Was There a Proto-Qur'an? Looking at a Recent Proposal by Dr. Tommaso Tesei
2023 ж. 7 Жел.
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This is a clip about a recent proposal by Dr. Tommaso Tesei concerning textual stratification in the Qur'an. In this segment we discuss the possibility of the Qur'anic material coming from distinct contexts and maybe having multiple authors. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to the channel and like the video! Please be sure to check out the full interview, here: • Tommaso Tesei: Dhu-l-Q...
You can find Dr. Tesei's article here: www.academia.edu/75302962/_Th...
As a Muslim I appreciate a research like this. We often hold everything as sacred in on its own, and while the recitation of the original Message is unquestionable, the modes it has been written down (i.e. Uthmans codex) are a subject to scrutiny. Our entire history from the time of death of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is riddled with odd political and social choices (for more info look at the period of First Fitna). Inshallah, if there was a fabrication, let that be revealed.
Nothing is “unquestionable” especially not scripture.
I would have supported Abdullah bin Zubayr myself. Good comment akhi
@@tawsifchowdhury4035 "unquestionable" as in the pillars of our Deen (and I mean the monotheist Deen in general, the commandments, the ultimate oneness of what God is (tawhid) etc. The universal truths. But dünya is a place of dynamic changes in states of being for everything, and therefore permanence is not a quality of this world. Hence anything that comes into contact with dünya gets affected by its laws. In which case the original Message revealed, once momerized by fallible humans, or written down according to the context of a particular writer, cannot by laws of physics be considered a permanent or unchangeable.
@@irreview ibn Zubayr could have been a stronger force on his own if he took a bit more personal involvement in rallying Muslims outside of Meccan region out of his control. But I have to say, after getting more familiar with post-Nabi (SAW) ummah, seems like most of His family even decided to pull the rug from under each other before the Prophet's (SAW) body even got cold. Very sad and disappointing. But typically human. As soon as there something to divide in the family, your close ones can quickly turn into your worst enemies.
I am surprised by these researcher who are doing big researches, but can't even apply what they are doing in their life to the study of the Quran 1. When a researcher starts his journey, he picks a topic , he published paper, he get rebuttals, he counters them, there is a change in his domain like AI has entered in lot of research areas and he give new answers and, he get new critics and so on. 2. Prophet(SAW) had a very normal life. He lived in a society, he got selected by the Allah to spread the one ness of God. He preached it to the people of the community, they got offended, they gave rebuttals, Prophet(SAW) countered them, then some of the companions went to Abyssinia, God gave them guidance to counter their arguments and then Prophet(SAW) migrated to Madina, Jews entered in the picture, other messages came. When you read Quran with the idea that each Surah is revealed in a specific time and context, which you can easily find from the text of the surahs, it look so natural and logical that there is no doubt left about that each word of the Quran is revealed from one might being Allah. The only thing which confuses Quran are the fabricated narrations like H. Uthman codified the Quran. H. Uthman just made a mechanism that no fabricated Quran is allowed to be spread. Otherwise we are believing that Allah who we BELIEVE only know the date of the judgement day didn't make sure to preserve the Quran through his messenger. So are you really believing He knows all things.
Hey Professor Gabriel, can you try getting Seyyed Hossein Nasr (professor of islamic studies from georgetown university) on your channel, to talk about perrenial philosophy, what perrenial philosophy is, and its relation to the islamic tradition/quran etc?
Gabriel Reynolds is a missionary who can never handle a proper Islamic scholar like Nasr. Reynolds thrives on hosting consummate liars like Tom Holland. His mission is to debunk the Quran, and he believes the lie of deity of Christ.
Have other scholars in the field commented on this hypothesis? Fascinating discussion thanks Dr reynolds
they are hoping to stick somthing but turns out they got nothing, at least appreciate the consistent message. If granular is the claim, a lot of proofs are needed, can't wait for the publishing of such theories to have trail of proofs.
If there was a proto quran then more material was added to it, you'd expect to find some sort of memory of it in the tradition. For example, some sects who reject this lenghtier Qur'an, a truncated mushaf, anything! Also, at the end, he's talking about a change of context in the Prophet's life, well, becoming an exiled political leader in war with his native city is a hella of context change but apparently we need to invent multiple authors to think outside of the box and differentiate ourselves for the grant applications!
Academics will believe anything except the obvious. But the Qu'ran already called these types out: "There is naught in their breasts but a desire to become great, which they shall never attain." (40:56)
Keep in mind this discussion is about the stupidest book ever written by man.
