Is This How The Quran Was Created?

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]That's right. You can >> If you're going to memorize the Quran, and you spend all your life memorizing it in the Warsh dialect, and then suddenly you come back to England or United States, and you see that there's only this one here, you're going to have a problem because you're going to be missing 5,000 words. And which one is preserved right now in the tablets in heaven? Up in Kufa, he said. You have to be in Basra. Take a look and see where these Qurans are being read. Just take a look at the Quran. Have you noticed how many discussions, how many of them theological points there in within the Quran? That now shows you how the the Quran was created at this time, much later in the 8th century.

[00:00:32]>> Right. And these discussions are incorporated into the Quran, and that's where they had access to these stories.

[00:00:38]These apocryphal writings proving to me that none of these come from Muhammad, and none of these come from heaven, and none of these come from Uthman.

[00:00:46]>> [music] >> Welcome to Events in History, [music] where we explore the origins, teachings, and historical development of Islam with a fact-based, [music] analytical approach. Today, we're diving into a deep and thought-provoking discussion about how the Quran was preserved, transmitted, and eventually standardized. In this episode, Dr. Jay Smith and Al Fadi break down research linked to Shady Nasser and the idea that early Islamic sources describe multiple recitations and competing textual traditions.

[00:01:23]They explore the famous reports in Sahih al-Bukhari about Uthman's standardization process, where disputes among reciters allegedly led to the production of a single Qurayshi codex.

[00:01:36]The conversation also highlights how later generations of scholars selected specific readers from a much larger pool, shaping what became the canonical readings used today.

[00:01:48]Ultimately, the video raises big questions about how early oral transmission, politics, and later scholarship may have interacted in forming the Quranic text tradition.

[00:02:00]If you've ever wondered how early Islamic history shaped the text we know today, this breakdown will push you to think more carefully about sources, timelines, and how tradition becomes canon over time. Let's watch the video.

[00:02:15]Today, we are going to capitalize now on the topic we shared with you last time concerning the five different canons according to the book or at least the research of Dr. Shabir Nasser. Today, we're going to begin to focus on the different problems associated with these canons. And of course, no better than Dr. Jay Smith who can impact these problems for us.

[00:02:43]Dr. Jay, thank you so much as always for being here with us. We mentioned these five canons last time. So, what are these different problems that we can now focus on as it applies one of them? Yeah, Dr. Shabir Nasser goes to these five different canons. What I'd like to do is take each one one after another. And let's start with the first canonization. And to do that, we need to go back to the 7th century.

[00:03:04]Let's look at the slide. And we have to go back to what we know about how this canon was put together. And this is all from Sahih Bukhari volume six book number 61 Hadith number 510. You can start with Hadith number 509 to talk about Abu Bakr's. We're now in the mid-7th century 652 where he's talking about Uthman's canon. So, this is Uthman's canon in Al-Bukhari. And when you look at I don't want to read it all. You have it there in the Arabic. You have the English rendition. Let's just summarize what's going on happening here, what it's telling us. What it's telling us is that there was another battle. Remember the first battle that of Yamama in 632 is why they had to put put the first the first Quran together. Now, you have a second battle. And this is happening up in Azerbaijan. And you're having a lot of the Medinans from and the from Mecca Medina know, are from the Hijaz. They're going up to Azerbaijan to fight against the Azerbaijanis. They're joined by those from Iraq and others from Syria.

[00:03:58]Right. And they're all together. And after the fight is finished, they go into the mosque to do their prayers. And as they're doing the prayers, these Hijazi Muslims hear the Quran being recited in other dialects or other languages, and they're quite upset. Hudhayfah, who's the leader, comes pedaling all the way back down to Medina. He's absolutely angered by what he's heard. They even went to blows. They were They were fisticuffing each other because of what they were hearing. And he comes to Uthman and he says to Uthman, "We've got to do something about this.

[00:04:26]You can't have all these different Qurans. We must not be like the Christians and Jews who have supposedly have different Bibles. We've got to just have one Quran."

[00:04:34]So, they've gone up north, right? And they've heard an awful lot of different Qurans being recited in the north. Now, they've come back down to the Hijaz.

