book. God Almighty and Immortal . Therefore, the task of preserving the final revelation - the Noble Qur’an - in the final message was transferred to God Almighty, who never fails to preserve it, after this task was entrusted to people before that. The divine promise was confirmed in the Almighty’s saying : “ Indeed, it is We who have sent down the Reminder, and indeed, we will be its guardian ” ( Al-Hijr: 9 ). Hence, God prepared for the writing of the Noble Qur’an from the writers of the revelation that had not been prepared for a previous book, and He made its compilation a divine promise and a divine fulfillment in the Almighty’s saying : { Do not move your tongue with it to hasten with it. * Indeed, it is upon Us to collect it and recite it. * So when it is recited Oh, so follow His Qur’an * Then it is upon Us to explain it . ( Resurrection: 16-19 ) ; This is so that God’s argument against His servants will continue, and His reckoning with them will be pure justice, just as the Lord Almighty promised that He would leave it as an inheritance to those whom He chose among His servants after He revealed it to the Chosen One in His saying, Almighty and Majestic : {
And that we have revealed to you from the book, it is the truth, sincerely, for what is between his hands, for God with his servants is for a sacrifice of visionary. They are unjust to itself, and some of them are confronted, and some of them are preceded by goodness with the permission of God, that is the best of the great : 31 ).
We draw attention to the fact that one of the characteristics of the Qur’an is that it is a dear book, protected from tampering with or in it, and that it refrains from being invalidated. Falsehood does not come to it from before it or behind it under any circumstances . For a Mighty Book: Falsehood does not come to it from before it nor from behind it - a revelation from the All-Wise, the Praiseworthy ” ( Fussilat: 41-42 ).
Among the attributes of the Qur’an is that it is a book about the Most Wise, above the rhetoric of those who arrogantly say, whether human beings or times or ages. The Almighty said : { Indeed, We have made it an Arabic Qur’an that you may understand. And indeed, in the Mother of the Book with Us, Most High is All-Wise. } ( Al-Zukhruf: 3-4 ).
Among the characteristics of the Qur’an is that it is a hidden book, that is, protected and preserved from play, tampering, and distortion. The Almighty said : “ Indeed, it is a noble Qur’an * in a hidden book ” ( Al-Waqi’ah: 77-78 ).
History has confirmed this divine preservation of this glorious Qur’an, and whoever reads the history of the Torah - even that which was written by Jewish scholars - knows what distortions afflicted it after its revelation, and how its books were rewritten in the manner written and made by “ Ezra ” and other rabbis, in a complete form. With distortion, and whoever contemplates the contradictions of the Gospels, even the famous ones , and the fundamental differences between them and the not-so-famous ones, such as: the Gospels of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls , the Dead Sea Scrolls , and the Gospel of Barnabas , knows what happened to the Gospel a few years after Christ’s mission to it. peace . But here is the Noble Qur’an as the Faithful Spirit sent it down to the heart of the truthful and faithful one. Not a letter, pattern, movement, tone, or elongation has changed in it. More than fourteen centuries have passed since its revelation, during which the Islamic nation went through stages of decline and decline, and Islamic memory was lost. Millions of manuscripts were destroyed by the invasions of tyrants, and doctrines and philosophies disappeared. The Holy Qur’an remained dear and invincible, preserved by the protection of God, the Best of preservers. History, too, has become a witness to this divine preservation of the Qur’an . As for the dots and diacritics, it is not a change in the Qur’an or the Qur’an, but rather it is part of the Sunnah of development that has come to languages, and we should not if we get to know this Sunnah . It is known that the Uthmani Qur’an was not punctuated, so that the word could remain possible to be read in all possible ways of readings in it .
The famous dotting of the Qur’an did not occur except during the reign of Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan, who saw that the scope of Islam had expanded, and the Arabs mixed with the non-Arabs, and the foreignness almost affected the integrity of the language. Confusion and problems in reading the Qur’an began to afflict the people, to the point that it became difficult for many of them to be guided to distinguish between The letters and words of the Qur’an are not lexicalized .