We have the Sanaa palimpsest, and then the Ubay ibn Ka'b and Abdullah ibn Masud mushafs that were rejected by Uthman - to the point Uthman persecuted both of them severely.
@@JohnGeometresMaximos familiar with all of that. It has all been explained even among non-Muslim scholars in a way that isn't really threatening to traditional Sunni narratives about Qu'ranic compilation, nor is it really challenging for our Orthodoxy.
@JohnGeometresMaximos true but Ibn masoud says the 7 verses opening chapter isn't part of his quran and he says 2 short chapters are missing (which are still in muslim liturgy just not as quran). Nothing as dramatic as what is discussed here. The palimpsest is even a worse example because it's actually a quran. There's not a missing verse (from the folios that were discovered and studied except one that is easily explained by the scribe jumping a line).
But how do we actually know that this corpus of the text is the oldest layer without delving into the traditional chronology?
16:39 "...chronology is also based on the study of the style of the Qur'an."
There are few references to Christian figures in the Meccan surahs generally. The big exception is Surah Maryam. I wonder if Maryam would have been placed in the Meccan period if it were not for the tradition about the believers reciting it to the Negus.
@@mrtrusttheeducator5475 That's really thoughtful and interesting feedback. I'll go back and read those surahs again.
This is a poor argument and one that relies on straw man fallacy. First, Dr. Tesei selects a number of surahs (he doesn’t know their number!) that serves his multiple authorship hypothesis. In this selection, he essentially uses Nöldeke’s arbitrary periodization. The absence or presence of certain words or expressions such as shirk in a group of carefully selected surahs is not a sufficient ground for classifying that group as the core of layer of the Qur’an. This same group share numerous features with the other excluded groups. Second, he mistakes change of literary devices for change of style; the latter is much broader than the former. The Qur’an uses different literary devices in different surahs while maintaining the same style across its entire corpus. For example, al-Mutanabbī (d. 354AH) uses a variety of meters (out of 16 meters) to compose his poems. We cannot select those poems that he has composed using Baḥr al-Ṭawīl, for instance, and then claim the rest of his poems does not belong to him. This is simply absurd. Third, there is no rhymed prose (Sajʿ) in the Qur’an. DJ Stewart’s claim of its existence is unfounded, as he himself took the concept from the unreliable Ibn al-Athīr (d. 637AH). In fact, the latter claims that almost all of the Qur’an is composed in rhymed prose, which effectively means that the Qur’an has not abandoned its style. Last, when one approaches the Qur’an or any other subject for that matter, one should not start one’s research with a foregone conclusion. Dr. Tesei has in his mind the hypothesis of multiple authorship of the Qur’an. Then he carefully selects texts that prove this point. Interestingly, even with flawed method, he claims that the corpus he has selected matches the social context in which it emerged. How would he know that context?
Depends how you define authorship. For example, the Greeks borrowed heavily from the Mesopotamian & Egyptian cultures that preceded them. Does that mean there was no Greek author as such but all borrowed and built upon on material originally of foreign origin? What is lost in this search is that a text has a context to do with the specific environment that produced it, and it may have local or universal appeal; often a mixture of both! This effort for the search of so-called 'original authorship' totally misses the point, since ideas do get used / recycled in human history. It's the outcome that matters!
Did you just admit that allah also borrowed from other sources? Because the koran clearly rejects that notion.
Could you use ai to help with stratification, a j deus papers are interesting I was interested in the fact that there must have been a library of apocryphal Christian, Jewish, hellanistic , zoastrian sources and don’t link it to Muhammad As there was a library in Iran that has all these sources
this was proposed a long time ago by dr. jay smith and the inara school. the core text was the Syriac christian lectionary that the muslims and heretical christian sects, such as the gnostics and arians living outside the byzantine empire have commandeered. the commandeered text was later used to compile the invention of Muhammad by the abbasids, canonized probably during the time of Ibn Kathir. murad is currently finalizing an uncensored English translation of the quran, and afterwards, will work on the Aramaic layer of the quran.
There is no possibility of the Qur'an being edited - if it had been the companions of the Prophet would have been the first to notice and reject him as a prophet. More non-Arabic experts crapping on about something they have little real comprehension of.
I actually have a similar theory related to the prefixed surahs and what I term "The Book of Clear Signs."
Can you elaborate?
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Intertextuality !
I wish you could do an episode on is the Quran recitation music or not.
well it's not
@@sravasaksitam Some parts are.