[00:04:40]There's the north-south again. So, Uthman agrees, "Okay, we'll put it in the Qurayshi Qurayshi dialect." This is the dialect that Muhammad would have known. And so, he decides he get to get Zayd ibn Thabit, the secretary of Muhammad, who had written the earlier Quran for Abu Bakr. That's right. Which was given to Abu Bakr, who then gave it to Umar, who then gave it to his daughter, Hafsa, who had been a wife of Muhammad. And she puts it under her bed for 20 years. Kind of inept to leave it there for 20 years. Had she kept it out in >> Exactly. And then And had Abu Bakr done his job, of course, there would there there would be no problem with all these different Qurans, right? But so, Uthman does what Abu Bakr should have done, and he then has Zayd ibn Thabit to write it in the Qurayshi dialect. And if you have any problems, he gave gave three other men to help him out. Who are these three men? Zubayr, Talhah, and Hisham. Take a look at who they are. They're the sons-in-law of Uthman. They have nothing to do. They're not scholars, but they have been married to his daughters, so he wants to keep it in the family. So, they go and help Zayd ibn Thabit create this Qurayshi dialect, which is given to Uthman. And then Uthman, interestingly, does something different. What does he do after that? Do you remember what happens next? He takes all the other Qurans and supposedly burn them.

[00:05:47]Exactly. I wonder how Yasir Qadhi feels about this. Oh, Yasir Qadhi explains this and so does Shabbir Ally explain this. He says these are nothing more than oral dialects. He burnt oral dialects?

[00:05:58]>> How do you burn oral to oral dialects?

[00:06:00]Burn someone's tongue?

[00:06:02]Burn the the person? You can't burn orality. You can you have to burn text.

[00:06:07]You have to burn paper. You have to burn books. Am I correct? Of course.

[00:06:12]>> So obviously these must have been codices. Codices, which are books. You have to burn books.

[00:06:18]Which suggests to me that these books are in existence in Basra and Kufa and in Baghdad. Now that's not their name about that time. That's their name for today. And they he was burning those so that they would not disagree with the Quraishi dialect that he now has written in a in a a continental text. Can you see there's a problem with this historically speaking? Because how would you today know how to read the Arabic text in a written form from in a different dialects in a written form? You have to have dialectical markings.

[00:06:53]>> Diacritical marks. You need dots, right?

[00:06:56]>> to pronounce it.

[00:06:57]>> Exactly. In order to you can speak it orally and hear it spoken differently and I think Yasir Qadhi used the example of a and water.

[00:07:07]See that's only the difference is how you say it. Well, how you say it is different, but how would you write what you say in the text when you only have 16 consonants? And that's all they had was 16 consonants in the 7th century.

[00:07:19]Right. You can't. You have to have damma, kasra, and fatha to know the difference of a and water. And then you also have a ta versus a. So that ta would mean you would have to have two dots above it. Those dots didn't exist.

[00:07:31]That didn't exist in the 7th century.

[00:07:32]That was only introduced in the late 7th 8th century and really is really only canonized in the late 8th century and could have only been introduced when these were being written. This guy right here. This is the first to have rewritten down with those different dots and vowels. And this is Ibn Ahmad, 736.

[00:07:48]That's 8th century. Right. Not 652. You can't have these oral these uh you might say dialectical differences that early.

[00:07:56]So, what did he burn then?

[00:07:59]He obviously burned something that was written. These have to be consonantal differences. Ooh, choo choo choo choo.

[00:08:05]These are not vocalizations. This has nothing to do diacritical marks. You can't burn texts that have that have different dialects that early. And this is where Dan Brubaker is coming into existence. Now we understand why they had to they had so many differences in the consonantal text. That's for another time. Let's don't get into that. That's the biggest problem yet that I don't think Muslims have even understood yet or even tried to answer. But let's go on. So, he does this, right? Now let's go I want to show you another slide.

[00:08:31]Let's go back to the slides. Once he does this, he burns them all and then he does this. Let's go to the next slide because the next slide shows the sequence. Starting with Muhammad. There he is. He dies in 632. Muhammad was given one Quran. All right? He was given one Quran, Qurayshi Quran I assume. And if it's the Qurayshi Quran, it must be the eternal Quran. And the eternal Quran must be written in the Qurayshi dialect.

