The Quranic Dilemma – How to CRUSH the Perfect Preservation Myth

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]And yeah, we got a good show, guys. We got a good show. This is just kind of the launching of it, but we've got something else. We've got the Quranic dilemma or the Quran dilemma.

[00:00:10]We might take a poll, see whether people prefer Quran dilemma or Quranic dilemma.

[00:00:15]Keep in mind, guys, this is distinct from the Islamic dilemma, completely different argument.

[00:00:20]No connection to the Islamic dilemma.

[00:00:23]It's a completely different argument. Um this argument is it just destroys what your average Muslim believes. Your average Muslim believes that he has the one Quran that was revealed to Muhammad. There there was one Quran, just one Quran revealed to Muhammad, and it's been preserved till now. Few years back and lots of lots of Muslims still believe it because it hasn't filtered down to them, but five, [clears throat] six years ago it was just standard to say one Quran perfectly preserved from the time of Muhammad down to the present, not one letter not one letter of difference between any two Qurans on the planet. It was a total total like idiotic nonsense.

[00:01:05]Really, really, really strange stuff.

[00:01:06]Anyway, guys, we've been exposing that stuff for a while. Um but it's getting it's getting worse because now people are bringing this stuff up to Muslims, and someone brought up someone brought up the issue of the different Qurans to Muhammad Hijab, and Muhammad Hijab's response leads to what we're calling the Quranic dilemma. And just just in a nutshell we'll unpack it as we go along, but you got to make a decision, Muslims. You got to make a decision.

[00:01:37]Either you only have part of the Quran that existed when Muhammad died. So, Muhammad delivers the Quran over 23 years or so to his followers, and then they have the Quran and so on when he died. But guess what? You don't have all of that right now.

[00:01:54]And if you're going, "No, we do." Just shut up. Just shut up and listen for once in your life, right? You don't have it. Not according to According to even Muhammad Hijab, you don't have it.

[00:02:03]Muslim scholars, you don't have it. You do not have all of what was revealed to Muhammad, right? Um so, we're we're about to find out. You can either say you have part of the Quran, part of the Quran, or there are many different Qurans. You have to say one of them. You can't say you have the one You can't say there's only one Quran and you have the one Quran that was revealed to Muhammad. You either have parts of the Quran, you don't have the complete Quran, or or you have many different Qurans. You have to pick one. You can't say one Quran and it's the one that was revealed to Muhammad. You can't say it anymore. There you go.

[00:02:40]When I say or when you hear Muslims say that the Quran is preserved dot for dot, letter for letter, Yeah. do you affirm that?

[00:02:52]The Quran is preserved dot for dot, letter for dot.

[00:02:54]Mhm.

[00:02:56]Well, the thing is, it wasn't revealed with dots and letters. It was revealed with sounds. So, if we want to be very technical, like >> He used to say it and then he got burned up. He got burned up on it and it was just sounds, guys. It was just sounds.

[00:03:09]We just played the clip of him saying that, by the way.

[00:03:12]>> [snorts] >> The I'm I'm sorry. Dots and letters were not necessarily there at the time of the prophet, so it was revealed with uh sounds. Yes, but the the spirit of what it's saying, right? Maybe not talking about like actual dots and letters, but do you think that the Quran has been perfectly preserved?

[00:03:28]>> Perfectly preserved, yeah. Perfectly preserved, of course. Okay.

[00:03:32]Yeah. Can perfect preservation have distinctions in semantics and meaning?

[00:03:39]Yeah. Okay.

[00:03:40]It can? How can it?

[00:03:42]>> Yeah.

[00:03:43]What do you mean?

[00:03:45]So, When you say When you say the Quran, when you say the Quran, Mhm. what do you mean?

[00:03:51]Okay, that's a great question.

[00:03:52]>> that it's singular or are you saying that it's plural?

[00:03:56]So, he's basically asking about different Qurans having verses with different meanings, different meanings, and trying to get Hijab to state his position on that. So, just want everyone to know where where he's going with this.

[00:04:15]Let's see.