@@abj136 where
Everyone should watch Cira International video series. They go more in depth on how the Quran came about,where it borrowed from,the multiple different versions of it.
I'm interested in some of Shoemaker's analysis, and I've wondered about potential layers of Quranic development in light of him and early sources like Sebeos. Possibly an initial Jewish influence started the movement, and then additional Christian material added later as the movement interacted with Christian subjects and their disputations.
The 'Christian material' is (for me...) the audience targeted by the Quranic texts. It is a mandatory landscape required by the targeted audience who are Arabic Christians.
It would be worthy to investigate that is not that “Muhammad first thought one way and then he changed his mind” - the Meccan and Medina suras are written by two different people.
@MBiernat0711 Exactly. What is "Meccan" vs. what is "Medinan" cannot be understood in terms of Muhammad's fictionalised life.
Please watch "The Preservation of the Qur'an " by The Blogging Theology . Paul Williams invites Dr Ali Atei to explain in detail. You may check out Dr Ali Atei's credentials online. There are many who claim to know the history and preservation of the Qur'an but quite the contrary , they really dont. Please learn from proper sources.
Text: Text can have a pre-text, context, and post-text material. Quran also has hypertext with OLD Testament n NEW Testament. In fact, Quran can be considered as FINAL Testament with common thread which in computer lingo be called ‘hyperlinked’ with previous revealed scriptures.
Quran can be considered as a control over the writ. 5:48 And We sent down to thee the Writ1 with the truth,2 confirming what is before it3 of the Writ,4 and as a control5 over it. So judge thou between them by what God has sent down; and follow thou not their vain desires6 away from what has come to thee of the truth.7 For each of you We appointed an ordinance8 and a procedure.9 And had God willed, He could have made you one community; but that He might try you in what He gave you[...].10 - So vie in good deeds; unto God will you return all together, and He will inform you of that wherein you differed -
as a Muslim , if i have 0.000000000000000001 % of doubt that Quran has a human source i will leave Islam , i wonder how could someone deny it unless he has a psychological problem.
You'd have to find that muddy spring with the sun in it, then
@@able763 See, this is the problem with relying on non-Muslims to analyze the Qur'an. Muslims do not believe that quote to be literal. You'd have to argue that Arabs had never seen the reflection of the sun in a body of water before, which is of course ridiculous.
Nope. 400 years of scholars after Muhammad got poisoned by a Jewish woman whose entire family he killed shows that THEY ALL BELIEVED IT TO BE LITERAL. For 450 years after Muhammad's timely demise, Muslim scholars in the tafseer INSISTED the sun sets in a muddy spring, ditch, puddle, etc. per the Alexander the Great Romances (fan fiction). Even Muhammad confirmed Allah's ignorance in Sunan Abi Dawud 4002 when asked point blank (this takes away the Muslim takiyya excuse of "wajadaha" meaning metaphorical "as if" because Allah can't say anything plainly in his "Clear Book"). Since the Quran is the verbatim word of Allah, this means if Allah's claims don't exist, Allah doesn't exist. So that settles that. Watch this masterpiece by The Masked Arab: kzhead.info/sun/iLqwmd6rppyaZJE/bejne.html @@user-gh6gc7xd9p
The Quranic accounts of embryology, honey, mountains, iron, etc are all proven scientifically wrong. That means the Quran cannot be revealed by an infallible god. It's clearly the product of fallible man, who himself was the product of his time.
You should watch Cira International. They have entire videos series about how the Quran came about.
What is obvious is the drastic stylistic variance between the suras, supposedly matching contextual modes as proposed in the article. Regardless how much life transformation a writer has undergone or is influenced by external circumstances, some “signature” writing style always remain the same. Multiple authorship is the only logical conclusion.
“Obvious variance in stylistic style” is itself a problematic, exceedingly subjective, highly hypothetical statement…Taylor Swift has changed her style of expression more times than there are years in her entire songwriting career. Do you realize you come across as too self-assured without any definitive evidence to back your position?
@@fadiljelin7297 And you consider your retort less subjective? Taylor Swift is an amazing self promoting artist but will always remain identifiable by her devoted followers through her soul penetrating lyrics no matter how many times she changes her appearance, communication channels, or music genre. On the other hand, for centuries the Quran has been dissected into Meccan and Medinan as a convenient way to deal with the variants in styles from the “shorter” poetic/rhythmic suras to the “longer” prosaic ones. That theory has long passed its used by date point, and in the absence of a satisfactory explanation (outside the Islamic narrative) for the obvious variations, researchers are looking at the written styles and are grouping texts in sub categories or strata according to identifying markers each leading to a “writer”. As for evidence I present to you exhibit A : the Quran itself.