[00:08:52]>> Right. How can you write How can you have an eternal Quran written in the Qurayshi dialect when you don't have dots and vowels that early? Dots and vowels are written by men. So, how can you even talk about a Qurayshi dialectical differences in heaven?

[00:09:02]Because in order to do that, you have to have dots and vowels again. Oh, I just love playing the Mickey cuz you can see this is absolutely foolish when you Muslims make this kind of joke. But he good old Muhammad, he realizes that not everybody can understand his Qurayshi speaking. So, now we're talking about orality again. So, he asked Jibril to give him six other dialectical differences so that his people who are coming to Medina and Mecca could understand what he was saying. So, Jibril does that. And he gives Muhammad six different uh or oral Let's just call them they are oral because he hadn't written it down yet. He was still alive.

[00:09:33]That was not done till he died. Oral different dialectical differences. Did Mo- Could Muhammad have understood those dialectical differences?

[00:09:41]I doubt it. Cuz where did those dialects come from? They came from north. Basra, Kufa, Damascus.

[00:09:47]>> Damascus. Had Muhammad ever gone there and learned those dialects? And even if he did, how come he did not indicate that it was revealed this way until Ibn Mujahid uncovered that Hadith for us?

[00:09:57]Exactly.

[00:09:59]So, this is what I do and this is what you all can do. Ask your Muslim friend, "Okay, so he was given seven by Ibn Mujahid. What are those seven?" Give me the names.

[00:10:09]Every Muslim I've asked that question to, they start Oh, yeah, this is Nafi, Ibn Kathir, Abu Amr, Ibn Amir, Assim, Hamzah, and Al-Kisai. I said, "Wait a minute.

[00:10:19]Those are the seven?" "Yes, those are the seven."

[00:10:22]Even Yasir Qadhi said that. He started referring to these seven. Those don't even begin to appear till 736. Right.

[00:10:30]These are 8th century. You cannot use this at the time of Muhammad. Muhammad did These were not written down. They didn't even exist. These guys weren't even living at that time that wrote these down in those dialect. There was no way you could have had dialectical forms that early and there's no way that Muhammad could have known those seven dialects even if he did cuz he never went to those cities and lived there to learn the dialects.

[00:10:49]Nonetheless, can you see these are There's enormous problems here. So, here's what's fascinating. He then Let's go to the next Go back to the slide again.

[00:10:58]We now have seven Qurans, right? We're now up to seven Qurans. Right. The Qurayshi plus six others. Right. Which are from Basra, Kufa, and Damascus as Muslims always tell me.

[00:11:08]Uthman then comes in and he says, "No, no, no, no, no. We've got to get it back to one because of all that happened up there in Azerbaijan." So, he asked Zaid ibn Thabit to write it and that's has 114 surahs. You see that 114? I have it there. 114 surahs is Zaid ibn Thabit and we're told that it's it's this one here, the Hafs stick. They will get to that.

[00:11:25]Now, suddenly there is a problem because now you're back to one Quran again. From seven back to one. Right. Right? Seven back to one.

[00:11:34]However, five copies were of this one Quran are sent to five cities. Let's look at the five cities. Take a look at your your your screen. There is one, that is Yathrib, which is the archaic name for Medina. Right. One was sent down to Mecca, there in the south. I have them in green because this is the Qurayshi.

[00:11:53]When you see green, that's Qurayshi, just for this segment. And then one was sent over there to Basra.

[00:11:59]And one was sent up there to Kufa, and one was sent up there to Damascus. Are you seeing that on the map? Right. The problem is they must be Qurayshi. Now, let's make sure they're green, okay? So, let's turn them green. Bing, bing, bing, bing. Now, they're back to green again.

[00:12:11]So, now you have five Qurayshi Qurans in five different cities with five different readers. We're told that these are five readers, so that they would make sure that they would not pollute them, they would not change them, and never again have not another Quran that's beside the Qurayshi Quran.

[00:12:26]Okay? This is what the tradition say.

[00:12:28]However, you got another problem.

[00:12:31]Because then suddenly three other Qurans start to appear.

[00:12:35]You have Ubayy ibn Ka'b's Quran that appears in Damascus. He is one of the companions of the prophet.

[00:12:41]>> Right. So, he's even more important than Zayd ibn Thabit.

