Page 338 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

318 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'ANIC TEXT

that many complete (and semi-complete)Mushafs have survivedfrom Islam's
earliest days, and among them may well be ones predating 'Uthman's
Mu~1:laf.
Though certainly a great treasure containing a wealth of orthographic
oddities, the Mushafs in San 'a' do not add anything new or substantial to
the body of proof which already demonstrates the Qur'an's completion
within the first decades of Islam.

7. Conclusion

Schacht, Wansbrough, Noldeke, Hirschfeld,Jeffrey, Flugel, Blachere, Guil-
laume, Mingana, and Puin are not alone in their schemes; all Orientalists
must, to varying extents, practice dishonesty if they are to successfully
distort the Qur'an, whether by transmutation, deliberate mistranslation,
wilful ignorance, use of spurious references, or other means. Prof.James
Bellamy recently composed a few articles to 'amend' certain scribal errors
found in the text,42 and in this endeavour he is by no means a lone figure;
the recent past has witnessed a rising chorus of Orientalists demanding
a systematic revision of the Qur'an. Hans Kung, a Roman Catholic theo-
logian who found discourse with Islam to be at an impasse, advised Muslims
in the late 1980s to admit to the element of human authorship in their
Holy Book.43
Likewise Kenneth Cragg, an Anglican bishop, urged Muslims to re-
think the traditional Islamic concept of wal!J!, "probably as a concession
by Muslims in the current pluralist spirit of interfaith dialogue" .44 In a
later piece entitled "The Historical Geography of the Qur'an", he proposed
abrogating the Madani verses (with their political and legal emphases) in
favour of their Makkan counterparts, which are generally more concerned
with basic issues of monotheistic faith, implying that politicised Islam de-
serves no shelter in a world of secular democracies and Roman Law. This

42 See "Al-Raqirn or al-Ruqud? A note on Surah 18:9",]AOS, vol. cxi (1991), pp.
115-17; "Fa-Ummuhu Hawiyah: A Note on Surah 10l:9",]AOS, vol. cxii (1992), pp.
485-87; "Some Proposed Emendations to the Text of the Koran", ]AOS, vol. cxiii
(1993), pp. 562-73; and "More Proposed Emendations to the Text of the Koran",
]AOS, vol. cxvi (1996), pp. 196-204.
43 Peter Ford, "The Qur'an as Sacred Scripture," Muslim IiVorld, vol. lxxxiii, no. 2,
April 1993, p. 156.
44 A. Saeed, "Rethinking 'Revelation' as a Precondition for Reinterpreting the Qur'an:
A Qur'a.nic Perspective",]Q,S, i:93, quoting K. Cragg, Troubled byTruth, Pentland Press,
1992, p. 3.