[00:04:16]Quran >> And and and again, um he's trying to set up the logical problem of the Quran where Muslims as fans already pointing out, they got their logical problem of the Trinity.

[00:04:26]And so, they got their argument, and all you have to do is apply the exact same reasoning to the Quran, and it would would seem to force them cuz they're trying to force Christians into saying, "Okay, well, this would actually be three gods" or something along those lines.

[00:04:40]And so, you could take the exact same argument structure and the exact same um meaning of I concept of identity that they're demanding and apply to the Quran, and now you guys have multiple Qurans. Hijab doesn't want to admit that there are multiple Qurans, and so, he's got to end up saying that there's only they only have part of the Quran.

[00:04:58]Oopsie. Oopsie. Well, let's see.

[00:05:00]When you ask me what the Quran is, it is the recitation of Surat al-Fatiha until Surat al-Nas in a way which is commensurate with A, a chain of narration which goes all the way back to the prophet and is approved by him.

[00:05:17]B, the skeletal text or the rasm Uthmani which is not necessarily written, but is a is a ilm which I can explain in a in a second. And the third thing is that it has to be commensurate with the Arabic language. If it fulfills all three criteria according to the biggest What's up?

[00:05:34]Uh so, there is a debate that Libyano had uh versus Timothy at Speaker's Corner when he was there a couple weeks back, and he was asked this similar kind of style of questions.

[00:05:48]And you'll notice that Muhammad Hijab didn't bring up that the readings themselves need to be like mass transmitted or mutawatir. Like they he didn't say that at all, which is important because Ibn Ibn al-Jazari rejects that as as a concept that the Quran that the readings are uh have this like you know, tawatur or or like mass transmission. However, Libyano, his student, actually believes that that's the defining characteristic of the readings of the Quran that they have to have this kind of like mass transmission, uh what they call like mutawatir, which is basically like it's so massively transmitted that you can't basically come together and lie about it. Like so many people agree on it that it it would be impossible for them to like collude. Um so so that's actually what most Muslims believe in.

[00:06:39]Surprisingly, Muhammad didn't give that at Muhammad Hijab didn't give that as a criteria here because he's actually quoting Ibn al-Jazari who does say what he said. It's not original to Ibn al-Jazari though, but he's like the you know, popularizer of it. Um uh but but it's important to note that because this is a different standard.

[00:06:55]It's a different it's a different criteria that you're going to hear from other Muslims like Libyano for what makes a reading of the Quran authentic.

[00:07:03]They're going to give you different criteria for that.

[00:07:06]And um I would say if your the criteria that you guys have come up with leads to contradictions and all this stuff, I'd say you probably need some better criteria. And it's so simple. Human beings made mistakes when they're transmitting the Quran. It's so it's so easy, but they can't acknowledge that.

[00:07:25]So guys, if you want to understand what they do and how absolutely insane this is, they've got dozens of different versions of the Quran and um that they'll at least want to say like 10 of them or something like this.

[00:07:37]They all go back to Muhammad. They all go back to Muhammad. And every verse in every one of these, even though some of them contradict each other, they all go back to Muhammad. They were all revealed that way.

[00:07:47]And it's just That's all to That's all just to avoid the idea that a human being could have made these kinds of errors and stuff like that and had textual variants.

[00:07:56]>> I want to show you something I want to Let me just illustrate this point actually because um this is something uh that Muslims make such a big deal about and I want to I want to Yeah, I want to show like a a graph Look on this just to show you guys what David is talking about here because it's so crazy to think that this is not uh this is not like just human intervention or human error.