[00:12:45]Remember, Zayd ibn Thabit was just a little lad when Ubayy ibn Ka'b and this guy here, Ibn Masud, had already written 70 surahs. And by the way, Ibn Masud has 111, some say 112 surahs. Ubayy has 116.

[00:13:00]>> Take a look at there. So, these are not 114s, these are completely different Qurans, aren't they?

[00:13:04]>> Right. And these are Take a look where they are. They're up in the north, in Damascus and in Kufa. That's in Syria and Iraq. So, here you have Ubayy ibn Ka'b with 116, he should have 114.

[00:13:13]That's not the same Quran. You have Ibn Masud who has 111 surahs, that should be 114, that's too few. And they are not at all down here in Mecca and Medina, they're up in Syria and Iraq. And then you have the third one by Ibn Musa, and his is 114 surahs, sura told. But can you notice the problem? Now suddenly those three at the top are no longer green, they're now red. Which means these are not the same Qurans and we're still in the 7th century. Right. We haven't even moved into the 8th century yet. So already you have a corruption going on in the north.

[00:13:43]Right. Up in the north again. Hold on a minute, I thought our our good friend Uthman burned everything from the north.

[00:13:49]Evidently he didn't. Cuz you still have Ubayy ibn Ka'b, Ibn Masud, Ibn Muyshar and who they become very popular in those three cities. Right. Insurrection going on. And it's obvious that that's the case. That's the case. So that's the problem, all the problems I have with canon number one. Let's now go to canon number two. Now before we go on, let me just put this thing. Notice they are all in the north and from where the very cities whose Qurans were burned by Uthman earlier.

[00:14:13]Okay? Now we get to canon number two.

[00:14:15]What kind problems do we have here?

[00:14:16]Well, this is now the 8th century. We're moving into the 8th century and now you have Uthman's codices 622. Yeah, suddenly you have this Quran appearing by Ibn Amir from Damascus. Look at the date, 736, but his is not alone. Then you have Ibn Kathir, his is 738. He is from Mecca.

[00:14:34]Right. That would be codices, am I correct? Yes. I mean, supposedly because it's Mecca. All right. One would argue that it is.

[00:14:42]Now suddenly you have Asim ibn Abi al-Najud, his is from Kufa. That's Iraqi.

[00:14:47]It is, modern day Iraq. 745 is when he died. Then you have Abu Amr. I let you Want you to read their names as I put them up because you know much better.

[00:14:55]Abu Amr ibn al-Ala. And he's 770. So now we're getting to the Ibn Ala, I'm sorry, Ibn Ala. And so he's getting really towards the end of the 8th century and then you have this guy.

[00:15:05]And then you have Hamza.

[00:15:08]Okay, and he's from Kufa again. Hold on a minute, did we already get him from Kufa? Yeah, this is the second one from Kufa. Then we get this guy Nafi.

[00:15:14]al-Madani Means from He's from Medina.

[00:15:17]>> yeah. 785. And finally we get this guy al-Kisai, right? Again from Kufa. From yeah. So three from Kufa, one from Damascus, two from well, two from the Hijaz, which would be Medina and Mecca, and one from Basra. All right, fascinating. These are the These are the seven that Muslims always say existed at the time of Muhammad. No, they did not exist at the time of Muhammad. Look at their dates. 736 all the way to 805.

[00:15:40]That's the problem.

[00:15:42]Who's the guy that chose them? This guy chose them, Ibn Mujahid. Look at his dates.

[00:15:45]>> he decided only these out of all the readings that were available to Out of about 700 that were available to him by the 10th century. That's right. Out of about 700, why did he choose these seven? So, it must be popularity also.

[00:15:56]It's all to do with popularity. Who is the one that has the most So, students.

[00:16:01]The criteria he used, if I see that someone, a reader, have so many people who follow their style, then that must be canon, uh canonized, and must be revealed to Muhammad. There you go.

[00:16:12]>> He decided what was revealed to Muhammad based on number of followers. Now, did he know Muhammad? Was he listening at Muhammad's feet? Did he live in that century? Did he even come from that area?

[00:16:21]Absolutely not on all three. He came from the 10th century, 300 years later.

[00:16:26]Now, let's go through and let's just look up Abd al-Malik. I want to show you Abd al-Malik again. This is the first the first get up that he he's appears is this guy here, and he is 44 years after, and then we look at this one here. I want to go up and show you one more.