There, a wise man decided to come to the rescue, so he ordered Al-Hajjaj bin Yusuf Al-Thaqafi to take care of this important matter, and Al-Hajjaj assigned two men to deal with this problem, namely: Nasr bin Asim Al-Laithi, and Yahya bin Yamar Al-Adwani, and both of them were competent and capable of what they were assigned to do, as they combined knowledge and work. And righteousness and piety, and experience with the origins of the language and aspects of readings, and they participated in discipleship and learning from Abu Al-Aswad Al-Du’ali .
May God have mercy on these two sheikhs, for they succeeded in this attempt. They digitized the Holy Qur’an for the first time, dotted all its similar letters, and committed themselves not to have more than three dots in any letter. This became widespread among people later, and it had a great impact in removing confusion and confusion from the Holy Qur’an .
As for the takilish : it is the marking of dhammah, kasra, fatha, and taskin .
What is agreed upon among historians is that the Arabs were not aware of the shape of letters and words. This is because the integrity of their language and the purity of their manners spared them the need for formality .
But when new nations entered Islam, including the non-Arabs who did not know Arabic, the non-Arabs began to misrepresent the language of the Qur’an. It was even said that Abu Al-Aswad Al-Du’ali heard a reciter reciting the words of the Almighty : “ Indeed, God is free from the polytheists, and His Messenger ” ( Al-Tawbah: 3 ) , so he recited it with a preposition. The L is from the word “ His Messenger . ” This hideous melody frightened Abu Al-Aswad, and he said: Glory be to God that he should disavow His Messenger! Then he went to Ziyad, the governor of Basra, and said to him: I have answered what you asked. Ziyad had asked him to give people signs by which they would know the Book of God, but he was slow in answering until this incident terrified him. His effort ended with him making the fatha sign a dot above the letter, making the kasra sign a dot below it, making the dhammah sign a dot between the parts of the letter, and making the sukun sign two dots. People began to follow his method, and then time passed and they began to increase and innovate, until they gave the stressed letter a sign like the bow. . And other diacritics .
After this presentation that we saw, we found that the rational proof related to the seal of the divine message and the seal of revelation makes memorizing the Qur’an in order to establish the argument a rational necessity, and what happened in terms of punctuation and formation was nothing but a year of development of the language imposed by circumstances in the opposite of what they wanted and it became one of the ways in which God preserved His wise Book. .
If dots and formation are a means of clarification; This leads to memorizing the Qur’an, but the basis for memorizing the Book of God is oral reception, and the readers of the Holy Qur’an continue to receive it from the sheikhs, not from the Qur’an. The Book of God is still transmitted from generation to generation through oral reception, and no one is said to have memorized the Qur’an unless he He takes it from a sheikh whom he trusts in this knowledge 1 .
The Qur’an - and it has been proven historically - is the truest and most accurate document preserved in history, and all forms of memorization demonstrate its retention and preservation: from writing in newspapers, memorizing it in the chests, constant recitation day and night in prayer and devotion to it, and reviewing its verses in knowing the rulings of the Sharia, to... The People of the Book and the infidels look at it to make a mistake and find a stumbling block. The Qur’an - and this is its case - bears conclusive testimony proven in multiple verses of it and scattered in it, with the challenge, then with the inability to carry out this challenge. This is a fact that no one disputes, nor does any of the opponents of Islam, or even those who are most hostile to it, deny it. Because it was too big to be denied, and too obvious to be hidden or confused by controversy or sophistry ! 2 .
• Then the skeptics claimed - in contrast to the previous suspicion - that the Qur’an’s absence of dots and diacritics is the reason for the differences in Qur’anic readings .
This lie, which claims that the Qur’anic readings resulted from the specificity of the Arabic calligraphy, has its origin in the Hungarian orientalist Goldziher, and the summary of his claim - which was followed by many - is that the absence of the Qur’an drawing from dots and accents led to the Qur’an being read in different ways, and he gave examples of this in a number of The verses and the readings in them, such as the Almighty’s saying : { And it is He who sends the winds as good news before His mercy } ( Al-A’raf: 57 ).
