robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

for them to brandish. Nor is it even certain that they had one for many years after that. Recall that the
Qur'an makes no appearance in the surviving documents and artifacts of the Muslims until around six
decades after the Arab conquests began.
And when the Qur'an finally emerged, it may have been considerably different from the Qur'an that
Muslims revere today.
Textual Variants and Uncertainty in the Qur'an
The standard Qur'anic text that circulates today is supposed to be based on the version Uthman
distributed, but there is no direct evidence of that. Only fragments of Qur'an manuscripts date back to the
seventh century. And these fragments mostly do not contain diacritical marks, so it is impossible to
confirm that they were written as the Qur'an in the first place, rather than as some other document that was
adapted as part of the Qur'an. 13 There is also no telling what textual alterations might have been made
before the time of the earliest surviving manuscripts. 14 Historian John Gilchrist notes that the “Samarqand
and Topkapi codices are obviously two of the oldest sizeable manuscripts of the Qur'an surviving, but
their origin cannot be taken back earlier than the second century of Islam. It must be concluded that no
such manuscripts of an earlier date have survived. The oldest manuscripts of the Qur'an still in existence
date from not earlier than about one hundred years after Muhammad's death.” 15 No complete extant copy
of the Qur'an dates from the first century of the Arabian conquests. 16
Beyond the fact that the text Uthman supposedly collected does not survive, there is also no mention of
the Qur'an as such in the available literature until early in the eighth century. What's more, although
Uthman supposedly burned other versions of the Qur'an, some variant readings in the Qur'anic text have
survived to the present day. To be sure, none of the extant variants is large, but even the smallest is enough
to debunk the Islamic apologetic argument that Fethullah Gülen articulated, that the Qur'anic text is
reliable because it remains “unaltered, unedited, not tampered with in any way, since the time of its
revelation.”
The variants begin with the Qur'an's very first sura, the Fatiha, or “Opening.” This sura is the most
common prayer in Islam; a pious Muslim who prays five times a day will repeat it seventeen times daily.
As a prayer and a liturgical text, it may have been added to the Qur'an later. According to hadiths,
Abdullah ibn Masud, one of Muhammad's companions, did not have this sura in his version of the Qur'an,
and other early Islamic authorities expressed reservations about its inclusion also. 17 The sura does not fit
in with the rest of the Qur'an, in that it is in the voice of the believer offering prayer and praise to Allah,
not Allah addressing Muhammad. Islamic orthodoxy has it that Allah is the speaker in every part of the
Qur'an; so with the Fatiha, the believer must accept that the deity is explaining how he should be prayed
to, without explaining directly that that is what he is doing.
Not only was there early uncertainty about whether the Fatiha should be in the Qur'an, but there are
also variations in its text. One version of the prayer that circulates among the Shiites says to Allah, “Thou
dost direct to the path of the Upright One,” rather than the canonical “Show us the Straight Path” (1:6).
The historian Arthur Jeffery found in Cairo a manual of Islamic law of the Shafii school that contained the