The Yasir Qadhi Controversy

This week, all holy hell broke out in the world of Islamic religious scholarship, when a live-stream video discussion and interview, between the London orthodox proponent of Islamic scholarship, Mohammed Hijab, and Professor Sheikh Yasir Qazi (also known as Sheikh Yasir Qadhi), opened up the internal dialogues between learned Muslims that they have been keeping to themselves for a while.

Sheikh Yasir Qadhi

Yasir Qadhi was the Dean of Academic Affairs at the Al-Maghrib Institute, which is a huge worldwide Islamic educational institution with backing from heavy-weight oil money and Middle Eastern Arabic princes and so on. He is a Yale-educated academic with a long list of impressive and serious credentials - he is no 'Reza Aslan' light weight.

The problem that has been uncovered, is that of the so-called 'Ahruf and Qira'at' of the Quran.

Yasir Qadhi has just turned the world of Islam upside down with the open public admission - and to this minute no one is really sure that it ever was intended to have gone public or quite so public and 'viral' as it has done - ...with the admissions that 1. there are simply no 7th century Qurans at all, 2. there are no '7 recitation variations' either in copy form or even that there is really any indication from the times in question that there were any such '7' recitation styles in existence during or shortly after the time of 'Muhammad,' 3. there is no 'perfect complete version of the Quran' and there never has been, 4. the version widely used today dates from 1926 and is from a recitation style by a man more than 200 years after the death the Muhammad, and from an area of southern Baghdad nowhere near Mecca or Medina, and in a dialect NOT the one that the original Quran was meant to have been delivered to Muhammad in, 5. the Quran has absolutely zero 'perfect copies/versions' and that of the currently more than 30 versions, there are over 93,000 differences in them.

And that all 'deep scholars' of Islam have long known this and have kept it to themselves secretly.

And now, challenges are coming from Western academics as to whether there is even one single shred of evidence that any 'Muhammad' existed at all in the places, and at the times Muslims say.

It appears, as of the minute, that today's Quran was adopted by an agreement of Egyptian scholars in 1926, and as late as only 35 years ago, King Faad of Saudi Arabia decreed that the 'orthodox' qira'at was that of a certain person 'Hafs' - which has no real basis in the historical series of authentic 'transmissions, and for what reason (that he choose this one) no one knows, since Hafs was not even from Saudi Arabia and never spoke the Quraysh dialect, which is the one, by tradition 'Muhammad' claimed the Quran to have been sent down from heaven by Allah and from Allah, in.

In other words, despite modern Islamic claims that the Quran came down from heaven, unchanged, and perfectly preserved in every way by Allah - there is no such thing in existence and there never has been.

This is the 'actual' peacock throne of the Moghuls -
it's in Germany and not India, and has been preserved
by a private German museum... 

Right now, as of this week, there are at least 38 versions of the 'Quran' in existence - from as far apart as Morocco and Yemen, in different scripts - and none of them are the same as any other (one) of them. And of the earliest manuscripts, none of which is less than 200 years after the apparent historical death of Muhammad, none of them is 'complete' - IE a complete text of the Quran as it is to be found today.

Further, the claim that has been made for a long time that '93%' of the actual extant ancient texts are 'exactly the same' - is deceptive because these have only ever been to do with small fragments and not even any complete books. And scholars knew that but kept it secret.

The whole entire basis of Islam is 'the Quran.' And... and... ...there is no 'Quran.' 

In one case, on one page alone, there were seventeen different 'pastings over' and in other very early text versions nineteen additions of the word 'Allah' into the original text where it had never been written in the first place, and where there was no space for the word, and thereby radically altering the meaning of the sentences involving those alterations.

It seems that a particular caliph, Abdul Malik, is the principal person most responsible for having created the myth of 'Muhammad' and the 'religion' of Islam as it is known today.

There was something, of the nature of a literary idea of an 'honored man' ('Muhammad'), and a series of profound writings, in Arabic dating from around and from even before the theoretical historical date and location of today's 'Muhammad' -  and these have almost nothing to do with today's religion of 'Islam.'

It would be different if Yasir Qadhi was the only Islamic scholar who said these things - but he is one of many recently. And it appears that this week's interview was perhaps unintentionally made public when it was meant to have been private.

Right now there are hundreds, literally hundreds of Islamic proponents and commentators rushing and very desperately loudly, to post YouTube videos to counter the Yasir Qadhi interview. And in these videos they are all asserting things in this kind of form: 'the Quran says,' 'the hadith about the sole transmission of the Quran,' 'the Messenger of Allah says in the Quran...' 

Up in flames...

...There is no 'Quran.' These people are merely asserting things that have no reality. At this stage these people are unable to demonstrate a single fact of any kind from history at all, that 'the Quran' in the form they all seem to believe is something they have been 'given' ever even existed. Yes, there is the present book which comes from 1924, and yes there was 'a' version inclusive of one set of hadith narratives dating from the Caliphate of Abd al Malik in the 8th century - but even from then all the written or printed manuscripts following that date diverge in considerable ways. And yes there is one style of reciting it officially today - but that is in a dialect not even close to the one in which the Quran was said to have been originally rendered, and from a person and a place nowhere near Mecca, and it was officially 'sanctioned' only 35 years ago by King Faad of Saudi Arabia.

Islamic scholars blew themselves up this week. It is not going to stop people from holding untenable views; they do it all the time. It's what people do.