These last two examples of corrections concern coverings, where someone at a later date covered over a portion of the text with a small piece of paper, or parchment, and either left it covered over and blank, or wrote something else over top of it. This, like the erasures, is one of the most obvious examples of correcting a text, proving intentional human intervention. Correction Addendum 1: Here we have an example of 8 coverings in the Hussaini Cairo Mushaf (Cairo Mushaf al-Sharif, fol. 33v.) in Surah 2:191-193. Let’s go through each of the 8. These are coverings which were left blank. At first Daniel thought they were covered to patch up some damage to the manuscript, but there were no damages on the reverse side. So, it looks like they were intentionally censoring the text eight times.
In the first line all but the first three letters of wa-akhrijuhūm min ḥaythu “drive them out from wherever” of Q2:191 have been covered. In line 5 all but the first two and the last two letters of fa-in-qātalūhum “so if you fight to kill them” of Q2:191 have been covered. In line 6 all but the first five letters of faaqtulūkum kadhālika“then kill them (imper.), such” of Q2:191 have been covered. In line 7 all but the last five letters of fa-inintahaū“and if they desist” of Q2:192 have been covered. In line 8 the first three letters of ghafūr “forgiving”, and the last three letters of رحيم rahīm “merciful” of Q2:192 have been covered. In line 10 all but the first letter of al-dīn li-llah “the religion belongs to Allah” of Q2:193 has been covered. In line 11 all but the last letter of udwān“enmity” of Q2:193 has been covered. And finally, in line 12 the final two letters of bi-l-shahr “in the month” of Q2:193 have been covered.
Correction Addendum 1: In this final example of a correction we find 3 instances of coverings, which were then written over top, in Surah 13:11-12, found in the Hussaini Cairo Mushaf (Cairo Mushaf al-sharif, fol. 430r.).
On the first line pictured, all but the first two letters of بانفسهم bi-anfusihim “in themselves” of Q13:11 has been written over top of such a taping. One can easily see the covering, while the word written over top has a thicker nib, with darker ink, and uses a completely different script with an elongated style of writing.
On the second-to-last line pictured, all but the initial ʾalif of يركمالذى alladhi yurikum “he who shows you” of Q13:12 has similarly been written over top of a taping and is rather elongated. The stretching is not unusual in this manuscript, but it is more pronounced in this spot than is standard for the original scribe. Instead of an entire sentence a later scribe has simply written a few letters and elongated the letters in order to fill the resulting gap.
It is notable that one letter is missing when compared with the 1924 ‘Hafs’ Cairo edition, which has an additional yaʾ between the raʾ and the kaf, ىِذلآمُيكِرُي
On the final line, the وطمعا wa-ṭamaʿā “and hope” of Q13:12 has also been written over a taping, which covered a sentence, but then was replaced with just a few letters, elongated once again.
In all three cases we cannot know what was initially written, but we can see that the new corrections over top all correspond with the ’Hafs’ Caireen 1924 text. Al Fadi wonders whether these coverings were added after 1924, since this manuscript resides in Cairo itself, the very city where the Hafs text was chosen.
In conclusion we can say that these are not examples of Ahruf or Qira’at, which are simply different readings, because those require diacritical marks and vowels, which weren’t even invented when these manuscripts were written.
These corrections are all made with consonantal letters (the Rasm) which anyone can then add their own readings by reciting the text orally (i.e. adding their own vowels, depending on their dialect).
In these 9 episodes Jay and Al Fadi have pretty much destroyed all of the 4 claims Muslims make for their Qur’an. No longer can Muslims claim that the Qur’an is eternal, nor sent down to Muhammad, nor complete at the time of Uthman, nor unchanged in the last 1400 years. These episodes, following just 22 examples of over 4,000 now discovered by Dr Brubaker, clearly suggest that the Qur’an was written by men, corrected and changed by yet other men, and then finally canonized just 85 years ago by still other men.
When we compare the Qur’an with the Bible, we find that the Qur’an begins with thousands of differences, which need to be corrected to one final text in 1924. When we look at the Bible, we find that the differences in it are found much later, but by comparing all 24,000 manuscripts we can know what the original text was, which makes the Bible much better preserved, and much more credible historically than the Qur’an.
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