Textual History of the Qur'an: Difference between revisions

The standard Islamic view is that every variant within the canonical qira'at (readings) were recited by Muhammad, and the canonical readers made choices from among the authentic variants passed down to them. The claim is that even when the variants are completely different words or when words are added or omitted, that these are all divinely revealed alternatives. This doesn't address variants that contradict each other such as the examples above, nor explain superfluous variants (examples of which are even more common<ref name="19.25"></ref><ref>Categories of this type include use of plural instead of singular as in {{Quran|59|14}} "walls" instead of "a wall"; active when there is already the passive as in {{Quran|23|115}} "return" instead of "be returned"; form I verb when there is already the more intensive form II as in {{Quran|21|96}} "opened" instead of "opened wide"; extra conjunction as in {{Quran|2|116}} "And they say" instead of "They say".</ref>). Nor does it explain why there would be so many authentic variants that just so happened to be accommodated by the Uthmanic orthography or sound similar. As mentioned above, over 1000 out of c.77,000 words in the Qur'an have canonical variants. If such a large number of variants all pre-date the Uthmanic rasm standard and are authentic, that would imply that many thousands more had also uttered that did not go on to pass this filter. It seems doubtful that the rasm standardisation would have been successful had it requried so many words to be discarded by the early Muslim communities, well beyond the degree of variation reported even of companion codices.