Oldest Quran pages dating back to the time of the Prophet found in UK

[Brown Skinned Savage]

You believe right from the start that Quran was never altered.
I don't understand the narrative your explaining.
I don't need to prove the Quran was altered. Muslims have to prove it wasn't.
All they have found is old parchments which have parts of today's Quran written on them.

The Islamic argument is about it being absolutely never altered.
Just because these parchments do not have contradictions with today. It can't speak for the rest.
Why don't they have the entirety of it then? Maybe they threw away rest away and it is anybody's guess why.

A book can change a little or a lot from first rough draft to final draft.

That's your assumption of what I believe ......but I actually use a predictive model analysis. If for the sake of argument what you said would have happened. It would have had arbitrary alterations where specific verses stay perfectly in tact. That would imply deliberate. The other case is deliberate alterations with one or two accidental precisions

the first case implies foreknowledge of people finding this fragment parchments. This would be effectively zero probability.In the second case would have slightly higher probability, but still very low.

You might be asking how do I even determine likelihood without any actual numbers?I'm using a Technique called Observational Interpolation. We've never seen a situation of something directly observed in case 1 so That is effectively 0 probability.

We've never seen situations like case 2 but, we have seen in large sets of information even in random iterations of altered data some information fidelity exists. This has been observed by computer simulations, but this is still very LOW Probability. depending on the size of the sample space It can go from very orders of magnitude of 10^-3 to 10^-9,

So what I am saying is based on LIKELIHOOD. This doesn't mean there's absolutely "NO"chance either event occurred or that even if the Qur'an remained in tact that it proves its divine origins.

It just means that it is UNLIKELY based on the evidence we have that it was altered, If I went from the assumption that the Qur'an is inalterable, then I would believe there's no possibility it was altered at all.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Finding old parts of the Quran doesn't mean that the rest of Quran wasn't altered.

Wrong. The most in depth analysis to date on the extant and old Quranic manuscripts was out of Leiden, Germany:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/130854520/The-codex-of-a-companion-of-the-Prophet-Benham-Sadeghi-Bergmann#

Contrary to your usual go to sites of Robert Spencer and AnsweringIslam.com which generally are the refuge of people like you and Khostai, academics of an honest tilt have a much more nuanced and balanced picture to paint regarding the ancient manuscripts. Their conclusions are against heterodoxy and toward the orthodox history based on the manuscripts themselves:


Their conclusion centers around the fact that the companion codex (the only example of which we have manuscript evidence of) helps construct a skeleton referred to as the Prophetic prototype (using similar analytic approaches to how Biblical scholars constructed Gospel Q)

"The Uthmanic Text preserves the Prophetic prototype better than C-1 (the companion codex)"

and

"The Prophetic prototype emerges as almost identical with the codex of Uthman."

They go on to write on page 411

"Alford Welch and Hossein Modaressi favor the idea that the suras were put in their final forms during the Prophet's lifetime. The study of C-1 has confirmed the latter position."

The authors refer to Michael Cook's confirmation of traditional Muslim accounts of the subject:

"It is not his (Cook) confirmation of some elements of the traditional account of the standard Quran that I wish to highlight here, noteworthy as it may be, but rather his demonstration that we can learn from the study of the literary sources"

The authors do a great job slamming Alba Fedeli for her prior paper in which she tries to insinuate a motive to Uthman's committee:

Refer to page 363 where they decimate her evidence based on her own reference for the claim that the word dinihi was inserted into the manuscript by pointing out that the prior manuscript has the letter nun clearly in the scripto inferior she is referencing.

