The Qur'an We Have Today is Not What Muhammad Dictated Verbatim.

SourcingCon provides literally no sources nor evidential backing to any of the claims Cn made last round. Thus has left me unable to fact-check his claims. This should weigh heavily against Con in the arguments since virtually everything Con states when making factual claims about the transmission of the Qu’ran commit the bare assertion fallacy.Thus, rather than wasting time attempting to attack my research (which is an ad hominem fallacy), or skills in Arabic, Con would be better off actually backing up all his claims of evidence rather than assertion.Tawatur – Precision of SuccessionCon provides no sources for any of this so I cannot fact-check his claims. The resolution is “The Qur'an We Have Today is Not What Muhammad Dictated Verbatim”, there are two key conditionals here: 1. What Muhummad dictated2. The Qu’ran we have today Pro attacks my notion of what the Qu’ran is, but fails to provide a superior definition himself. I asserted that there are largely two extant recitations of the Qu’ran, the Hafs & the Warsh. Both of this have their textual variant today, and both have canonised editions that are largely in use. The major recitation, the Hafs, has a canonised textual edition in the 1924 Cairo editionas already stated.[http://tinyurl.com..., http://tinyurl.com...]. In any case, my arguments are non-specific, neither edition(s) are likely to be the verbatim word of Muhammad because of the implications already mentioned.Con asserts, baldly, that there is a flawless chain of recitation to Muhammad, but makes no attempt to prove this is the case. We simply do not have all the facts that expand this chain through 1400 years. Moreover Con makes enormous assumptions regarding the competency of the all the reciters between the gap of Muhammad’s death and our first complete transcripts of the Qu’ran with its full implementation of diacritical elements.Given we know scribes inevitably make errors in the copying of passages by hand, even highly trained ones that were revered in the Jewish written tradition.[http://en.wikipedia.org...] Thus, what chance does oral tradition have being perfect> This is made worse by the fact that oral traditions inherently have no proof-checking process. If anything if forgotten/remembered incorrectly then there is no record of what it originally was, and no way to know how reliable that transmission was in an objective manner.Moreover, if Con is citing today’s traditions in reciting the Qu’ran, he needs to demonstrate this was the case for the entirety of the Qu’ranic history. Since one “mental copy” is only as good as the previous mental copy. Thus any errors introduced from the previous generation will accumulate in the next generation, and so on and so forth. Thus, if there was one error in the 60,000 word recital per generation, and say 50 generations until it the textual canon became clear, then we have 50 accumulated errors. I argue the situation is evidentially *much* worse than this in my opening round, the sheer number of textual variants which are in large part, a result of the variant oral traditions, are only to be expected of a transmission process that is not infallible.Moreover, the most sensitive years of the Quality of the Qu’ran are the first ~350 years, during the period in which the text became canonised, the number of oral variants were trimmed, and the first textual copies were produced. Thus, Con needs to assert everything he claims was true in that period of Islam (600-950AD).Con extensively addresses intentional/deliberate changes to the Qu’ran over the course of its transmission, but that doesn’t affirm what Con wants it to. That at best only makes a decent case against deliberate changes to the Qu’ran. However the vast majority of variants in any transmission tradition are unintentional ones, thus virtually all of Con’s argument is off-target. Furthermore, Islamic law was in it’s infancy in the first few centuries, with many different legal systems arising, which is evidenced by the large number of forged Hadith that we possess today.[http://en.wikipedia.org..., http://www.quranicpath.com...]Mathematical ArgumentCon makes an oversimplistic mathematical argument for the reliability of the transmission of the Qu’ran, as well as plugging extremely overly optimistic values in with no evidence to support any of them.Even assuming Con’s absurdly simplistic argument, if we assume that 2 in every 100 Hafaz are either unjudicious, or untrustworthy, then we have a 2% chance PER GENERATION of errors being incorporated in the chain of transmission. Since people who learned the Qu’ran via. oral tradition necessarily learned from their predecessor, and their recollection of the QU’ran is only going to be as good as the source material they have had.Thus, what we end up with is something like this:Gen 1: 100% authenticGen 2: 