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Questioning The Transmission Of Quran Through Ijmah And Tawatur
If the Quran had been memorized by thousands of huffaz even while the Prophet was still alive, why did the companions panic upon the death of merely seventy of the huffaz?!!?
When they decided to compile the Quran in a book form, why couldn’t they just sit together, hundreds of the best of the huffaz, and just write it down from their memories. Afterall, the Quran was a orally transmitted book!! Why was a small group led by Zaid ibn Thabit entrusted with the collection of all the written materials in circulation?!!? This should have been a secondary step to make the process more robust, instead of being the primary method!!Therefore, it seems unlikely that the narrative of mass transmission is true. The Quran, like the ahadith, was transmitted in bits and pieces only. Some people remembered some parts. Some had parts of it written with them. While many (not thousands) had it fully memorized.
And that fits with the generally agreed upon traditionalist account too. As the traditionalist account traces chains of transmission of the various ‘qiraat’/readings of the Quran just like they do for the ahadith. As otherwise, if there were thousands of people in each stage/generation of transmission from the very beginning, why would there be a need to check reliability through analysis of individual chains of transmission?!!? Australia exists. It’s mass transmitted. Millions of people saying the same. Why and how do you verify the chains of such a transmission?!!? En masse transmission, by definition, is beyond the scrutiny of individual chains!!
And it is because of this underlying problem with the traditionalist account that it doesn’t fully establish the perfect preservation narrative, nor does it establish tawatur from the very beginning, that the Ghamidian narrative ignores the ahadith that describe the process of the compilation of the Quran! Arguing that the ahadith being a ‘dhanni’ source cannot be used to know about the preservation of the Quran which is ‘qatii’, therefore preferring the day-to-day observation based common sense picture of Quran transmission mentioned above!
But this approach is merely theoretically appealing and satisfying only to a believer. To an outsider/seeker, it makes no sense as the only way it works is if the historical records (the ahadith) are ignored or problematized! But why would a seeker do so? If mainstream history itself is ignored, how do we then verify the claim of tawatur?!!? There’s a serious deadlock.
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Questioning The Transmission Of Quran Through Ijmah And Tawatur
updated 4 days, 16 hours ago
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The famous story of the Quran’s compilation after the Battle of Yamama has been narrated by only one person: Shahabuddeen Zuhri. This narration is dubious, like many of his other narrations. Against these dubious narrations, we have a historical fact of the mass transmission of the Quran from generation to generations. It is a self-evident fact, and its result is what we witness now: that all Muslims are agreed upon the one Quran, and there is no difference reported in history on Qirat e Amma.
The differences in variant readings were quoted in the books of Ahadith and tafseer, but none of those variant readings could ever attain the status of Qirat e Amma.
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