Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

Allah promises to guard the Qu...

Does it say quran specifically? Or does it say god's word? Or some other variation thereof? Because 1 argument is that the bible is god's word and if the quran says that god's word cannot be changed that Means the quran is lying in another place Because the bible is to be Believed And in other place it says the bible is corrupted supposedly.

The science argument, and especially the perfect preservation of the Quran, formed the keystone of my faith. I set out to scrutinize this keystone, trusting it to bear the weight of the case for the Quran, indeed to provide the entire basis for my faith.

All the while, I did my best not to be bothered by the niggling question, “What will happen if this keystone fails?”

By doing so, I did my best to resolve the dissonance by aspiring to the highest of Muslim standards. The two opposing forces meant that, should the foundation fail, the collapse would be colossal.

the twentieth century saw the Islamic ethos of proselytization powered by an unexpected fuel: modern science.

Maurice Bucaille,

Bucailleism: The technique of referring to the Quran for miraculously advanced scientific truths in order to defend its divine origin

We were convinced science confirmed the divine origin of the Quran. This was such a widely held point of pride among Muslims that no one tested it.

When I finally did test it, another foundational pillar of my worldview cracked.

For example, 23:13 – 14

I then realized that this verse could not defend the inspiration of the Quran. Far from it, we had to assume the inspiration of the Quran to defend this verse.

Verses 86:6 – 7

Believing that it was impossible for the Quran to say something so obviously incorrect, I began looking online for answers.

Once again, I found a similar procedure to defend the verse: redefine the words and gloss over the difficulties.

And that was the pattern that emerged. Whether proclaiming scientific miracles or defending scientific inaccuracies, the protocol always called for redefining the clear statements of the Quran to say somet...

After I recognized the pattern, it struck me that Bucailleism was very much like stud...

if I tried to build a case as an objective investigator reading the text at face value, there simply was no scientifically miraculous knowledge in the Quran.

I now turned to the deepest of all my roots: my faith in the perfect preservation of the Quranic text.

AT LEAST TWO POWERFUL FORCES combine to make the perfect textual preservation of the Quran the bastion of Muslim confidence.

On the one hand, much like the other proclamations of Islamic pride, it is a ubiquitous axiom that becomes ingrained in the Muslim psyche.

“At no point has anything in the Quran ever been changed. It comes down to us exactly as Muhamma...

On the other hand, this belief in perfect textual preservation also forms the very basis for the condemnation of modern Judaism and Christianity.

“The Psalms, the Torah, and the Gospel, according to Islam, are no longer in their original state. They have been added to, cannot be traced directly to their prophets, or were simply altered. Only the Quran has been preserved in its original state, exactly as it was revealed to Prophet Muhammad.”101

Serving as a basis for the rejection of other faiths and the acceptance of Islam, the preservation of the Quran is critical to Islamic apologetics.

But it is even more important to Isla...

The Quran is the cornerstone of the Islamic worldview, underlies all of sharia, serves as the fulcrum of daily devotions, and pro...

In the minds of most Muslims, if the Quran were not perfectly preserved, their world would be in jeopardy. Since that is not the case, they maint...

the preservation of the Quran undergirds the unparalleled confidence of the modern Muslim zeitgeist. It is not even a remote possibility in most Muslims’ minds that the Quran of today m...

Once again, it was the most trustworthy Islamic traditions that subverted my faith.

Volume 6 of Sahih Bukhari, a volume dedicated to the Quran, details the process of Quran’s collection in book 61.102

We find that Muhammad used to dictate the Quran to Muslims orally, not having first written it down. It came to Muslims a few verses at a time, and sometimes Muhammad would relay...

Because of this, people recited the Quran disparately enough even in Muhammad’s time that there were heated, accusatory arguments among pious Musl...

When Muhammad died, many people no longer felt the need to remain Muslim. Abu Bakr sent Muslims to fight the apostates, ordering them to fulfill their Islamic obligations.103

Muslim fought former Muslim until many who had known the Quran lost their lives in battle. Abu Bakr was worried that large parts of the Quran would be lost if the battles continued, so he officially ordered the Quran to be collected under the auspices of one Zaid ibn Thabit.

Sahih Bukhari emphasizes that the Muslims easily forgot Quranic verses, and Zaid found the task of collecting the Quran extremely burdensome. He collected the verses fro...

On more than one occasion, only a single person was able to testify to some of the Quran’s verses. After Zaid finished, the Quran was ultimately given...

it was discovered that Zaid had accidentally left a small portion out of the Quran.

regions of the Muslim world were reciting the Quran incongruously enough that an appeal was made to the Muslim leaders to “save this nation before it differs about the Quran.”

the khalifa Uthman ordered that the Quran be standardized.

Then, to settle the disputes over the Quran once and for all, Uthman “ordered that all the other Quranic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be destroyed by fire.”

The process of collecting the Quran recorded in Sahih Bukhari was so choppy that it left the door wide open for lost sections of the Quran. In fact, Sahih Bukhari testifies to this.

When Zaid’s standardized Quran was distributed, it left out some sections that a man named Ubay ibn Ka’b used to recite. Ubay insisted that, regardless of Zaid’s Quran, he would not stop reciting those verses because he had heard them from Muhammad himself.

I turned to other books of hadith for their story. Sahih Muslim, the next most trustworthy source, records more problems.

It documents that a whole surah is no longer found in the Quran, and at least one verse went missing around the time of Muhammad’s death.104

Sunan ibn Majah, one of the next most authentic books, clarifies that the verse went missing because the paper on which it ...

As I continued my research, tradition after tradition kept cropping up that challenged the...

Much like my incredulity when I studied the historical Muhammad, I simply would not assimilate these hadith into my mind, keeping them at bay by accepting the far-fetched explanations o...

Muhammad named four men as the best teachers of the Quran.

but as I studied the early sources, I found that they did not agree with the final Quran, which has been passed down as today’s version. They did not even agree with each other.

Ubay is known to have had 116 chapters in his Quran, two more than Zaid’s edition.