The compilation of the Qur'an was clearly a very human process involving trial and error, educated guesses, faulty memories, fallible opinions, disagreements, mistakes, ignorance, and bad decisions.
And we can't forget, of course, the pile of manuscripts reduced to ashes by Uthman in his desperate attempt to destroy all evidence that the Qur'an hadn't been perfectly preserved. The early Muslim community left modern Muslims with a huge mess to clean up if they want to cling to the false belief that the Qur'an was perfectly preserved.
Will you believed the same Companions and a wife of Mohammad that are said to have memorized and preserved the Quran also tell us that Surahs (Chapters) of the Quran were lost as well as hundreds of verses from chapters we have, that even Mohammad forgot some verses of the Quran?
Narrated Aisha: The Prophet heard a man reciting the Qur'an in the mosque and said, "May Allah bestow His Mercy on him, as he has reminded me of such-and-such verses of such a Surah." (Sahih al-Bukhari: vol. 6, bk. 61, no. 556)
Narrated Abdullah ibn Mas'ud: ... (Muhammad said) I am only a human being and I forget just as
you do; so when I forget, remind me ...
(Sunan Abu Dawud: bk. 3, no. 1015; also Sahih al-Bukhari: vol. 1, bk. 8, no. 394).
Ibn Abi Maryam related to us from Ibn Luhai'a from Abu'l-Aswad from Urwa b. az-Zubair from A'isha who said, "Surat al-Ahzab (xxxiii) used to be recited in the time of the Prophet with two hundred verses, but when Uthman wrote out the codices he was unable to procure more of it than there is in it today" and It is reported from Ismail ibn Ibrahim from Ayyub from Naafi from Ibn Umar who said: "Let none of you say 'I have acquired the whole of the Qur'an'. How does he know what all of it is when much of the Qur'an has disappeared?
Many of the passages of the Quran that were sent down were known by those who died on the day of Yamama, they were not known by those who survived them, nor were they written down, nor had Abu Bakr, Umar, or Uthman by that time collected the Quran, nor were they found with even one person after them.
Hadith Ibn Abu Dawud, Kitab al-Masalif, p23. We've seen that early Qur'anic codices contained a different number of chapters from the Qur'an we have today, and that there were numerous other differences among these early Qur'ans, including spelling differences, different words, different phrases, etc.
According to both Aisha (the Mother of the Faithful) and Ubayy ibn Ka'b (Muhammad's greatest reciter), approximately two-thirds of Surah 33 went missing. Aisha even notes that the Verse of Suckling and the verse of stoning was eaten by a goat. Ibn Umar declares that Muslims shouldn't claim that they know the Qur'an, since much of it has been lost. And yet Muslims maintain, in spite of the evidence, that the Qur'an has been perfectly preserved.
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