The word { good tidings } in the verse has eight readings : good tidings - good tidings - good tidings - good tidings, good tidings - good tidings - good tidings - good tidings 3 .
What Goldziher and those who followed him on this claim argued was a gross error, and the following is sufficient to refute it : • That learning the Qur’an during the time of the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace - and even to this day - is based on oral reception, and that the writing of the Qur’an was limited to a narrow group of companions. They are the writers of revelation, and when the Qur’an was compiled during the reign of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, may God be pleased with him, it was not content with what was written, but rather the Qur’an was compiled from the issuances of the memorizers; It has been famous for scholars to say: Do not learn the Qur’an from a Qur’an, and do not learn from a Qur’an. This means that oral communication was the basis for receiving the Qur’an and learning all other sciences, and this rule is still the one applied in memorizing the Qur’an to this day .
The different readings are not an accident, but rather they are a Sunnah that Muslims received from the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, and they all come from the niche of the seven letters. It has been proven in Sahih Al-Bukhari and Muslim from the hadith of Ibn Abbas, may God be pleased with them, that the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, said: “Gabriel taught me to read it.” One letter, and I kept adding more until it reached seven letters. ” 4 .
It was reported on the authority of Omar bin Al-Khattab, may God be pleased with him, that he said: “I heard Hisham bin Hakim bin Hazzam reciting Surat Al-Furqan during the life of the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, so I listened to his recitation, and behold, he was right He recited many letters that the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, did not recite to me, so his bracelets were lost. During prayer, I waited patiently until he said salaam, so I wrapped his cloak around him and said: Who recited to you this surah that I heard you reciting? He said: The Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, recited it to me To me, may God bless him and grant him peace. I said: You lied, for the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, taught it to me in a way other than what I had read, so I set off with him to lead him to The Messenger of God, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, and I said: I heard this man reciting Surah Al-Furqan in letters that you did not recite. So the Messenger of God, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, said: Send him to recite Oh Hisham, he recited to him the recitation that I heard him reciting, and the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, said: Likewise. It was revealed. Then he said: Read, O Omar. So I read the reading he taught me. The Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, said: “This is how it was revealed. Indeed, this Qur’an was revealed in seven letters, so recite as much of it as you can.” 5. His comment, may God bless him and grant him peace , on Hisham’s reading, saying : “ This is how it was revealed , ” and according to Omar’s reading of his saying, may God bless him and grant him peace: “Thus was revealed” is conclusive evidence that the Qur’anic readings are a revelation from God Almighty, and are not due to approval from humans or authority from them. It is not possible for the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, to change anything in the Qur’an. God Almighty said : { And when Our verses are recited to them as clear signs. Those who do not hope for the meeting with Us say: Bring a Qur’an other than this or change it. Say: It is not for me to change it of my own accord. I follow only what is revealed to me I fear, if I disobey my Lord, the punishment of a great day ” ( Yunus: 15 ).
• That when Othman, may God be pleased with him, sent copies of the Imam’s Qur’an to different countries, the people of each country adhered to the readings they had received from the Companions, may God be pleased with them, and abandoned the readings that contradicted what they had learned, even if the absence of the drawing of the Uthmani Qur’an from dots and diacritics was the reason. The origin of the readings - as they claim - is when we found readings outside the form of the Qur’an, but the reality is that there are readings that some of the Companions recited that contradict the form of the Qur’an. However, the consensus on the Uthmanic Qur’an made those aspects like abrogated ones, and what Othman did, may God be pleased with him, was not of his own accord. Only about twelve thousand of the Companions and Followers, may God be pleased with them, agreed with him, and reading in a manner contrary to that became an innovation and an error according to all scholars, even if it was authenticated and narrated, as the author of “ Al-Ibanah ” says.
Then the scholars set conditions for correct reading, which are :
- That its chain of transmission is authentic to the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace .
- It must agree with the Ottoman drawing .
- That it agrees with Arabic, even if only in a way .
Therefore, the drawing of the Qur’an was not the reason for the existence of the readings; On the contrary, drawing the Qur’an was a means of preserving the differences that already existed. Because the frequent readings - as we have explained - are all a followed Sunnah, and not an invented innovation, and drawing does not create the reading, but rather embodies it .