[00:16:41]Let's look at the time that Uthman's good issue with the one that was supposed to have been the canonical one from the last century. That's 84 years later that these others start to appear.

[00:16:51]84 years after the canon was put in place Now, you have seven others that come up that are not part of that canon. Right.

[00:16:58]Okay? So, that is canon number two. I want to just put this one more that Muhammad's death, it's 104 years after Muhammad's death. Now, I just want to bring up the Abbasids one more time. I keep on reminding you this is all during the Abbasid period. Let's go to canon number three. Boom, boom, boom. Canon number three, now let's go up there.

[00:17:14]We've already talked about canon two, there it is. Let's go and see what we have here. Following this, we have seven designated readers. Al-Sijistani, how do you pronounce his name? Al-Sijistani, yeah.

[00:17:24]In 1194, chose 14 little what? And we're going to bring them all up here, the 14 little what. There you are. Each one of those seven readers is given two. He had a good 700 he could have chosen from. He chose two for everyone. What was his criteria? We talked about in the last episode. Same thing.

[00:17:40]Popularity.

[00:17:41]>> Popularity and he's choosing two just to justify the transmission, basically.

[00:17:46]Just to justify the transmission.

[00:17:47]>> witness to the reading, not to the person.

[00:17:52]And the reason you can see then there's another problem here. The guy named Warsh that we talked about earlier, he was not chosen for popularity. He was chosen for geography, where he lived.

[00:18:01]>> look at the dates. I mean, for instance, you have the reader in green. Look at the dates of those who are transmitting his material. They're not even his age or his time. And a lot of them were not students that even lived in the time that their supposedly their stable leaders lived. Now, this is the guy that I'm looking at because this one I've just circled in black. I want to look at him because he is the one that his the one we're using today. And he does not introduce his Quran for 144 years after Muhammad. Hugely important.

[00:18:33]And I can just say let's bring up the our good old friends. That's 164 years after Muhammad. And of course, they're all after the Abbasid period. This is I'm going to keep bringing it up. You'll see how I I'm going to bring it towards the end of all these episodes. Now, we get to Canon 4.

[00:18:49]You if you have I mean, we already have now 21 qira'at. If that's not bad enough, you have our good friend good old man. His name is Al-Jazari. He is in the 15th century and he chooses another nine.

[00:19:03]Three readers, isn't that amusing? You brought this up before. Why is that important?

[00:19:07]Cuz the three readers along with the seven are >> 10. And supposedly, those are canonized.

[00:19:13]There is another a tradition that added four more, made it 14, and then they decided anything beyond that is heretical.

[00:19:19]Well, who get to decide what is heretical what is not?

[00:19:22]Well, Ibn Mujahid is considered to be the scholar of all scholars. He is the one that is always the father of all the Qira'at, and look at his date. 1429, he made this decision. 1429 to make it and aggrandize it, bring it up to 30. So, now you have 30. You have 7 + 14 + 3 + 6. That makes 30 in my account. 30 official Qurans, they're all there up on the screen. 30 of them. But, that's the fourth canonization, and we want to just show that that's a good 797 years, roughly we're talking about 800 years.

[00:19:52]They have all of them coming after the Abbasids. Now, we come to canon number five, and canon number five is from 7 to 21 up to 30, then we have to come back down to one again. This is why I want to make it visual so people see why we're talking about this.

[00:20:09]You you you not good enough with 30 because obviously you cannot have standardized tests, so you've got to bring them back to one. So, they bring them back to this one [clears throat] here, the Hafs that's circled in black.

[00:20:19]There he is.

[00:20:21]What is that? Well, one official Quran chosen 96 years ago.

[00:20:26]Interestingly, only chosen in Cairo.

[00:20:29]They have to then in all for all of Egypt, that is the Faruq edition that was chosen in 1936. But, that's still not good enough because if you want it for the whole world, then you have to go to King Fahd who then chose this Quran in 1985.

[00:20:43]Why was Hafs chosen? Do you know the reason?

[00:20:45]Um if I want to take a wild guess, we're talking again about probably popularity contest. Well, no, in this case it wasn't popularity contest.

