firedragon
Veteran Member
This is not such an easy subject to address in a post.
Textual criticism is the study of what the original author or writer of the book actually said. It does not address if what he said was correct or not, just the assessment of text to identify what the author actually said.
Qur’anic scholars in medieval times took a pragmatic approach, and developed scholarship based on it. It differs from modern literary criticism and it’s methodologies are contrasting in many ways. For example, in textual criticism of the New Testament a scholar might come in front of two sentences that have different readings. One would say Jesus got angry, and the other would say Jesus smiled (as an example). Being Jesus’ his character being peaceful, the writer would not deliberately change something good to bad. That is, a writer will not take a copy that says Jesus smiled, and change it to Jesus got angry. A copyist will not wish to portray in a non-peaceful manner, unless the original writer actually said that Jesus got angry. Thus, the scholar will conclude with high probability that the original writer would have said “Jesus got angry”. This is called the criterion of embarrassment.
In medieval Islamic scholarship, they will not make such an assessment. They will take both vartiations, and see if there were any historical traditions that has any one of them, and they will take the narrator, his character, his memory, age, etc etc and make an assessment where one is correct or not, and sometimes “both are correct”. Anyway, that is a very lengthy subject altogether. Modern day scholars find it a very daunting task to apply textual criticism to the Qur’an.
Some orientalist type of 20th century scholars have tried to do literary criticism of the Qur’an applying techniques developed by Christian scholars of the New Testament which ironically ends up being an attempt at form criticism. Like techniques they had learned from the great Gunkel, all due respect and honour given to Christian scholarship which is one of the most commendable work in my personal opinion. Actual application of textual criticism as applied to the New Testament is very very scarce. Form criticism of the Qur’an by western scholars have been with presuppositions, not an analysis outcome alone. For example, if an analyst take the Bible as the yardstick of a story (e.g. Adam), and claim that the Qur’an has a different version in one place, and another version in another place, both contrasting two different aspects of the Genesis story, it is a presupposition that the Bible is the correct story, and the Qur’an has two different stories, thus, it must be written by two different authors. In criticism, the internal stories must have two different writing styles, contradictions, or/and varying intent’s, not that it differs from Bible. If the two stories in the same book are contradistinctions, it cannot be deemed that two different people wrote those two different stories. I hope that logic is clear.
Qur’anic textual criticism have been approached by non-muslim scholars. Some of them with a wide scope and some, in my opinion, with a very narrow scope. ironically the scholar with a narrow scope gets famous. E.g. Brubaker. He became the sensation of modern day anti Qur’anic polemical pedestal. His work is so widely discredited by muslim and non-muslim scholars. His Phd Title named “early corrections in the Quranic text” or something very similar to that basically claims that there were intentional interpolations. And of course, there are some preachers who pick up the “he said this” argument without knowing the subject, which is an appeal to authority fallacy, and publish videos on the internet, left, right, and enter, and of course, his book sold like hot cakes due to the promotion. The free PR. If needed, we can look at his errors.
Anyway, the most prominent variants in the Quran manuscripts, other than corrections in palimsests are something like a difference between one manuscript to another, e.g. Zulmihim vs Kufrihim. Meaning Injustice vs intentionally hiding a fact. This is a real variation. In this case, what’s the dilemma here? How do you decide which one is the correct one? Can you apply a technique like the criterion of embarrassment? No. Because both meanings are practically similar. Both bad. The Muslim scholar will look at the tradition, the chain of narrations, and make a call. The western scholar will probably look at manuscript’s and take the majority variant. There is no way to make a judgment call based on the meaning. And both variations go back in tradition to earliest chains of narrations.
The Quran’s manuscript tradition goes back to the times of the prophet Muhammed. Some preachers have tried to make the case that it predates Muhammed. Sometimes the same person says it post dates Muhammed. Ironically for that type of polemicist the Qur’an either predates Muhammed or post dates him, nothing in between. This person has a Phd. But his Phd is about a Christian preacher and his life, not Quranic studies or anything related whatsoever. Unfortunately, most who speak of Quran criticism learn from this type of unscholarly polemicists.