[00:08:20]Um You want that up on the screen? Yeah, let's put that up on the screen and we'll kind of like go through this. So, uh we can kind of like ignore that note here on the side, but the the the text here is what I want you guys to focus on. So, this is like the Uthmanic kind of rasm, which is the the consonantal outline of the text. There's no So, in for Arabic for the for the script to to work, in order to read this properly, you need to have these little dots right here on here. But because there are no dots on the Uthmanic uh like the the manuscripts and stuff like that the codices, um it can lead to different ambiguities. So, this These are not canonical readings these two right here, but I could have done this with canonical readings as well. But the idea is that Okay, so here's the skeletal outline for this one right here if you can see my mouse. And you go down, you can put two dots right here and it's going to say al-kitab, which is the book, or you can go down here and put two dots below, it's al-kebab, which is like a kebab, like you know, like something to eat. Yummy. So, yeah, or like right here, rayb means doubt, zayt means oil. The the the outline is the same. The only difference is the dots.

[00:09:29]So, what they're suggesting and by the way, this this second one is an example that Muslims use in their literature that like one of the readers his name is actually Hamza Az-Zayyat because uh he had this reading it's not a canonical reading but he instead of reading it as rayb he wrote it as he wrote it as zayt.

[00:09:46]And so the idea in the literature is to show that uh you know you need like a teacher you need a guide to do this you can't just kind of but but it's so the the the point that uh making here is like what David is saying is like if you just have this consonantal outline right here and you can actually fill in the blanks with certain dots Muslims are like oh this is so I I have a I have a I do have a example with like you know the the famous example here where it's like uh you know king versus owner and the only difference is going to be like a long kind of line to indicate that it's a long vowel. So the idea is that um there's no mistakes here it's just it's it's like but you can see how a scribe can easily make these errors. A scribe can easily just put like two dots here or sorry sorry the two dots are consistent but like you know two two dots on the top here or one dot on the bottom like making a T sound or a B sound. It's it just seems like so easy that any scribe could just make that mistake but Muslims like no it's not a scribe who is making the mistake it's a law law revealed in all these ways.

[00:10:44]>> Yeah.

[00:10:45]So I have this slide for like to to prove other points but like this is like you know it illustrates like kind of what you're talking about there. This is a you know different point maybe we'll get to it later on but I just wanted to show that it yeah.

[00:10:59]All right here we go back to the video.

[00:11:01]authority of Qira'at probably in Islamic history name is Ibn ul-Jazari and the book is called Tayyibat al-Nashr which is the most authoritative book on the on the matter.

[00:11:12]That thing in question would be called the Quran. If it does not fulfill those three criterion then it would not be called the Quran.

[00:11:20]Okay. So are you affirming that so if we take the mode specifically right and you're saying okay it meets these conditions where it's an approved recitation. If we take the mode specifically and we say of mode one, if someone let's let's say you have three Muslims in a room, right?

[00:11:37]>> Yeah.

[00:11:38]Yeah. One person recites the Quran in mode one.

[00:11:44]Sure. Have they Have they truly recited the Quran? Yes.

[00:11:48]So that that's a good question.

[00:11:49]>> recites in mode two, has that Muslim truly recited the Quran?

[00:11:54]Are mode one and mode two distinct from one another? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's Say you've got two Qira'at, you've got two readings of the word Malik or or the word which you do have, right? So for example King and owner, right? King and owner, right?

[00:12:08]So um some of the Qira'at they recite it Malik, which is owner, and some of them recite it Malik, which is king. Are you aware of that, right?

[00:12:19]Okay.

[00:12:19]>> Yeah, I'm Yeah, I'm aware. We claim Our claim is that Prophet Muhammad approved both, okay? Approved both. Guys, here again.

[00:12:27]Inference to the best explanation. You have these words, which look and sound very very very very similar. So, how do you explain that you have one word in certain Quran certain versions of the Quran, and the other word in certain versions of the Quran.

[00:12:47]And I would just say, well, you had whatever the original reading was, and then someone messed up at some point, and got the got an almost a very similar a very similar looking word, they went with it.

[00:13:02]Uh that would be that would and I I wouldn't even have a problem with that.

[00:13:06]Unless you were saying perfect dot for dot letter for letter preservation, then I'd say, okay, this refutes you.

[00:13:11]But they can't they can't say that.

[00:13:13]Nope, Muhammad approved them both.

[00:13:15]Muhammad approved them both. Yeah.

