what textual changes ! , and how far it affects the meaning if it did
…
Thousands of small variants, almost all of them having no effect on the meaning, but very significant since they show that there is not one text of the Quran that has been miraculously preserved from change over time, and it shows that those ‘scholars’ who do arithmetical acrobats with the abjad of whole surahs and the whole Quran, and find patterns in it, are fooling themselves. The abjad calculations depend on the exact lettering of the text, and there are thousands of variants at the very small level (variant spellings, or synonyms), so such calculations are meaningless.
These variations were known in the classical Islamic age, but fell out of sight as Islamic scholarship declined, due to the Mongol invasion and the normal decline of any human institution. Jeffrey based himself largely on the Kitab al-Masahif of Ibn Abi Dawud, in the Zahiriya Library in Damascus. This is the only intact example of a number of books by Islamic scholars in the classical period who collected citations in the early Islamic literature from variant manuscripts. When the pre-Uthmanic Quran collections were order to be destroyed, many scholars concealed theirs and in any case remembered what was in them, and eventually some scholars, like Ibn Abi Dawud, systematized the study of the Quran variants.
The most important of the early codices, differing from the Uthmanic version, are those of Ibn Mas’ud, Ubai b, Ka’b,
Ali, Ibn Abbas, Abu Musa, Hafsa, Anas b. Malik,
Umar, Zaid b. Thabit, Ibn az-Zubair, Ibn Amr,
Aisha, Salim, Umm Salama, and Ubaid b. `Umair.
Not all the variants come from after the time of Muhammad. Some show the development of the text during the mission of Muhammad. For example, Sura 103 in
Ali's version has two extra words in verse one, so it reads (**by the age** (asr),
and the ups and downs of time (dahr), verse 2 is the same as the Uthmanic text (“
verily man is at a loss.”
However verse three is completely different in meaning to the Uthmanic text. It says “
and he remains in it to the end of time.” In the Uthmanic text verse three reads, “
except those who believe and do good deeds and enjoin one another in what is right, and enjoin one another to be steadfast.”
There’s another version recroded by Ibn Mas’ud, which begins, “By time, Truly we have only created man for his loss, except for such as have faith and enjoin one another to piety…” This looks like an intermediary between the earlier bleak version of `Ali, and the later Uthmanic version. It has “except…” and gives the believers an escape clause, but it does not have the “good deeds” which is more a Medinan theme than a Meccan one.
you based your argument in wrong interpretation which dosn’t represent the clear words of the verses
An assertion is not an argument. What actually happened is that you based yourself on a translation, without checking the original.
I did check, and what I said does rest on the clear words of the verses. I saw that there was no word for “message” in the Arabic. Rather I found the word dhekr (remembrance). And I checked the verses before and after, and saw that this remembrance must be a person, since it is parallel to the angels before, and because the following verse says “we have sent X before you.” The X is unspecified, but the implication is “the one/thing sent” (hence the usual translation, “we have sent apostles before you”.)
however , we have another verse in chapter 56
77 That this is indeed a qur’an Most Honourable."
78 In Book well-guarded
This is an early Meccan surah. At that time, the Qur’an meant recitation, not a particular book collected together, and Book likewise did not mean a collected Quran like the Uthmanic version or the earlier collections that Uthman ordered replaced. There were no such collections. The words quran and kitab were used, but they did not mean what we mean today by “the Quran.” In the same way, “the gospel” in the New Testament does not mean the New Testament, because when the New Testament was collated, it did not exist. “Gospel” means the preaching, the good news, not the book.
Verse 79 gives us a typical example of the variant versions. Ibn Mas’ud (who died about the year 33 of the Islamic calendar, so his is a very early collection) begins the verse with Ma rather than La. They are both negatives, preceding the verb, and the meaning is not affected. But we have no way of knowing which is the one Muhammad used, or whether he sometimes said one and sometimes the other. In the same verse, Ibn Mas’ud and Aban b. Taghlib have a variant spelling of “the pure”, al-mutaTahhiruna. Such variants put paid to any idea of adding up the numerical value of the letters and discovering a secret code.
On top of the early text variants, there are later ones. These have been largely obscured by the great success of the Egyptian edition prepared on the orders of King Fu’ad. His version is used almost everywhere in the Arab world today. But I sat in a tafsir class with Moroccan students, and their Qurans were slightly different because they were printed in Morocco. Before the Egyptian edition, there were big variants and a lot of confusion, as you would expect when a text is copied by thousands of different scribes in different parts of the world. This led King Fu’ad to order one authorised edition to be prepared in 1923. And it’s that edition, spread all over the world, that gives the impression that the text has been consistently preserved from variations.
God warned us that many false prophets would come and try to sway us from the truth.