FINAL CONCLUSIONS

When all is said and done

What was our remit today?

What did we look to find?

• We were not interested in an ‘uncreated’ or a ‘sent down’ Qur’an
• We wanted to find an archaic, ‘complete’, and ‘unchanged’ Qur’an
• Thus, we looked for:
  • 1 Qur’anic Manuscript
  • Dated from the mid-7^th century (652 AD)
  • Complete (i.e. all 114 Surahs)
  • Unchanged (exactly like the 1924 ‘Hafs’ Qur’an used today)

Where did we investigate?

The 5 areas we observed

[A] What do modern Muslim Leaders Claim?

[B] What did early Muslim Scholars Say?

[C] Historical Anachronisms

[D] Source Criticism

[E] The 2 compilations of the Qur’an

[F] The 6 Earliest Qur’anic Manuscripts

[G] The 2 Layers of the Sana’a Palimpsest

[H] The 4 Carbon Dating Lab Reports

[I] The late Diacritical Variants (i.e. the 31 different Arabic Qur’ans)

[J] The early Consonantal Variants

[K] The History of the 1924 Hafs canonized text

What did we find?...

[A] What do modern Muslim Leaders Claim?

The modern Muslims make absurd claims for their Qur’an

• It is unaltered
• Unedited
• Untampered
• In its original form
• Not a single letter, nor a diacritical dot has changed
• So that today’s Qur’an is identical with the Qur’an of 1300 years ago…

[B] What did early Muslim scholars say?

They would never say what Muslims are claiming today

• They were all agreed that parts of the Qur’an was:
• Lost, Disappeared, Forgotten, Cancelled, Missing, Overlooked, Changed, Modified, Substituted, and even Eaten by Sheep!
• They never considered the earliest Qur’an to be complete
• nor unchanged
• But a book like any other…written, edited, and then changed by men.

[C] Historical Anachronisms

The Qur’an is riddled with historical mistakes

• It introduces a SAMARITAN, a MOSQUE, COATS OF CHAIN MAIL, and even CRUCIFIXIONS too early.
• Then it denies the historicity of JESUS’ CRUCIFIXION, and gets the WRONG MARY.
• It confuses the QIBLA, the KA’ABA, PHARAOH, the TOWER OF BABEL, & even HAMAN; and erroneously makes ALEXANDER THE GREAT AN AMAZING ENGINEER; while placing FUTURISTIC COINS in the wrong era.
• This suggests that it was written by finite and failed men, and not by an infinite God.

[D] Source Criticism

Looks like much of the Qur’an was borrowed from the wrong sources…

• Muslims claim that the Qur’an was written on eternal tablets in heaven
• Yet, we now find that much of it was borrowed from previous 2^ND to 5^th century Jewish apocryphal writings
• They were written long after the Bible was canonized, proving not only that the Qur’an is not eternal, but that it owes much of its content to the wrong material
• These apocryphal writings were all rejected by the earlier Jews and Christians, not only because they were so late, but because they contradicted the Bible itself

[E] The 2 Compilations of the Qur’an

1^st = Abu Bakr (632-634 AD), and 2^nd = Uthman (652 AD)

• According to Islam God chose a man who was illiterate, and language which was unreadable, to reveal his last and greatest revelation
• Though the Qur’an is supposedly eternal and complete, the early Muslims needed to compile two different versions of the Qur’an, just 20 years apart
• Once they compiled the final canonical version (the Uthmanic recension), they then burned all the other copies which did not agree, destroying any hope of finding the original
• They then sent 9 copies of the canonized text to 9 cities, yet we can’t find even one today

[F] The 6 Earliest Manuscripts of the Qur’an

Topkapı, Samarkand, Ma’il, Petropolitanus, Husseini, Sana’a

• According to both Muslim and Secular Qur’anic scholars there are 6 early Qur’anic Manuscripts extant today, all of which were supposedly written in the time of Uthman
• Yet, none of them are dated to the mid-7^thcentury (i.e. Uthman = 652 AD)
  • They all date to the 8^th or even 9^th centuries
  • None of them are complete
  • None of them agree completely with each other
  • None of them agree completely with the 1924 ‘Hafs’ canonical Text used today

[G] The 2 Layers of the Sana’a Palimpsest

Lower = 671 AD – 705 AD, Upper = 705 AD….