[00:20:55]The reason that Muhammad Ibn Ali Husayni al-Haddad chose him in 1924 is because the Ottomans liked him.

[00:21:04]He was chosen by the Ottomans who come into power in 1299.

[00:21:08]So, that's the 13th century. So, he was popular among the Ottomans. There you go. And why did the Ottomans choose him?

[00:21:13]Because he comes close to where they lived. He He They live up in Turkey.

[00:21:17]They wanted one from that was from Iraq.

[00:21:18]And so, they chose Hafs cuz he was very easy to read.

[00:21:23]Fascinating.

[00:21:24]>> The NIV of the Quran. That's right. They had nothing to do with textual criticism. It had nothing to do with manuscript textual looking at a manuscript. It didn't look at any of the Topkapi, the Samarqand, the the Husayni, the Petro Petropolitanus, or the Sanaa manuscript. Any of the six major manuscript, we don't know of any reference of any of these manuscript that they looked at.

[00:21:42]>> take the 1924 Cairo edition, look at the introduction, and show me which manuscript did they reference. That's right. They can't. So, what do they do?

[00:21:51]Well, you can see that all of these as you're going up on the screen, all of these that are being chosen are chosen two to three to 800 years after the fact. And most I've never heard any Muslim talk about this.

[00:22:07]And that's why we have to put it on a timeline. Do they see I mean, do they see how stupid this sounds in public?

[00:22:13]When you say that these were all existing at the time of Muhammad, and that Muhammad knew all of these, and these guys were there, they were given these dialects were given to Muhammad, that these are nothing more than dialectical differences, and there's no difference they in as far as doctrine, there's no difference as far as practice, there's no difference as far as meaning, they all say the same thing.

[00:22:31]No, they do not. We did a show I've never a month ago where we just unpacked a few of them, and we looked at chapter 98 verse 6, and good old Shabbir Ali took an hour and a half to try to refute you just with one verse. One verse, we found 93,000. Does he want to take an hour and a half on all 93,000? Have any of them looked at the 93,000 differences between the ones you see on the screen right here?

[00:22:54]How many Muslims have even known that?

[00:22:56]How many Muslims even know how many difference they It was It was our group >> a a lot of them know anything about this. It was our group in London that found out the 93 and that's just looking at 23 of the 30 that we have accessible.

[00:23:07]>> I feel bad for my people, my Muslim people because unfortunately, they don't know about these things and when these facts come out, you have babblers like Yasir Qadhi who come and attack without even any knowledge.

[00:23:19]Not one word, not one letter different.

[00:23:21]Every one of these is different. That's why you have the different names. If they were all the same, all you would do is just choose one of them. Say that we don't need the others. Why do you think you need 30 of them? Because all 30 of them were different and this is what you do. Each family, you know this, each family chooses usually they they choose what what whatever is popular in their area. For instance, we know that this one here, the ones that we talked about earlier. This is very popular in North Africa. Right. And that's why it they memorize this one in North Africa. All around the rest of the world, they memorize this one. That's correct. There are 5,000 differences between these two books right here.

[00:23:57]It's right. If you're going to memorize the Quran and you spent all your life memorizing it in the Warsh dialect and then suddenly you come back to England or United States and you see that there's only this one here, you're going to have a problem because you're going to be missing 5,000 words. And which one is preserved right now in the tablets in heaven? Uh which one of these five 5,000 differences? Then that's why you can still buy them today. That's why you can get them on the internet because they sell them to different families from different parts of the world who want to make sure that they have a tajwid, they call it a tajwid in their dialect.

[00:24:28]>> Right. Written down, yes, we know they're written down and that's why they're so different and that's why they have you cannot destroy them because you dare not destroy them because all these families, hundreds of families, thousands of families all over the world memorize it differently than the others and they cannot and they have not been told that the next door neighbors have it a different completely different Quran. Now, before we finish, I have two more slides to show. Right. Cuz I want to show you what then lets this north-south divide. Note note notice this what we call north dominance.

[00:24:56]Mecca.

[00:24:57]Three qira'ats come from Mecca. Do you see that there?

[00:25:00]How about Medina? Five of these qira'at, five of these different Qurans, these Arabic Qurans come from Medina. Take a look here. Cairo, just one comes from Cairo. That's the one that we talked about. Damascus, three qira'at come from Damascus.

