Saudi Press: 'We Need to Change the Qur'an'
‘We need to change the Qur’an’! Not quite the kind of headline that you would expect in the Saudi press, but this was exactly the message of two relatively recent articles that appeared in the Kingdom.
The first was published by journalist Ahmed Hashem in ‘Saudi Opinions’ on the 10th of January 2020. Hashem states that there have been huge numbers of copyist errors since the text of the Qur’an was supposedly fixed for all time under Caliph Uthman Bin Affan (ruled 644-656).
Hashem lists as many as 2,500 errors that occur in the Qur’an that Muslims read today, citing many concrete examples. He, therefore, urges the Saudi authorities to act in order to: “…make the text more readable for present day Muslims and more linguistically correct.”
This rather startling admission that there are fundamental issues with the reliability of the Qur’anic text was followed by an article published on 20 July 2020 on the Saudi website Elaph, written by Iraqi Kurdish researcher Jarji Gulizada. In it he echoes Hashem’s call that fundamental changes should be made to the Qur’anic text because in its present form: “…it is not suitable for the Islamic nation in the modern world, and especially for non-Arab Muslims.”
The articles caused a major furore across the Arab world, particularly because they threw a searchlight on an issue that is rarely addressed in the Muslim world: Namely that serious questions can be asked about the process through which the Qur’an was written down, preserved and transmitted.
At the very least it should tell us that the cosy certainties that the Qur’an has ‘never been changed, never been altered’ (words used in an ad on the London Underground recently) are very far of the mark.
For much more about the Qur’an’s obscure origins, please see my book ‘The Mecca Mystery - Probing the Black Hole at the Heart of Muslim History’
Kind regards,
Peter
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