Page 329 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

THE ORIENTALIST AND THE QUR'AN 309

that is unacceptable to any reciter. There is a concurrence among Muslims
to recite the Qur'an according to the inflections of any of the seven most
distinguished reciters," all of whom follow the 'Uthmani skeleton and the
sunna of qiritat, the clifferences manifesting themselves mostly in a fewaltered
diacritical marks which bear no weight on the content of these verses.Every
printed Mushaf is based on one or another of these seven qirii'iit, following
it uniformly from beginning to end. Flugel however used all seven, arbitrarily
choosing one qirii'athere and another there (without any attempt at justifi-
cation), creating a mishmash of no validity or value. EvenJeffrey (no friend
to Islamic tradition) commented,

Flugel's edition which has been so widely used and so often reprinted,
is really a very poor text, for it neither represents anyone pure type of
Oriental text tradition, nor is the eclectic text he prints formed on any
ascertainable scientific basis.!"

ii. Blachere's Attempted Distortion of the Qur'an

In translating the meaning of the Qur'an into French (I.e Coran, 1949),
Regis Blachere not only changes the sura order in the Qur'an but adds
two fictitious verses into the body of the text. He bases this on a spurious
narration in which Satan made his own 'revelations' to the Prophet, who
was apparently too inept to distinguish between the Words of Allah and
the polytheistic mumblings mentioned in the account. None of the trans-
mission channels for recitation and none of the 250,000 extant Qjir'anic
manuscripts contain these two verseswhich, by themselves,wholly contradict
everything preceding them and following them, and in fact the very essence
of the Qur'an."
Labelled '20 bis' and '20 ter', the fake verses are a call to Muslims to
glorify the idols of pre-Islamic Makkah.21 See Figure 18.1.
This fraudulent report has proven too charming for Orientalists to pass
up. Rev. Guillaume's translation of Sirat Ibn Ishiiq (an early and definitive
biography of the Prophet) has been published continuously in Muslim

18 Refer to this work pp. 153-5.
19 A.Jeffery, Materials, p. 4.
20 For a detailed discussion on this see 'Urwah b. az-Zubair, al-Maghiizl, pp. 106-
110, in particular the footnotes.
21 Counterfeit verses aside, Blachere (and others such as Rodwell and Richard Bell)
alter the order of stiras in their translations, challenging again the holiness of the text
in a convenient way given the Western views regarding the supposed sura arrangement
in Ibn Mas'nd's Mushaf