[00:25:14]Basra has six qira'at come from Basra and Kufa double that number, 12.

[00:25:20]Why do you think just try to guess? I don't You probably don't know the reason, but why would you think so many come from Kufa?

[00:25:27]Um it could be that the authority at that time favored maybe um Kufa because of existence of schools or or Exactly.

[00:25:38]>> to that. What schools especially? And see, this is what's interesting. What we now know is that Kufa was the seat of many of the seminaries for the Jews and the Christians and also the emerging Muslims. Cuz remember, these are 8th century now. We're talking about 8th century up in 9th century up until the 10th century. All the way from 736 up to 905. 8th, 9th, and 10th century, you have all these different qira'at coming in and the majority of them are in Basra and Kufa, which specially Kufa, 12 of them from Kufa alone because that is where these schools are and they're having all these these discussions with the Jews and Christians. Take a look at the Quran. Have you noticed how many discussions, how many of them theological points there in within the Quran? That now shows you how that the Quran was created at this time, much later in the 8th century >> Right. and these discussions are incorporated into the Quran and that's where they had access to these stories.

[00:26:28]These apocryphal writings, maybe Dr. John Wansbrough said this in the 1970s.

[00:26:32]These apocryphal writings that you see in chapter 5 and chapter 21 and chapter 27 don't make sense cuz none of these writings would have been down in Mecca Medina. There were no Jews in Mecca Medina. There none of this apocryphal account would have existed in Mecca Medina to have these stories incorporated. You had to be up in Kufa, he said. You have to be in Basra. Take a look and see where these Qurans are being written. In the very place where the Jews were throwing out these stories that they didn't believe were authoritative, but they were giving them as basically nothing more than children's tales about these different biblical characters. That's why the Quran is full of these stories. Now can you see why all of this takes place in the north? More than that, let's just look at one of all of the 30 Qurans, eight of them from the Hijaz, 22 of them are from what we know as Iraq and Syria.

[00:27:19]Today's Hafs is also from Kufa, which is Iraq. The conclusion, a minority of the Qurans originated in Mecca and Medina, while the majority were too far to the north. All of these northern areas, except Cairo, are where the Abbasids originated. You're going to get tired of me saying the Abbasids. You'll see why later on. Can you then understand why we're saying this? This is hugely significant. And that's why, folks, you need to you need to look at the maps.

[00:27:43]You need to look at the timelines. When you see the timelines, when you look at the maps, you realize there is a real problem that Islam has not even dealt with. They've got to deal with this north this north dominance. They've got to do with the deal with the fact that almost all of these start to appear in the 8th, 9th, and 10th century. They do not come from the 7th century. They and certainly this one comes from 796, the late 8th century. You've got to start admitting this, Muslims, and you've got to start dealing with this. Proving to me that none of these come from Muhammad and none of these come from heaven and none of these come from Uthman.

[00:28:16]Wrapping up this discussion, the video leaves us with a clear sense that early Quranic transmission is far more complex than many people assume.

[00:28:26]We've looked at how reports in classical sources describe multiple recitations, battlefield disputes, and a push toward a standardized text under Uthman's authority.

[00:28:37]At the same time, Dr. Jay and al-Fadi highlight how the recognized reading traditions appear later in history through scholarly selection rather than a single fixed origin.

[00:28:49]For us, the takeaway isn't about rushing to conclusions, but about paying attention to how canonization processes often develop gradually over centuries.

[00:29:00]Whether you agree with the arguments or not, the discussion pushes you to think critically about sources, timelines, and how tradition becomes authority. And that's where we'll leave it for now.

[00:29:12]This kind of historical inquiry also shows why Islamic textual history continues to be an active area of academic debate, especially when comparing manuscript evidence, oral tradition, and later codification.

[00:29:28]What we are finding out is different from what the standard Islamic narrative gives us in the tradition. Understanding this requires careful, patient study, always.

[00:29:38]Thank you for watching this video.

[00:29:40]Please like and share this video so others can see it. Don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications for more Islamic history content.

[00:29:50]Stay with us as we sift through history to find out what the standard Islamic narrative on the Islamic Awareness website is hiding regarding the origin of Islam.

[00:30:00]Jesus is Lord.

[00:30:03]>> [music] [music] [music]