On Comparing Religious Texts ...

In the Name of Allah; Most-Merciful, Most-Compassionate.

On occassion various orientalists, non-Muslim academics and people in general wish to compare the history of religious texts. It is valuable and interesting to glean insight from the works of Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami on this topic (specifically his text The History of the Qur'anic Text).

For example, orientalists claim that the Qur'an is suspect to error due to a possibility of delay of written recording. Firstly, our scholars have clearly refuted these claims and have proven that the Qur'an was written during the time of Prophethood. However, taking that claim at face value (which is that 15 years past before the codification of the Qur'an) it is interesting to offer a comparison to other religious texts so as to contextualize these claims. For example, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible comes from the 11th century and the earliest Greek manuscripts of the gospels were written around the 10th century. Literally hundreds of years had passed; this may shock some, so let us give futher details for your own verification purposes: Regarding the Greek gospels Metzger (1992) states that the earliest complete versions we have were written by a monk named Michael in 949 AD, which is currently held in the Vatican library. Regarding the oldest Hebrew Bible, some say it to be the Aleppo Codex, however this is an incomplete version, and in fact it is the Leningrad Codex dated to 1008 CE.

One sad reality of the academic field of Islamic studies, here I am speaking about academia in the typical secular University setting, is that claims which have been clearly refuted and clarified continued to be spread and shared as if they were truth. Professor Wensinck's position that aspects of Islam were adopted after Muslims met Christians, is clearly inconsistent and without factual proof. Goldziher's argument regarding variations in qira'at neglects taking into account the hundreds of instances whereby his theory fails altogether. Andrew Rippin, and others, continue to push forward ideas of relativism and call into suspect the history of Islamic texts, without the context of Islamic scholarship that pertain to these issues - because over the centuries and generations these issues have been clarified and expounded upon. Even to the extent that completely false claims have been attributed to Muslim scholars in an effort to appear truthful - one such example is that of the early manuscripts of the Qur'an from Yemen, which are said to contain different words, however the researcher in Yemen has himself stated clearly that this is not the case. Yet, these ideas continue to be passed around as if they contain some portion of validity.

One final note is that often non-Muslim academics writing and speaking about Islam are not interested to hear what Muslim scholars have to say. For example, Professor C.E. Bosworth was asked why Muslim scholars were not asked to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Islam - he said it was a work by the Western pen for the Western people. Time and time again we see such people refering to non-Muslim sources and neglecting to acknowledge the lengthly and detailed discourse that exists within Islamic scholarship.

May Allah guide us all.



Metzger, B.M., 1992. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd Ed., Oxford University Press, p. 56.