What most don’t understand in this subject is the difference between a textual variant and a rendition variant. Fahum or rendition means a word like Kiss written with a vowel. If you write it without a vowel, it would be Kss. But if you put it in a sentence, you will probably understand what it is. If you put the wrong vowel there like “Kess” then that’s a rendition variant. If the variant is a letter like a drop of an s as in “Ks”, that’s a textual variant. I don’t know how else to explain to a non-linguistic reader. I am sure a Jewish person can understand this phenomena better than an English reader. (I cant read Hebrew BTW). I remember vividly, one person in this forum said “there is a huge difference in the “i” sound and the “u” sound in arabic. Of course I chuckled for a minute or two at a so called graduate in arabic studies from SFU making such mindboggling claims. So this is another phenomena.
There is also the subject of palimsests. Upper text, and lower text. Many know this. In this case, the biggest error people make is not understanding corrections on the same page is not a variant. E.g. Lets say there is a book of 10 pages you wrote a week ago. The book is made out of a material where you can wash away the writing. So today you take it and wash everything away. All the pages. And you write the book all over again in those 10 pages. Now what happens is, you don’t know which page is page number 1. It could have been previously the 5th page, the 10th page or something else. So lets say you wrote “Big brown dog” on the 1st page the first time. And you wrote the same “Big brown dog” after washing them, collecting the pages, and now the first page for you today, was actually the 5th page in the previous time, obviously you are writing on top of the some other sentence. So if you find a way to recover the previous texts tomorrow with a lazer viewer, you will see different texts, on top of varying texts. That’s not a variant. Many make this mistake.
Sometimes variants are erased and immediately corrected by the same writer. This is easily identifiable because you can see physically in the same row, same sentence, the writer is later erasing a word, and rewriting it correctly. It could even be sentences. That is a correction of a mistake. It could happen for various reasons. Parablepsis, homoeoteleuton, Dittography, Haplography, etc. Another common mistake is when people take a slight extra slanting of a letter or two in a correction to mean it’s another person making an addition or correction. Well, those days the Arabs used to have a thing called Hazaf (Ha with phlegm) which is a table like thing made out of dried clay. This is commonly known. And they have blemishes and small hills on this ugly table. A letter or two can have different slantings or slight differences. So one has to consider these factors in textual criticism.
So I have opened the topic. This is not easy to grasp so quickly and so shallowly. So I apologise if I made any mistake or brushed it on to the wall too concisely.
If you have any specific questions related to the topic of the OP, which is textual criticism of the Qur’an, please post it. If you deny what is said, or have a criticism of the criticism, it’s very welcome. Cheers.
Textual criticism is the study of what the original author or writer of the book actually said. It does not address if what he said was correct or not, just the assessment of text to identify what the author actually said.
Qur’anic scholars in medieval times took a pragmatic approach, and developed scholarship based on it. It differs from modern literary criticism and it’s methodologies are contrasting in many ways. For example, in textual criticism of the New Testament a scholar might come in front of two sentences that have different readings. One would say Jesus got angry, and the other would say Jesus smiled (as an example). Being Jesus’ his character being peaceful, the writer would not deliberately change something good to bad. That is, a writer will not take a copy that says Jesus smiled, and change it to Jesus got angry. A copyist will not wish to portray in a non-peaceful manner, unless the original writer actually said that Jesus got angry. Thus, the scholar will conclude with high probability that the original writer would have said “Jesus got angry”. This is called the criterion of embarrassment.
In medieval Islamic scholarship, they will not make such an assessment. They will take both vartiations, and see if there were any historical traditions that has any one of them, and they will take the narrator, his character, his memory, age, etc etc and make an assessment where one is correct or not, and sometimes “both are correct”. Anyway, that is a very lengthy subject altogether. Modern day scholars find it a very daunting task to apply textual criticism to the Qur’an.
Some orientalist type of 20th century scholars have tried to do literary criticism of the Qur’an applying techniques developed by Christian scholars of the New Testament which ironically ends up being an attempt at form criticism. Like techniques they had learned from the great Gunkel, all due respect and honour given to Christian scholarship which is one of the most commendable work in my personal opinion. Actual application of textual criticism as applied to the New Testament is very very scarce. Form criticism of the Qur’an by western scholars have been with presuppositions, not an analysis outcome alone. For example, if an analyst take the Bible as the yardstick of a story (e.g. Adam), and claim that the Qur’an has a different version in one place, and another version in another place, both contrasting two different aspects of the Genesis story, it is a presupposition that the Bible is the correct story, and the Qur’an has two different stories, thus, it must be written by two different authors. In criticism, the internal stories must have two different writing styles, contradictions, or/and varying intent’s, not that it differs from Bible. If the two stories in the same book are contradistinctions, it cannot be deemed that two different people wrote those two different stories. I hope that logic is clear.