This principle has been established among reciters and many scholars have stated it, including what was confirmed by Ibn al-Anbari when he spoke about the readings and permissible forms in the Arabic language, where his saying was often repeated: Such a thing is permissible in Arabic, and it is not permissible for anyone to recite it in it. Because he has no imam 6
.
Similar to this is what Al-Zajjaj said during his discussion of an abnormal reading in the Almighty’s saying : “ Indeed, those who disbelieved and died while they were disbelievers - upon them is the curse of God, and of the angels, and of mankind ” ( Al-Baqarah: 161 ) , where Al-Hasan recited : “ All together . ” Al-Zajjaj said: This is good in Arabic, except I hate him; Because reading should only be obligatory in Sunnah 7
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Many scholars of language and Qur’anic sciences have stipulated this principle: that reading is narration, not analogy, and reading is taken by receiving orally .
The root of the mistake that Goldziher and those who followed his doctrine fell into was their assumption that the readings differed according to the different readers, and the truth is that the frequent readings are all tawqifi, that is, they were taken from the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, just as he received them from Gabriel, peace be upon him, from the Lord of Glory, glory be to Him 8 .
• Also, the fact that the Qur’an was free of dots and diacritics had a great benefit, which was making it easier for the servants of God. Where everyone was able to read in his own language, this one opens the present tense ta’ and the other breaks it, and this one inclines and the other does not incline; If every person were assigned to read in a language other than his own, this would be an obligation that would be impossible9 .
A final word :
The case, as stated by the person who made this suspicion, is upside down. فليس خُلُوُّ المصحف العثمانى من النقط والإعجام هو سبب اختلاف القراءات، بل كان خُلُوُّ المصحف من النقط والإعجام لاستيعاب القراءات كُلِّها، فمثلاً قول الله عز وجل : { وَهُوَ الَّذِي يُرْسِلُ الرِّيَاحَ بُشْراً بَيْنَ يَدَيْ رَحْمَتِه ِ } ( الأعراف:57 ) ، كُتِبت كلمة ( بشرا ) Without diacritics or dots in order to comprehend the eight readings mentioned. If I had written semicoloned and dotted, I would not have understood all of these readings .
Therefore, punctuation, diacritics, and other aspects of written control are only a means of assistance in this great task, which is memorizing the Holy Qur’an. This also applies to all other technological means, such as recordings, computer cylinders, etc.
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(1) See: Al-Burhan 1/293 , Manahil Al-Irfan 1/412 .
(2) The Miracle of the Qur’an, Abdul Karim Al-Khatib, p. 203 .
(3) See: Al-Kashshaf 2 /83-84, Al-Bahr Al-Muhit 4/316 , Dictionary of Readings, d. Abdul Latif Al-Khatib 3/76 .
(4) Fath al-Bari : 2241 , 2980 , 4607 , 4608 , 4653 , Muslim with Sharh al-Nawawi : 1354 , 1355 .
(5) The previous places in the two Sahih books .
(6) Clarification of stopping and starting, Ibn Al-Anbari 1/321 .
(7) The parsing of the Qur’an and its meanings, Al-Zajjaj 1/465 .
(8) Drawing the Qur’an: A Historical Linguistic Study, Ghanim Qadduri Al-Hamad, National Committee for Celebrating the Printing Presses of the Fifteenth Century AH: Baghdad, pp. 717-724 ( adapted and concise ) , and see: The History of the Qur’an, Dr. Abdel Sabour Shaheen, p. 7, Qur’anic Readings, p. 210, Dr. Abdel Sabour Shaheen, drawing the Qur’an and using it in readings, Dr. Abdel Fattah Ismail Shalabi. Dr. Abdel Fattah wrote this book as a basis for discussing “ Goldziher ” and responding to him. Likewise, Sheikh Abdel Fattah Al-Qadi wrote his book “ Readings in the View of Orientalists and Atheists ” for this purpose - see the footnotes of the previous reference, pp. 719-720.
(9) See Manahil Al-Irfan 1/ 260-265 .
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