A Miracle to last till the End
The Methodology
The Glorious Quran is the pure word of God. There is not a single
word therein that is not divine. Divine verses therefore, have not been
mingled with the history of the Arabs or the events that occurred during
the period its revelation.
The Book has been handed down to our age in its complete and original
form since the time of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him (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 Quran 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 Quran 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 time
Besides, those of the Companions who were literate used to keep a
written record of several portions of the Glorious Quran. 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 (p) 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 Quran, every syllable of it, by heart.
c) All the illustrious Companions, without an exception, had
memorized at least some portions of the Holy Quran, 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 Quran and satisfied themselves as to the
purity of their record by reading it out to the Prophet (p).
Methods of preservation of the Quran after the demise of the Prophet
It is an incontrovertible historical truth that the text of the
Glorious Quran 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 Quran to memory),
and the written records of the Glorious Quran 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 Quran 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 (p) and in our own time. Should anyone alter a syllable of
the original text of the Quran, 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 Quran 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
Quran 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 Quran 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.
(This is taken from part of a speech “Message of Prophet’s (p)
Seerah”, given by Syed Abul A’ala Mawdudi. He compares the history and
authenticity of three scriptures, Torah, Injeel and Quran
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