In Search of the Original Koran: The True History of the Revealed Text Read Online Free PDF Page B

Prophet.35
    Even so, there did exist in the circle around the Prophet some dishonest secretaries entrusted with the task of transcribing the revelation. They managed to manipulate the sacred text without Muhammad's knowledge. One of them, who has remained anonymous, had written "the Magisterial, the Clairvoyant" instead of "the Magisterial, the Omniscient," and vice versa. He even made this admission: "I wrote around Muhammad whatever I wanted." Tradition reports that upon his death, each time they tried to bury him, the earth rejected him.36
     

One of the principal questions on the subject of the history of the Koran that was raised very early is whether the text that was handed down contains the totality of the divine revelations brought by the Prophet of Islam.
    Of course, such a question presupposes from the start two kinds of facts that must be determined before any answer can be given. First, one must wonder about the heavenly tablet from which the revelations are drawn: does it contain a text that is definite in its contours and very precisely determined in its content? There is nothing less certain.

    Second, what about the relationship of the copy to its original, also from the standpoint of completeness? Here again, things do not seem very clear, and what we said above on this question enjoins us to the greatest prudence about whether the revealed copy conforms in completeness. When God announces, "This day have I perfected your religion for you" (5:3), it is not a matter of putting a final ending upon a revelation whose termination has never been announced.
    But what is most remarkable is the sharp awareness among the first Muslims of the incomplete character of the revelation-starting with Muhammad himself. In fact, during his final pilgrimage to Mecca, he is supposed to have said: "0 people! Take [after my example] your legal prescriptions (`ilm) before they are seized [by the angel of death], and before the `ilm rise to Heaven."37 The Prophet's companions are astonished by this assertion regarding this incompleteness of revelation, since it is supposed to contain the totality of the `ilm. So they ask Muhammad: "0 Prophet of Allah! How is it that the `ilm can mount to Heaven when we are in possession of pages (masahif) [of the Koran] . . ." The Prophet, visibly embarrassed, blushes and tells them that the Jews and the Christians, too, have pages but they take no account of them. "In fact, by `losing the `ilm' one must understand `the loss of its bearers,"' conclude the authors of the story, somewhat dubiously. Whatever the degree of veracity of this story, it justifies to our intimation of a conviction among the first Muslims-during the Prophet's lifetime and afterward-that the revelation was associated with the destiny of the person of the Prophet, which meant that it would be necessarily broken off at his death. Anas ibn Malik is even meant to have said, "God pursued revelation through his Prophet, in the latter's lifetime, until his Prophet had received the majority of what there was of it ('akthara ma kana). And then, [it was only] after this [that] Allah's Apostle died."38
    From a purely theological standpoint, the Koran has enunciated a principle that definitively denies the idea of completeness of Scripture in the face of the inexhaustible words of God: "Say: If the sea were ink with which to write the words (kalimat) of my Lord, and even if We were to add to it a similar sea to replenish it, the sea would surely run dry before the words of my Lord were spent" (18:109). And, "If all the trees of the earth were pens and the sea, replenished by seven more seas, [were ink], [trees and seas would be exhausted but] the words (kalimat) of God would still not be exhausted" (31:27). Undoubtedly this image belongs to an old tradition, since we find in John, "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would