That's YOUR opinion
@@arta.xshaca Unless you propose another theory, the difference in styles depicts multiple authorship.
You don't have to believe in Islam, but only based on historic, linguistic and textual analysis, the Quran has one writer, and appeared without any previous development, during the life of Prophet Mohamad. But Western Orientalists want to apply the same methodology as they find in the Old and New Testament which were clearly developed over time with different authors and languages.
It is actually also Orientalists (and contemporary scholars following in that tradition) who have defended the views of the Qur'an being a single-author composition, an early-Islamic composition, a composition dating to the life of the prophet, etc. These are, in fact, the standard positions of (Orientalist/Western) Islamic studies. Dr. Reynolds actually refers to this in the video and alludes to the fact that it is somewhat of a heterodox pursuit in current Qur'anic studies to consider other possibilities about authorship.
@@strictlycommercial1058 Good point. Fair enough.
Why not also consider the possibility that the life of the prophet was invented and manipulated to match the different authors and places of the Quran. Apart from very late and doubtful hadiths and siras we have nothing in the Qur’anic text to lead to the so called Arab prophet.
@jma7600 Oh please.
What analysis shows it has one writer without development in Muhammads lifetime? lol you are just making this up
Mr might have been
Lots of authors and lots of editors. The Talmud is the model.
The two have very different histories!
There is a lot more in common than you imagine. They are also contemporary with each other, if the Babylonian Talmud is considered. The methodology of disguising what is being discussed through wordplay exists in both. The Qur'an is at war with it. @@Zarghaam12
Probably not. The Quran has some literary differences, but many authors do that. It likely had chiefly one author, likely Muhammad. Some verses were edited or added or subtracted later on, but the majority probably came from him.
Again. This is a unfounded assumption of yours: that the Qur'an has by and large one author. It does not.@@arta.xshaca
@@arta.xshaca- what literary differences? Your contention is completely baseless. How could only some of the Qur'an originate from Muhammad when it is obviously the work of a single author, coherent and stylistically unique throughout? And how could the supreme example of the Arabic that signifies the text/language come from an illiterate Arab far from the centres of civilisation? Not a single point you make makes any sense and serve only to pose still more difficult questions.
For muslims and Bahai: Allah is the only Author.
Not for Sufis and Falasifa
@@mfb311 really?
What are you taking about? For true sufis - nothing exist but Allah… But that’s obviously above your reading level and comprehension.
@@fadiljelin7297 thank you very much.
It could be extremely useful to open up toward historical analysis of the Quran, and stop treating Islam as a “Holy Cow” of religions: untouchable and unreasonably venerated. Maybe - just maybe - when the western secular academia starts seriously learning and teaching, without the fear of offending their Muslim colleagues- maybe then the Muslim people can have the real opportunity to choose what they believe. This has serious consequences in today’s world, where in all the regions we have religious fanatics willing to “die for the cause of Allah” - believing the Quran to be “the final and perfect declaration of Allah”. Isis, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, and countless others - taking this Quranic nonsense as if it was truly a word of God and not religious imaginations of late antiquity wanna-be prophets
The quran and islam was proven false back when Saint John of Damascus destroyed it. The only reason islam has survived to this day is because of the [geo]political and military power and value muslim countries have due to oil and natural gas.
You left out American involvement and horrible crimes they committed has created extreme groups
As if the orientalist tradition brought to bear against the Qur'an/Islam/Muslims didn't already have this aim and exert a huge effort to undermine these! Try to get some knowledge before commenting.
@@stephenconnolly1830 you wrote something- but I can’t find meaning in it. Can you be more specific if you wish an answer? What exactly about the orientalists and what exactly the “Muslim effort” is? From my experience, Muslim scholars don’t want to go too deeply into rebuking the orientalists, because although they may find some errors based on the lack of evidence- overall - the orientalists are on the right path. So one needs to be more specific of what one wishes to rebuke :)
Not to be rude, but whatever this person had before coming up with this hypothesis, it is clearly a haram substance.
This is not an independent conclusion made by Tesei, by the way. His hypotheses do stand up, and can be supported by the textual corpus.
Yes he has definitely consumed a lot of Quran.
@MAbdusson You're not being rude, but actually moronic in your comment.