[00:13:17]Right. have two different meanings, but our claim is that he approved both. In other words, we believe Allah revealed it like this, and Allah revealed it like that as well, okay? like this way and like that way.

[00:13:29]So, if you're asking is that if someone recites only Maliki Yawm id-Din and does not recite Maliki Yawm id-Din, have they recited Surat al-Fatiha? Yes, they have. So, is the minimum requirement for the Quran to be read once is reciting it only with one mode.

[00:13:46]One Okay, so so can I can I respond now? So If we if we just apply, right?

[00:13:54]The same principle of Leibniz's law, right? If A equals B, then whatever is true of A is true of B, okay.

[00:14:04]If we apply Leibniz's law to this principle and we say of the modes that Muslim like that room I was saying, Muslim one recites in mode one, Muslim two recites the Quran in mode two, Muslim three recites the Quran in mode three.

[00:14:20]According to Leibniz's law, how many Qurans are represented by numerical identity? That's the thing. Look, I don't think you understand what I'm saying to you, all right? I'm not trying to make a Trinitarian argument about Malik and Malek. I'm not trying to say that they're separate and distinct as well as conjoined at the same time. I'm not making a contradictory claim like the Trinitarians.

[00:14:39]I'm just making a normal claim that you have two ways of reciting this particular verse. You have Malik and you have Malek. Owner and king, both of them are approved by the prophet, okay? And that's it. Simple as this. Okay, so so I under- Respectfully you didn't Respectfully you didn't answer my question. It's not the same. We don't believe the law of identity or substitution identity holds in this situation because we're not saying everything that is true of cuz it's ridiculous. There are aspects of the Quran which are completely different from other aspects anyway. Chapter one is different from chapter two. But they're both Are you Are you applying a part-whole relation? Or are you applying an Yeah, yeah, so it's a part-whole relation. That's what I'm saying to you.

[00:15:20]It's a part-whole relation. It's Malik is part of the Quran. Malik is also part of the Quran.

[00:15:28]What's that thing?

[00:15:29]He he did not say that to John initially at all. Like He did He didn't imply any sort of part whole relation in the last 10 minutes.

[00:15:39]And Hijab is sitting here being like, "Oh, that's what I'm saying. I What you didn't hear me say part wholes mereology?" It's like, "Not until John just made the words explicit." So, either Hijab is trying to hide behind something or he just was not tracking at all with his own answer.

[00:15:56]I think once he once he kind of felt that cuz this is this is what he was trying to run on on Avery when Avery was on this kind of the logical problem of the Trinity which they they kind of get from Dale Tuggy and other Unitarian philosophers and use it their own way.

[00:16:11]But he was trying to run the argument.

[00:16:13]So, he's he's familiar with the kind of like the the questions and like how you get to this point and if if the Christian says this and this is why you respond if a Christian says that, that's how you respond. And when he saw it flipped, "You don't understand me. No, no, you don't understand what I'm saying.

[00:16:26]You clearly don't understand." Like the gaslighting starts when he clearly understood him. But then Muhammad Hijab like you said, he he just he he changed his or or you know, he he he introduced something new which was he didn't say before which is this the part whole relationship. So, in other words, what he's saying is that king So, if you read if you read the Quran and that the variant that you're going to read is going to be like the reading with king, then you're actually reading just part of Al-Fatiha. You're not reading the entirety or the whole chapter of Al-Fatiha.

[00:16:57]You need to read all Well, actually, they don't even have That's part of the problem which we are going to talk about today. They don't actually have all the readings. So, yeah, it's it's going to be problematic.

[00:17:07]Um Jay, when when Muhammad Hijab is saying, "Oh, you got these two different these two different readings, but Muhammad confirmed them all."

[00:17:17]Just to be clear, it's not like when you have all these textual variants and you have tens of thousands of them that you have a Hadith where Muhammad says, "Oh, yeah, I affirm that reading and that other reading and that other reading." They're just saying, "Okay, we we have this version of the Quran, the Hafs, and it has a chain of narration that supposedly goes back to Muhammad that definitely couldn't have been invented. No one can invent a list of names."

