The Glorious Qur'an 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 (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 Qur'an 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 Qur'an 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 Qur'an. 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 (PBUH) 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 Qur'an,
every syllable of it, by heart.
c) All the illustrious Companions, without an exception, had
memorized at least some portions of the Holy Qur'an, 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 Qur'an and satisfied themselves as to the
purity of their record by reading it out to the Prophet (p).
Methods of preservation of the Qur'an after the demise of the
Prophet
It is an incontrovertible historical truth that the text of the
Glorious Qur'an 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 Hadhrat Abu
Bakr, assembled all the Huffaz (those who have committed the Qur'an
to memory), and the written records of the Glorious Qur'an and with
their help had the whole text written in Book form. In the time of
Hadhrat '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 Qur'an available all over the world today.
And how can one expect any discrepancy, when there have existed
several million "Huffaz" in every generation since the time of the
Holy Prophet (PBUH) and in our own time? Should anyone alter a
syllable of the original text of the Qur'an, 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 Qur'an 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 Qur'an 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 Qur'an
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 (saw)
Seerah", given by Syed Abul 'Aala Muadoodi. He compares the history
and authenticity of three scriptures, Torah, Injeel and Quran.)
