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Wa`alykum As-Salaamu Warahmatullahi Wabarakaatuh.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Dear brother in Islam, we would like to thank you for showing keenness on knowing the teachings of Islam, and we appreciate the great confidence you have in us. We hope our efforts meet your expectations.
In response to the question you posed, we'd cite the following:
“It is to be noted that in the Qur’an the Prophet’s life, the history of the Arabs and the events which occurred during the period of the revelation of the Qur’an have not been mingled with the Divine Verses, as is the case with the Bible. The Qur’an is the pure word of Allah. Not one word therein is not divine. Not a single word has been deleted from its text. The Book has been handed down to our age in its complete and original form since the time of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. From the time the Book began to be revealed, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, had dictated its text to the scribes. Whenever some Divine Message was revealed, the Prophet would call a scribe and dictate its words to him. The written text was then read out to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, who, having satisfied himself that the scribe had committed no error of recording, would put the manuscript in safe custody.
The Prophet used to instruct the scribe about the sequence in which a revealed message was to be placed in a particular Surah (chapter). In this manner, the Prophet continued to arrange the text of the Qur’an in systematic order till the end of the chain of revelations. Again, it was ordained from the beginning of Islam that a recitation of the Holy Qur’an must be an integral part of worship. Hence the illustrious Companions would commit the Divine verses to memory as soon as they were revealed. Many Ahadith explain how frequently they used to consult the Prophet regarding their recitation of the Qur’an and beautiful stories were told about women who asked their husbands-to-be to teach them a part of the Qur’an as their dowries.
Method of preservations of the Qur’an during the Prophet's time
Besides, those of the Companions who were literate used to keep a written record of several portions of the Holy Qur'an. In this manner, the text of the Holy Qur'an had been preserved in four different ways during the lifetime of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him:
a) The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, had the whole text of the Divine Messages from the beginning to the end committed to writing by the scribes of revelations. The Prophet used to keep scribes in his service. The four Rightly Guided Caliphs, as well as Zayd ibn Thabit, Ubayy ibn Ka‘b, Mu‘awiya ibn Abi Sufyan are among those who were known as scribes.
b) Many of the Companions learned the whole text of the Qur’an, every syllable of it, by heart.
c) All the illustrious Companions, without any exception, had memorized at least some portions of the Holy Qur'an, for the simple reason that it was obligatory for them to recite it during worship.
d) A considerable number of the literate Companions kept a private record of the text of the Qur'an and satisfied themselves as to the purity of their record by reading it out to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him.
Method of preservations of the Qur’an after the demise of the Prophet
It is an incontrovertible historical truth that the text of the Holy Qur’an extant today is, syllable for syllable, exactly the same as the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, had offered to the world as the Word of Allah. After the demise of the Prophet, the first Caliph Abu Bakr, may Allah be pleased with him, assembled all the Huffaz (those who kept the Qur’an by heart) and the written records of the Qur’an and with their help had the whole text written in Book form. In the time of the third Caliph ‘Uthman, may Allah be pleased with him, copies of this original version were made and officially dispatched to the Capitals of the Islamic World. Two of these copies exist in the world today, one in Istanbul and the other in Tashkent. Whosoever is so inclined may compare any printed text of the Holy Qur’an with those two copies, he shall find no variation. And how can one expect any discrepancy, when there have existed several million Huffaz in every generation since the time of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and in our own time? Should anyone alter a syllable of the original text of the Qur’an, these Huffaz would at once expose the mistake.
In the last century, an Institute of Munich University in Germany collected FORTY-TWO THOUSAND copies of the Holy Qur’an including manuscripts and printed texts produced in each period in the various parts of the Islamic World. Research work was carried out on these texts for half a century, at the end of which the researchers concluded that apart from copying mistakes, there was no discrepancy in the text of these forty-two thousand copies, even though they belonged to the period between the first century to fourteenth century of Hijrah and had been procured from all parts of the world. This Institute, alas, perished in the bombing attacks on Germany during World War II, but the findings of its research project survived.
Another point that must be kept in view is that the word in which the Qur'an was revealed is a living language in our own time. It is still current as the mother tongue of about a hundred million people from Iraq to Morocco. In the non-Arab world too, hundreds of thousands of people study and teach this language. The grammar of the Arabic language, its lexicon, its phonetic system and its phraseology, have remained intact for fourteen hundred years.
A modern Arabic-speaking person can comprehend the Holy Qur'an with as much proficiency as did the Arabs of fourteen centuries ago. This, then, is an important attribute of Prophet Muhammad, which is shared by no other Prophet or Leader of Religion. The Book which Allah revealed to Him for the guidance of mankind is today's in its original language without the slightest alteration in its vocabulary."
The above quotation is based on Mawlana Abu al-A‘la al-Mawdudi’s article “History of the Qur’an”.
The above-mentioned facts about the accuracy and preservation of the Holy Qur’an is even acknowledged by several Western writers. Examples of non-Muslims’ statements about the Qur’an are the following:
“On the whole we find in it a collection of wisdom which can be adopted by the most intelligent of men, the greatest of philosophers and the most skilful of politicians… But there is another proof of the Divinity of the Qur’an; it is the fact that it has been preserved intact through the ages since the time of its Revelation till the present day… Read and re-read by the Muslim world, this book does not rouse in the faithful any weariness, it rather, through repetition, is more loved every day. It gives rise to a profound feeling of awe and respect in the one who reads it or listens to it … It was, therefore, neither by means of violence of arms, nor through the pressure of obtrusive missionaries, that caused the great and rapid diffusion of Islam, but, above all, through the fact that this Book, presented by the Muslims to the vanquished with the liberty to accept it or reject it, was the Book of God.” (Laura Veccia Vaglieri, Apologie de I’Islamisme, pp.. 57-59)
“…It will thus be seen, from the above, that a final and complete text of the Qur’an was prepared within twenty years after the death (A.D 632) of Muhammad, and that this has remained the same, without any change, or alteration by enthusiasts, translators, or interpolators, up to the present time. It is to be regretted that the same cannot be said of all the books of the Old and New Testaments. (F.F. Arbuthnot, The construction of the Bible and the Qur’an, London 1885, p.5)
“So there has been no opportunity for any forgery or pious fraud in the Qur’an which distinguishes it from almost all other important religious works of ancient times…It is exceedingly strange that this illiterate person should have composed the best book in the language.” (Basanta Coomar Bose, Mohammadanism, Calcutta, 1931, p.4).
Excerpted, with slight modifications, from: http://www.islamweb.net
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