98% authentiGen 3: 96% authenticGen 4: 94% authenticThe math is oversimplistic, but it gets the point across, each generation 2% of all reciters will be unreliable, and thus their transmissions will be unreliable, and their erroneous transmissions will affect a proportionate number of future recitations, and so on. Thus, over time, the portion of reciters with a perfect copy of the Qu’ran back to Muhammad decreases.If for example, one unreliable reciter taught 10 Muslims, and all 10 of those Muslims were themselves perfect and flawless in their transmission, it simply would not matter, as their recitation is only as good as their source material. Con needs to actually present evidence that the chain of narration indeed is reliable all the way to Muhammad, and that there is a mechanism that can perfectly correct for inevitable errors that will arise in the transmission, and that this mechanism has been in place for the entirety of history. A tough burden to bearQira’atJust how is this an argument for the Qu’ran being the verbatim word of Muhammad> I have read over this argument dozens of times and I have yet to find one. Muhammad dictated the Qu’ran one way, and now we have seven ways. If there ever was a time where the law of non-contradiction was useful it is this time. Con essentially shoots himself in the foot by bringing this argument up since at most one of these Qira’at can be what Muhammad dictated.Moreover, we already know that the Qira’at end up changing the meaning of what is stated in the Qu’ran in several instances, and that we are missing the manuscripts for five of these Qira’at and we know there were many more than just seven ways from the Hadith. Thus I have no idea how Con can make the following claim:“Hadith fulfilling the degree of Tawatur, which makes it 100% true”Clearly he cannot make that claim if he doesn’t know the contents of all but two of these Qira’at. Furthermore, Con’s argument here presupposes the Uthmanic Codex is a reliable transmission from Muhammad. Given that the codex had not been compiled before then then we are left relying on the accuracy of transmission from Muhammad to Xaid.“I found the last verse of Surat at-Tauba (Repentance) with Abi Khuzaima al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. The verse is: 'Verily there has come to you an Apostle from amongst yourselves. It grieves him that you should receive any injury or difficulty ... (till the end of Bara'a)'.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.478).This raises an important point.Either:1. Zaid was searching for the recitation2. Zaid was searching for a manuscriptIf Zaid was searching for a manuscripts, then this seriously undermines the case for reliable oral transmission from Muhammad to his followers, since: 1.Zaid would have just compiled the Qu’ran from memory (he was one of the four claimed people to have known it in it’s entirety) if he believed oral tradition was as strong as Con claims, especially given the primitive nature of Arabic at the time.2.The availability of written portions of the Qu’ran was limitedIf Zaid was searching for the recitation, then this is even worse for Con, since the whole notion of reliable oral tradition back to Muhummad is dubious. Thus Con has a choice of which horn of the dilemma to grapple.[ http://www.answering-islam.org...]What we see instead is what appears to the objective viewer to be nothing more than an honest attempt by someone who knows his limitations at gathering the scattered Qu’ran. For example in the following Hadith:Narrated Zaid: “So I started looking for the Qur'an and collecting it from (what was written on) palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones, and also from the men who knew it by heart, till I found the last verse of Surat at-Tauba (repentance) with Abi Khuzaima al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.478This is understandable given verses were lost using the battle of Yamama Variant CodexesIf the early oral transmission was as infallible as Con claimed it to be, then we would not expect to see variant codexes of the Qu’ran in the early history (for evidence, I cite Con’s dubious math), yet we are already aware that the Abdullah ibn Mas’ud and Ubayy ibn Ka'b codexes varied significantly from the Uthmanic codex, and they existed before it was canonised. Moreover, the ibn Mas’ud condex is expecially problematic for Con because he was a prestigious follower of Muhummad“No study of the early transmission of the Qur'an would be complete without an analysis of the contribution of Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, one of the most prominent of Muhammad's companions. He was one of his earliest disciples and we are told that he was "the first man to speak the Qur'an loudly in Mecca after the apostle" (Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasulullah, p.141).”[ http://www.answering-islam.org...]