• The Sana’a Palimpsest (both the Lower and Upper texts) are different than the Qur’an (the 1924 Cairene ‘Hafs’ canonical text) which we are using today
  • The lower text (with only 63 verses) has 70 variants which do not correspond to any known later (9^th century) textual variant school
  • The upper text has further variants
  • Conclusion: The Lower Text seems to be a nascent Qur’anic script, which was then rubbed out, corrected, and then re-written over top, sometime between 671 AD and 705 AD

[H] The 4 Carbon Dating Lab Reports

4 laboratories (Lyon, Kiel, Zurich, Oxford) of the Sana’a Manuscript

• Since all four Sana’a A examples, dated at four separate laboratories, completely pre-date Muhammad, the Qur’an, and Islam, these must be earlier Arabic writings, from which the writers of the later Qur’an borrowed
• Since all the folios, including the Sana’a A, B, C, D, and the Birmingham folios (except for E) pre-date the Uthmanic recension (652 AD), they contradict the classical account, suggesting that we dare not trust that account to understand when the Qur’an was truly written
• Conclusion: Either we throw out the RC 14 dating as untrustworthy, or we throw out the much later 9^th century classical account of the Qur’an’s compilation…you decide

[I] The late Diacritical Variants

The 31 Different Arabic Qur’ans

• No-one seems to know how to define either the ‘Ahruf’ or the ‘Qira’at’ “readings”
  • Yet, everyone is absolutely sure that there were 7 ahrufs or Qira’ats before Uthman
  • And they are equally sure that they made no differences in the meaning of the text
  • Ahrufs or Qira’ats could not have existed after Uthman, since he standardized it in 652 AD
  • Yet, we have now found 31 different Qur’ans with over 59,766 differences between them
    • These differences not only change the meaning, but often, the theology as well
    • Conclusion: The Qur’an today was created in 1924, yet, attributed to a student from 796 AD (Haf), while disregarding over 36 others, though even his manuscript does not exist today

[J] The early Consonantal Variants

The 4,000 Consonantal Changes

• 1,000s of Insertions, Erasures, Coverings and Tapings
• All carried out long after the Manuscripts were completed
  • Possibly after 1924, so within the last 94 years
  • All done to standardize the text to conform to the canonical Hafs text

[K] The History of the 1924 Hafs Canonized Text

Created to standardize students High School tests

• Muslims are unaware that the Qur’an we have today (the Hafs text) was created in 1924 by a committee, led by Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Husayni al-Haddad, in Cairo, Egypt, in order to standardize high-school tests!
• They chose the Qira’at compilation written by a student named Hafs who died in 796 AD, a full 144 years after the Qur’an was supposedly created by the Caliph Uthman.
• This was then adopted by the Egyptian government in 1936 as their official text (known as the ‘Faruq Edition’)
• which was then canonized worldwide in 1985 by the Ibn Saud family in Saudi Arabia as the official text (known as the ‘Fahd Edition’), a mere 33 years ago
• Rather than critically compile a text derived from the earliest manuscript evidence available, they simply chose one student’s (Hafs) compilation, regardless of whether it matched those earliest manuscripts.

CONCLUSION

What does this prove?

• The 2 Compilations prove that men changed the Qur’an in its earliest period
• The 6 manuscripts prove that men created 6 different Qur’ans between the 8^th and 9^th centuries
• The 2 Layers of the Sana’a manuscript prove that men created a nascent Qur’an in the 7^th century
• The 4 Carbon dated Lab reports prove that men borrowed stories created long before the Qur’an
• The 31 Different Arabic Qur’ans prove that men even today still read a variety of Qur’ans
• The 4,000 Consonantal Variants prove that they are still changing and standardizing the text
• The 36 non-Hafs Qira’at Variants dumped into the Nile prove that when Muslims find problems with their Qur’an, they burn them, wash them, or sink them to destroy the evidence!

Thus, we can conclude

From what we have researched, and found, that:

• The Qur’an was not created by God at all
• The Qur’an was not sent down to Muhammad between 610 and 632 AD
• The Qur’an was not completed by Uthman in 652 AD
• The Qur’an was not un-changed in the last 1300 years
• The Qur’an was not finally compiled until 1924
• Thus, the Qur’an is a mere 94…no wait…33 years old!
• Many of us in this room are actually older than the Qur’an!

Yet, by Casting Doubt on the Qur’an

Our Muslim Friends can consider a Better Book

The Bible!