[00:17:39]Um and then we have this other Quran version and it has a a different word, a different reading instead of, but it also has a chain of a list of names that go back to Muhammad and so no one could have ever faked that uh faked that list of names.

[00:17:53]That that's what he's Isn't that what he's basing it on? Like, "Oh, they All these different versions say they all go back to Muhammad. Therefore, Muhammad must have affirmed all these different versions." That's exactly what he's saying. And then that's why I brought the point with the totality because you have a 10th century huge huge huge scholar who is saying that actually, no, there's another way to look at this.

[00:18:11]It's not that these are both He doesn't say the language that they're both divine. He says that one of them is more correct than the other one. And so the kind of analogy that I like to use is like if a Christian is reading like a verse in the Gospel according to John and in the Gospel according to Matthew, and you would never say, "Oh, this In John, it's more correct than in Matthew cuz this is the Bible. This is the inspired word of God." We don't say it's more correct than the other. So obviously they didn't He didn't have that view. He didn't share that view that Muhammad Hijab has. He's saying, "No, this reading of king is more correct than this other reading." He didn't say they both go back to Muhammad. Muhammad approved both readings. Um and even you have scholars today like Yasir Qadhi who says that yes, you might have a valid chain that goes back to Muhammad, but what is the chain telling you? Is it saying that Muhammad actually said it like that or did he just give permission, let's say, for, you know, it to be said in different ways and maybe that was one of the ways he said it, but did Muhammad actually say it like that?

[00:19:03]That's what Yasir Qadhi was saying in the interview with Muhammad Hijab. What did Muhammad say? What was the Quran What did it look like? And And the problem that we're going to see today. All right, let's see.

[00:19:15]That is what I'm saying. It's meteorologically part whole. That's what I'm saying.

[00:19:18]>> Okay. Okay, if it's part whole then your camera just died. If it's part whole then if it is the case that someone recites mode one and someone recites mode two and someone recites mode three then they are not reciting because I asked you earlier I said are they reciting the Quran? I think I think what is what one sec let me finish let me finish. I didn't cut you off. I didn't cut you off.

[00:19:39]So it is not the case that they are reciting the Quran if they only recite mode one mode two and mode three but rather according to what you just said they are reciting part of the Quran.

[00:19:50]>> Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay yeah.

[00:19:52]No see that's right okay. But when I say I've I've read Genesis I say I'm reading the Bible. It doesn't that's a vernacular expression all right? If I if I read the book of Genesis and I say I'm reading the Bible what I mean is and this is I don't understand every week it's as if I speak to Christians they don't understand part and whole. If I say a part of something can be expressed in the language of wholes. If I say I read the book of Genesis and is it okay for me to say I'm reading the Bible? Of course it's okay for me to say I'm reading the Bible if I'm only reading Genesis. So you can use a part It's not the whole Bible though and that's John's question. If you read Al-Fatiha to An-Nas everything in between the covers of this particular book did you read the whole Quran?

[00:20:39]And the answer that from my job is is forced to say now is no you didn't read the whole Quran you just read a percentage or or or a part of the Quran.

[00:20:47]But no one would say that if you just read Genesis that you just read the entire Bible you read the the whole Bible. No one would say that. You read the Bible but you didn't read the entirety of the Bible. I don't know if there's like a distinction in philosophy or something between the and the whole but that's I don't I don't know what he's getting at here but to me doesn't make sense.

[00:21:04]>> he's doing is equivocating on terms.

[00:21:06]There's just an equivocation between the Quran being the complete object that he's referring to and then the Quran in the vernacular expression sense that he's alluding to. Like in the same way that when I say I've read the Bible that's just shorthand for saying I read Genesis, which is a part of the Bible, right? And so when he says the I read the Quran he's equivocating between the term Quran as in the fullness of the revealed speech of Allah and Quran as in just the shorthand way of saying I've read one of the modes.

[00:21:47]Okay, how would It's called totum pro parte, which is using a whole to describe a part and vice versa. You can do that. That that's a normal So now we can ask an epistemic question, okay?