These authors followed up in 2012 on their superb 2010 study with another excellent article that even called out the current huckster and reference for numerous sanaa fragment articles (Gerard Puin) for providing manuscript info and pictures to missionaries and what not but not to these academic authors who were steadily and slowly blowing holes in his historical revisionist theories.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/110978941/Sanaa-1-and-the-Origins-of-the-Qur-An#scribd

This work was published this time out of Stanford and Harvard:

Comparing it with parallel textual traditions provides a unique window onto the initial state of the text from which the different traditions emerged. The comparison settles a perennial controversy about the date at which existing passages were joined together to form the sūras (chapters). Some ancient reports and modern scholars assign this event to the reign of the third caliph and link it with his standardizing the text of the Qur’ān around AD 650. However, the analysis shows that the sūras were formed earlier.

page 12 of the essay devastates the integrity of Elizabeth Puin and points out the gross errors she made while trying to show up the Quran. The authors go into great detail of where she either missed(intentionally?) wholesale words in the Quranic manuscripts she was analyzing.

page 14 and 15 footnotes are excellent in basically tearing apart GR Puin's pseudo and fabricated history of their interaction with Yemeni authorities and instead expose slipshod scholarship.

In essence, these sets of superb papers validate much of the transmitted history of the collection of the Quran and its sound textual narrations and pretty much provide cannon fodder for Muslims world round to view authors like Fedeli and Puin and Puin's wife with suspicion in motive and execution!

Sadly, people like you are searching for reasons to disbelieve so that you can do God knows what in your free time - whereas the plethora of evidence continues to validate Muslims broad trust in the Quran and their historical rendition of how it came to be.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

additional quote from this superb published work:

The innumerable ‘Uthmānic manuscripts and the different ‘Uthmānic readings preserved in the literary sources provide a very clear picture of the degree and types of change that could arise during the period in which the ‘Uthmānic tradition flourished. These changes are small enough in scope and few enough in number to be compatible with written transmission or with dictation in which the result is checked against the original. The standard tradition thus appears to have achieved a high level of transmission fidelity already around the mid-seventh century AD.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

or this excellent conclusion:

Analysis resolves a fundamental question about the early history of the Qur’ān: who joined the existing verses to form the sūras (chapters)and when? Many scholars and some early reports hold that this was accomplished after the death of the Prophet by the committee that Uthmān charged with the task of standardizing the Qur’ān. Some other early reports however indicate that this was done already by the Prophet himself. This last view is now found to be better supported. It follows from the fact that the ‘Uthmānic Qur’ān, C-1, and the Companion codices generally have the same passages within the sūras, that the sūras were fixed before these various textual traditions branched off, in par-ticular before the spread of the ‘Uthmānic version.

This sentence I bolded and put in red should cause us all to pause and be so very thankful we were born Muslims or found our religion since it is quiet amazing that traditions from antiquity (including hadith literature) are validated in the traditionalist sense... and we see that the sacred book we read, memorize, recite in full in Ramadan publicly across the world is our valid, evidence based, and meticulously preserved link back to the Holy amongst Holies (The Prophet Muhammad). We are truly a nation given a gift that we take for granted.

But God himself promised this when he said:

’We have, without doubt, sent down the Message; and We will assuredly guard it (from corruption). (Al-Hijr –Stone land-:9)

And thankfully, devastating the idiocy of the Rashad Khalifa sect, the authors beautifully go on to note:

There are some traditions about ‘Uthmān’s team finding the last two verses of
sūra 9 with a man named Khuzayma, or Abū Khuzayma, or IbnKhuzayma. C-1 has these verses in the expected place. Since they arealso found in the ‘Uthmānic Qur’ān, and since it is not reported that any Companion codex was without them, these verses must have belonged to the prototype from which the C-1 and ‘Uthmānic text types have emerged.Therefore, one should not read too much into the report.

or amazingly one of the striking issues of the lack of the basmallah between surahs 8 and surah 9:

One report ascribes to ‘Uthmān’s team the decision to place sūra 9 after sūra 8, and to do so without inserting between them the basmala, “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” a formula found at the beginning of all the other sūras. The evidence of Ṣan‘ā’ 1 adds anuance to this claim. The transition point between sūras 8 and 9 happensto be part of the surviving fragments of the lower codex, and it lacks the basmala like the ‘Uthmānic text.

What a sad shame - we have the word of God but we (including myself) pay such little attention to the miracle we recite from memory daily and that sits on our shelves.