P.S. I born Muslim so I get to be critical about Islam and I think everyone should be able to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quran#Uthman_ib...
"When the task was finished Uthman kept one copy in Medina and sent others to Kufa, Baṣra, Damascus, and, according to some accounts, Mecca, and ordered that all other variant copies of the Quran to be destroyed. This was done everywhere except in Kufa, where some scholars argue that, Ibn Masʿūd and his followers refused."
Thousands of people claim below:
The famous ten People who form the chains of narration regarding the Quran are as follows.
Umar ibn al Khattab [26]
Uthman bin Affan[27]
Ali ibn abi Talib[28]
Abu Musa al Ash'ari[29]
Ubay Ibn Ka'b[30]
Abdullah ibn Masood[31]
Zayd Ibn Thabit[32]
Abu Hurairah[33]
Abdullah Ibn Abbas[34]
Abu al-Darda[35]
So 12 people were essentially responsible for Quran, mostly through hearsay.
By the way, it is relatively easy to memorize the Quran, because it is in verse form. You can go to any mosque and find children from the age of ten who has it memorized.
Furthermore, memorizers of the Quran can trace the chain of narration back to Muhammad himself. So there couldn't be any forgery or manipulation. Uthman doesn't have the power to erase people's memories.
Your comment doesn't address the claim.
Once the canonical written version of the Koran had been established memorising the entire text is relatively easy. Prior to that you would have had to be present when Mohammed revealed the narrations or had a precise rendition of that oration conveyed to you. At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible. Conveying the general meaning is within the realms of possibility; surahs revealed to large groups might even allow the preservation of some of the actual wording too.
Take an example - Armstrong's speech when stepping on to the moon, was it "one small step for a man" or was the "a" not spoken? This is probably the most pored over of all speeches ever, millions of witnesses. Did no camel ever brae in the tents of the Qureshi tribe in Mohammed's time?
Abrogation causes further problems to this claim as not only do all "thousands" have to remember the exact wording used but the exact order too, and they have only a couple of months from the end of Mohammed's narrations to learn the last of them. Not only do they need to know the order, for abrogation purposes (to learn the way to act) but they have to remember the narrations in the same non-temporal order as everyone else. I can believe even that many of Mohammed's followers remembered surah, mostly that they agreed on wording, but not at all that they remembered it in the "wrong" (ie not the delivered order) and that the order it was remembered in was identical (ie was "the entire Quran").
Doesn't 2:106 say that Allah causes ayats to be forgotten, those ayats must have been in the original - else they wouldn't have been narrated by Mohammed - but aren't now remembered and so are not in the "entire Quran".
Of course if surah 25:32 (http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=25&verse=32) that says the Koran was revealed piecemeal is wrong and surah 2:185 is right then the whole Koran was passed on in one month (including future conversations) which makes it easier to attain unanimous agreement but also means that [if tradition that the Koran was passed on in 10 days is correct] the hearers were remembering > 600 ayats of prose each day for 10 days in a row; quite a feat for illiterate desert tribesmen regardless of whether they had a tradition of oral history or not.
I'm very interested in the Muqatta'at too - how were written character variations conveyed by the "thousands"?
However even with that, it is understandably difficult to believe that no mistakes were made in transmission. That's why the Quran calls it a miracle, and calls it Allah's job, to safeguard the integrity the Quran. That fact there is an established canonical version today with zero conflicts among all major prints in all countries is somewhat of a miracle, considering the fact that Muslims across cultures argue and disagree about a lot of other things within the religion.
As for the Muqatta'at, they are a part of regular recitation - they are not simply written characters.
And that's the point of why it is considered a miracle. Transmission of the Quran has always been orally and will continue to be. The general meaning is preserved within the text, however, the correct recitation(s) are not.
You can't pick up the Quran and expect to be reciting it correctly.
The entire muslim community contributed their memorized Quran together with written parchments (to double check) in the making of the "official" copy.
Making this into a community-wide project and hence nobody could say that the Quran was incorrect.
Thereafter unreliable parchments were destroyed.
"The Quranic canon is the form of the Quran as recited and written in which it is religiously binding for the Muslim community. This canonical corpus is closed and fixed in the sense that nothing in the Quran can be changed or modified. The process of canonization ended under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (r. 23/644–35/655), which was about twenty years after the death of the Muhammad"
Edit, most of it is hearsay any way:
Zaid ibn Thabit, Muhammad's primary scribe, was assigned the duty of gathering all of the Quranic text. He gives an insight into what happened during the meeting between Abu Bakr, Umar, and himself:
"Abu Bakr sent for me at a time when the Yamama battles had witnessed the martyrdom of numerous Companions. I found 'Umar bin al-Khattab with him. Abu Bakr began, Umar has just come to me and said, 'In the Yamama battles death has dealt most severely with the qurra',[Reciters of the Quran] and I fear it will deal with them with equal severity in other theatres of war. As a result much of the Quran will be gone. “ 'I am therefore of the opinion that you should command the Quran be collected.'" Abu Bakr continued, "I said to 'Umar, 'How can we embark on what the Prophet never did?' 'Umar replied that it was a good deed regardless, and he did not cease replying to my scruples until Allah reconciled me to the undertaking, and I became of the same mind as him. Zaid, you are young and intelligent, you used to record the revelations for the Muhammad, and we know nothing to your discredit. So pursue the Quran and collect it together." By Allah, had they asked me to move a mountain it could not have been weightier than what they requested of me now”. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih,Jam'i al-Qur'an, hadith no. 4986; see also Ibn Abu Dawud, al-Masahif, pp. 6-9)"
The person ordered to compile the Quran by Abu Bakar said:
...By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Quran... So I started locating the Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leafstalks of date palms and from the memories of men.[Bukhari Sahih al-Bukhari, 6:60:201]
"So I started looking for the Holy quran and collected it from (what was written on) palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones, and also from men who knew it by heart, until I found the last verse of Surat at-Tauba (repentance) with Abi Khuzaima al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p. 478).[23]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hearsay https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heresy
Once you start translating something into different languages, that's when the unavoidable changes start working their way in. So, I agree with you that it's not "miraculous" in any way, but it is a fascinating and important archaeological find.
Understandable but not true. There are, currently extent, versions of the text with variations. There was a significant effort made to create a single authoritative version to enforce the narrative of the text being a perfect copy of one in heaven.
Here is some info in case you are curious [0]. Look for the word "burnt" and read that paragraph. Or simply google "Quran Uthman burnt"