[00:21:59]Okay. If I hear a Muslim say the Quran has been perfectly preserved and I hear one Muslim say that it's never been changed, right? There were there was I can't remember the name of the scholar right now but specifically there was a person who went around saying it was dot for dot, letter for letter, right? He was a very influential person. He has clips of him.

[00:22:19]Do you know what I'm talking about? No, cuz that look the dots in the letters were only introduced in like the >> no, I'm I'm just saying this was uh he was an he was an older gentleman. He had just a white beard. He didn't have a mustache. It's it's it's from back in the day. Anyway anyway, yeah. I've had I've had many conversations with Muslims. And so I've heard this claim constantly where Muslims are floored whenever you show any type of distinction because their idea of perfect preservation and your idea of perfect perfect preservation are distinct from each other. Hey, by the way, that's that's interesting in itself. He says when you're saying yes, the Quran has been preserved, perfectly preserved, Hijab is saying of course we have all these different versions of the Quran, but they all go back to Muhammad, so they've all it's been it's been perfectly preserved. Um when your average Muslim when he hears perfectly preserved is thinking one Quran dot for dot letter for letter. Why? Because that's what you guys used to say perfect preservation meant. And they're still going with that earlier definition before you admitted that basically you you were all lying. And it's just amazing that that Muslims didn't you know Muslims didn't catch on and go, "Oh wait, you were liars when we can't trust what you're saying."

[00:23:27]Um but yeah, that's the situation here.

[00:23:30]You asked a question about the Quran, right? Yeah. So so on the part whole relation, you say, "Okay, if someone recites mode one, they're reciting the Quran." Yeah. Yes. A part of the Quran.

[00:23:41]How about that? Okay. They're reciting parts of the Quran.

[00:23:44]And so if you have the Quran as a as a part whole relation, Yeah.

[00:23:48]>> then you actually would have to say that uh at certain points the Quran was not fully revealed until the seventh mode was revealed, right?

[00:23:58]>> that's what we affirm. Okay. But the Quran says that itself.

[00:24:03]Uh but the Quran doesn't say that.

[00:24:04]>> Where Yeah, where? Chapter and verse.

[00:24:06]Chapter and verse.

[00:24:09]Uh pretty crazy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's part It's part of the Quran. You can recite the entire Hafs Quran. You recited part of the Quran.

[00:24:17]Okay, what's the problem? Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. I guess the point has been made that reading the Hafs cover to cover, every single word in there like you said you can memorize the whole thing, you only memorize part of the Quran. You only read part of the Quran.

[00:24:34]So, that means that the entirety of the Quran you now it's in percentages. The Quran can be broken up into parts as percentages. So 100% of the Quran is seven ahruf.

[00:24:46]That's uh what Muhammad Hijab uh hasn't uh said so clearly yet, but that's what he actually means when he says that that the the entire if if if if if Hafs is only part of it and Hafs represents like, you know, some of the modes or a mode depending on how Muslims look at it. Um and then you have the entirety of the canonical readings that according to Muslim scholarship like um Thern breaks down in his video and I went over in the review yesterday that that that it's not the case that all seven modes continue to exist today. That they do not exist and there's reasons for why they say that.

[00:25:21]But even if you're not convinced by the reasons that they give, the arguments that they give, the consensus is that all seven modes don't exist. So it doesn't matter what Libyano says, some guy from TikTok or whatever. It's it's the consensus of Muslim scholars is that all seven modes don't exist. So what does that mean?

[00:25:37]That means that you might um escape the problem of having multiple Qurans, but you're now introduced to another problem, which is that you have an incomplete Quran.

[00:25:50]And that's the Quran dilemma.

[00:25:53]Under no circumstances as do you have one Quran as it was completed during the time of Muhammad. You don't have You do not have it. You've either got many Qurans or you've got part of the Quran. You don't have what you think.

[00:26:10]And like 99.something percent of you believe that you that's what you have and you're all wrong. You're You're all indisputably wrong.

[00:26:20]>> [music] [music]