Customer Reviews

The Collection of the Qur'an

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Professor Burton's long out of print work is a brilliant, scholarly deconstruction of Qur'anic history - of the actually assembling of the current commonly used holy book of Islam. This work should be reprinted and widely circulated to further stimulate a reasoned and learned debate about this issue, far from the heat generated by polemicists of both sides.

Burton does essential, thankless spadework in unraveling the convoluted and conveniently forgotten (by conservative Islamists especially) early decades of Islamic and Qur'anic textual history. He thus begins the same process that Biblical scholars began more than a century ago in looking at their "holy book" in the cold true light of history, reason and science.
It is about time.

Burton makes very clear his hostility towards Muslim sources very early on. His argument seems to be constructed more to find an excuse to reject these sources than to actually reconstruct the history of the collection of the Qur'an. He some how ends up at the conclusion that the Prophet(pbuh) collected the Qur'an in the form we have today. He rejects the knowledge of alternate early versions of the Qur'an as a fiction, invented by early Muslim scholars. While he does have a good critical knowledge of the early Muslim sciences, the conclusions he reaches are untenable. In addition recent research done in Yemen has found several very early Qur'an codexes that appear to be the very alternate versions that Burton rests his thesis upon rejecting.

John Burton attempts to outline the history of the collection of the Qu'ran. He starts by calling all the Muslim Sources of the history into question, this he does semi succesfully. He then goes on to reject the Mulism sources, leaving scholars with absolutely no sources with which to base the history. This leaves him a blank canvas where he can paint his own picture, without having to ever rely on evidence. His hypothesis, that Muhamed himself was the first collector of the Qu'ran, is just about the only one not found in any hadith collection. Needless to say, his argument for the early codification of the Qur'an fails miserably. In addition the book tends to rely heavily on technical language which makes it inaccessible to a beginning student of Islam.

Since the last review I posted, Prof M Azami has written a book on the History of the Qur'aan. My objections against the majority of orientalists remains the same. History cannot be based on conjecture and ineando. It is absurd to believe that Muslim scholars and historians invented the history of the Qur'aan. The same scholars applied extensive tests on the validity of Ahadith [sayings and actions of the Prophet(pbhu)] and rejected a vast amount of material. Incidently many of the allegations made by orientalists are based on hadith, yet these same orientalists accuse the writers of hadiths as liars and inventors! You can't have it both ways.

The biggest fallacy which nearly all orientalists make is that if the Qur'aan has an 'evolving' history, the text would have been riddled with errors and inconsistancies. Yet NO orientalists has once said that a single verse of the Qur'aan contains any grammatical errors. Scholarship based on formulistic hatred of Muslims continues to this day and will continue forever, that is human nature. If you are person who can put the formulism behind them, please read Edward Said's 'Orientalism', Prof M Azami 'History of the Quran' and Muarice Bucailles 'The Bible, the Qur'aan and Science'.[...]

Reject any ideas of early "versions" of the Qur'aan ever existing. Only the Salafi groups pander the alternate versions of the Qur'aan nonsence. Does any Muslim know of any sahih hadith from the Prophet[saw] which says this doctrine is true ? The Qur'aan itself rejects this idea of changing texts, "No falsness can come to it in open or stealth..". Whatever alternate versions of particular verses may be found are all probably scribe errors, since the Sahabi themselves organised the final definative arrangment of the text and suras under Caliph Uthman.