I reply to ahmad22 May 12
You merely assert that Toby Lester's 1999 article on the Koran fragments
found in the Sana'a mosque in Yemen is "garbage," and do nothing to
justify
your adjective. Similarly you fail to give any reference for your
assertion
that Puin "refuted" Lester's account to the Yemeni antiquities
department.
An internet search has failed to find any trace of such a "refutation."
Even
if you can produce Puin's alleged refutation, which you quote as citing as
variants only such things as orthography, Qariaat (? please use English,
which is the language of this forum), my case stands. Muslims claim divine
perfection for the Koran, yet Puin is quoted as saying that the Sana'a
texts
include "unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and
rare
styles of orthography." (Lester's article.) Muslims claim perfection in
every dot for the Koran - or some misguided individuals do.
But you ignore the most devastating evidence against the Koran's
perfection:
its measure of incomprehensibility. I quote the following from the
Wikipedia
article on Puin:
"My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not
all
understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a
hundred
years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is
a
huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian
substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one
wants. The Qur'an claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or clear, but if
you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply
doesn't
make sense. Many Muslims will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact
is
that a fifth of the Qur'anic text is just incomprehensible. This is what
has
caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Qur'an is not
comprehensible, if it can't even be understood in Arabic, then it's not
translatable into any language. That is why Muslims are afraid. Since the
Qur'an claims repeatedly to be clear but is not-there is an obvious and
serious contradiction. Something else must be going on."
You require me to produce an example of a variant found in the Sana'a
material and to demonstrate how it conflicts with Islamic theology. You
are
disingenuous: the whole point of my posting was that such critical
discussion is made impossible by the Islamic authorities who do not want
the
perfection of the Koran to be undermined; of course you know this very
well.
Secondly, it has never been my claim that the variants in the texts of the
Koran that Western scholars have shown to exist have any theological
bearing; my claim has been that these demonstrate that the perfect
trasnmission of the Koran is a myth.
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