Page 118 - Tafsir of surat at tawba repentance

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Yamaamah only two years after the death of the Prophet (r). 98 If they had not
completed their memorization of it before his death, they must have done so for a
substantial portion of it.
Some people have tried to argue on the basis of Anas’s statement collected by
al-Bukhaaree that the number of people who memorized the Qur’aan during the
lifetime of the Prophet (r) was too small to support the Muslim claim that the
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Qur’aan was conveyed to us by tawaatur. Even if we accept this report at face
value, its use to support that argument is not strong, because, although the number
of people who had memorized the whole Qur’aan in the Prophet’s lifetime may
have been limited, many others had memorized substantial, overlapping portions.
So during his lifetime the number of memorizers was great for any given portion
of the Qur’aan. Many of these completed their memorization of it after his death.
In fact, with every succeeding generation of Muslims, the numbers of those who
memorized all of the Qur’aan has increased. Today there are literally hundreds of
thousands of Muslims throughout the world who have done so.
There is no other book, religious or otherwise, which has been memorized on
this scale in recorded history. The Qur’aan is about four-fifths the length of the
New Testament of the Christians, yet not a single person in recorded history is
known to have memorized the New Testament completely. In fact, if all of the
books in the world were somehow destroyed, the only book which could be
rewritten, word for word, without a single mistake is the Glorious Qur’aan.

One of the leading orientalists, Kenneth Cragg, said the following regarding
the memorization and preservation of the Qur’aanic text, “This phenomenon of
Qur’anic recital means that the text has traversed the centuries in an unbroken
living sequence of devotion. It cannot, therefore, be handled as an antiquarian
thing, nor as a historical document out of a distant past.” 100 Another orientalist
scholar, William Graham, wrote: “For countless millions of Muslims over more
than fourteen centuries of Islamic history, ‘scripture’, al-kitab, has been a book
learned, read and passed on by vocal repetition and memorisation. The written
Qur’an may ‘fix’ visibly the authori-tative text of the Divine Word in a way
unknown in history, but the authoritativeness of the Qur’anic book is only realised

98
Sahih Al-Bukhari, vol. 6, pp. 477-8, no. 509.
99
Tawaatur is the transmission of a report by such a large number of narrators that they couldn’t
have gotten together to fabricate a lie nor could they all agree upon an errror.
100
The Mind of the Qur’an, p. 26.

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