Qur’anic textual criticism have been approached by non-muslim scholars. Some of them with a wide scope and some, in my opinion, with a very narrow scope. ironically the scholar with a narrow scope gets famous. E.g. Brubaker. He became the sensation of modern day anti Qur’anic polemical pedestal. His work is so widely discredited by muslim and non-muslim scholars. His Phd Title named “early corrections in the Quranic text” or something very similar to that basically claims that there were intentional interpolations. And of course, there are some preachers who pick up the “he said this” argument without knowing the subject, which is an appeal to authority fallacy, and publish videos on the internet, left, right, and enter, and of course, his book sold like hot cakes due to the promotion. The free PR. If needed, we can look at his errors.
Anyway, the most prominent variants in the Quran manuscripts, other than corrections in palimsests are something like a difference between one manuscript to another, e.g. Zulmihim vs Kufrihim. Meaning Injustice vs intentionally hiding a fact. This is a real variation. In this case, what’s the dilemma here? How do you decide which one is the correct one? Can you apply a technique like the criterion of embarrassment? No. Because both meanings are practically similar. Both bad. The Muslim scholar will look at the tradition, the chain of narrations, and make a call. The western scholar will probably look at manuscript’s and take the majority variant. There is no way to make a judgment call based on the meaning. And both variations go back in tradition to earliest chains of narrations.
The Quran’s manuscript tradition goes back to the times of the prophet Muhammed. Some preachers have tried to make the case that it predates Muhammed. Sometimes the same person says it post dates Muhammed. Ironically for that type of polemicist the Qur’an either predates Muhammed or post dates him, nothing in between. This person has a Phd. But his Phd is about a Christian preacher and his life, not Quranic studies or anything related whatsoever. Unfortunately, most who speak of Quran criticism learn from this type of unscholarly polemicists.
What most don’t understand in this subject is the difference between a textual variant and a rendition variant. Fahum or rendition means a word like Kiss written with a vowel. If you write it without a vowel, it would be Kss. But if you put it in a sentence, you will probably understand what it is. If you put the wrong vowel there like “Kess” then that’s a rendition variant. If the variant is a letter like a drop of an s as in “Ks”, that’s a textual variant. I don’t know how else to explain to a non-linguistic reader. I am sure a Jewish person can understand this phenomena better than an English reader. (I cant read Hebrew BTW). I remember vividly, one person in this forum said “there is a huge difference in the “i” sound and the “u” sound in arabic. Of course I chuckled for a minute or two at a so called graduate in arabic studies from SFU making such mindboggling claims. So this is another phenomena.
There is also the subject of palimsests. Upper text, and lower text. Many know this. In this case, the biggest error people make is not understanding corrections on the same page is not a variant. E.g. Lets say there is a book of 10 pages you wrote a week ago. The book is made out of a material where you can wash away the writing. So today you take it and wash everything away. All the pages. And you write the book all over again in those 10 pages. Now what happens is, you don’t know which page is page number 1. It could have been previously the 5th page, the 10th page or something else. So lets say you wrote “Big brown dog” on the 1st page the first time. And you wrote the same “Big brown dog” after washing them, collecting the pages, and now the first page for you today, was actually the 5th page in the previous time, obviously you are writing on top of the some other sentence. So if you find a way to recover the previous texts tomorrow with a lazer viewer, you will see different texts, on top of varying texts. That’s not a variant. Many make this mistake.
Sometimes variants are erased and immediately corrected by the same writer. This is easily identifiable because you can see physically in the same row, same sentence, the writer is later erasing a word, and rewriting it correctly. It could even be sentences. That is a correction of a mistake. It could happen for various reasons. Parablepsis, homoeoteleuton, Dittography, Haplography, etc. Another common mistake is when people take a slight extra slanting of a letter or two in a correction to mean it’s another person making an addition or correction. Well, those days the Arabs used to have a thing called Hazaf (Ha with phlegm) which is a table like thing made out of dried clay. This is commonly known. And they have blemishes and small hills on this ugly table. A letter or two can have different slantings or slight differences. So one has to consider these factors in textual criticism.
So I have opened the topic. This is not easy to grasp so quickly and so shallowly. So I apologise if I made any mistake or brushed it on to the wall too concisely.
If you have any specific questions related to the topic of the OP, which is textual criticism of the Qur’an, please post it. If you deny what is said, or have a criticism of the criticism, it’s very welcome. Cheers.
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That could happen.