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What About the Quran?

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The Quran is the holy book of Muslims. It is a compilation of the texts which the archangel Gabriel ('D'jibraïl' in Arabic) dicated to Muhammad during a series of revelations which took place in a cave, in the neighbourhood of Mecca. Such a revelation is considered by Muslims like the final revelation which the unique God of Jews and then Christians made to man. Muhammad thus is the 'sceal of the Prophets', or the last of them. The texts of the Quran are of a religious and eschatological nature, adressing questions of the faith of the end of Times as they are too concerning accurate and practical political prescriptions. Such prescriptions soon allowed the new, Muslim society to work. The Muslim whole of believers is known like the 'community of the faithfuls', or 'umma', in Arabic. At the time self of Muhammad, the verses which had been dictated to Muhammad by Gabriel either were written down upon varied supports -like sheep omoplate bones- either were memorized by the first proponents of Muhammad. The methods of interpretation of the texts of the Quran which appeared later in the history of the Islamic world, like the interpolation, or the use of the 'hadiths', or the deeds and facts of the Prophet, etc. might have appear as soon as the early beginnings of Islam at the effect of settling the first questions posed by the practical applications of the prescriptions exposed by the texts. Early, too, a first, purely material effort of classification of the revealed texts is appearing with the texts put under the form of verses, at the number of some 6,400 as the verses themselves are grouped into chapters, which are called 'suras'. Those suras, in the current version of the Quran, are sorted from the largest, to the smallest

Uthman, who was the third caliph from 644 to 656, decided to eventually have a unique version of the Quran written down as internal quarrels -which had degenerated up into armed conflicts- had been born about the interpretation of the Holy Quran. The caliph thus named a committee of elders, who redacted a text, which is called the 'Uthman's Vulgate.' It consists of a enormous book -more than a 50 cubic feet large!- written with large Arabic, 'hedjazi' (from the Hedjaz region of the Arabic Peninsula)-style characters with no vowels, diacritical signs. The vowelic, or diacritical signs, in such alphabets like the Arabic one, are signs which are affixed along consonantal letters allowing to hint to what the vowels and pronunciation are to be. Copies of the Uthman's Vulgate were sent, under that same large form of a large volume, into the main cities of the Muslim world of the time, like the ancester city to Cairo, for example. Some copies -like the one of Cairo- are still preserved until today! Even Shias accept that text like the one of reference. Among the fights which are linked to the redaction of the Quran, Uthman was assassinated as he was sitting among copies of his Vulgate. His blood tainted some of the copies! The redaction of the Quran took place as internal quarrels had appeared in the Islamic world, following that conquest had came to a stop. Ali, or Ali ibn Abu Talib, the cousin of Muhammad and his son-in-law (he had married Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet and his sole surviving child) had already missed the caliphate, by the death of Muhammad by 632 A.D. as the choice made by the community of the faithfulls then had surpassed his rights by the blood. Ali thus became the spokesman for the Beduins which had been recruited by the Arabs of the Arabic Peninsula for military service during the conquest and which were dissatisfied with the rewards they had been allocated. Ali, among others, was proposing, through his pietist views, a very conservative view of the Quran as he was opposing to what he called innovations not respectful of the Quranic directives. He pretended that his version of the Quran contained 20 times more texts than the Uthman's Vulgate! That basic disagreement within the Muslim world gave birth to the basic rift between Shias, the proponents of Ali, and other Muslims called Sunnis. Shias however came to accept the Uthman's Vulgate like the reference to their faith

Following those years, as their rule had been better established, the Umayyad Caliphs, which were the successors to Muawiyah-ibn-Umayya, the governor of Syria, a kinsman of Uthman and a winner over Ali, came back to a policy of conquest which was mostly aimed against the Byzantine empire. Such that conquest still increased the diversity of peoples which were lying under the Muslim rule. The Umayyad Caliphate eventually was ruling over territories stretching from Spain and Marocco in the West, to Samarkand and Kabul in the East. The fact that the Uthman version of the Quran was lacking the diacritical signs brought to a whole variety of new versions of the Quran which built upon such unaccuratenesses. The Arabic language is basing, as far as its lexical ressource are concerned, upon fundamental groups of three consonants. Such 3-consonant bases are providing for the variety of the vocabulary, function of what vowels are associated to those, when the language is spoken. As the Uthman Vulgate lacked that precision, the text could be at the origin of numerous new versions of the Quran! Then came Abd al-Malik, who was caliph by 685 A.D. He turned the Uthman Vulgate into something more uniformized by simply adding the lacking vowelic signs. From then onwards, the Quran text became definitively settled. Such a endeavour, moreover, matched that Abd al-Malik had the will of a cultural, Muslim policy as he wanted to posit the Muslim world, in terms of culture, against the Christian, or Jewish worlds. He wanted that the Muslims might refer to a unique Book, like the Christians or the Jews were doing, or he wanted to have prestige buildings to be built in the territories of the Islamic Caliphate. For that purpose, Adb al-Malik had Christian craftmen and artists to come into Damascus, the capital city of the Caliphate, or had them willingly sent to, by the Byzantine emperor. They decorated the famed Umayyad Mosque of Damascus! That mosque thus is displaying a very Byzantine decoration. The Umayyads too accepted that the burial site of John the Baptist, which already was sitting in that location, remain inside the mosque as John is know to Muslims under the name of Yahia. The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus too is harbouring the beheaded head of Husayn, one of Ali's sons who had extended the revolt of his father and who had been killed in the battle of Karbala by 680 A.D. Copies of the Uthman Vulgate of the Quran, like it had been settled by Abd al-Malik, were taken with by the great conquerors of the Umayyad time such like Uqba ibn Nafi (also named Sidi Uqba) who conquered North Africa. He had one of his copies left in the city of Al Qayrawan in modern Tunisia as copies were made from those copies

Between the time when the Uthman version of the Quran and the fix brought at the time of Abd al-Malik, many other versions of the Muslim Holy Text had the time to be redacted however! A German orientalist, between WW1 and WW2, had the opportunity of collecting those, under a photographic form. Such varying versions of the Quran have, for example, the suras displayed into a different order, or the content of the verses is differing. A 'Corpus Coranicum' work is currently about to be completed at the University of Madgeburg, Germany, based upon those photographs as they had been though lost during the bombings during WW2 and actually had been preserved. Such a corpus likely will add to the debate currently pending due to the Islamic fundamentalism

Website Manager: G. Guichard, site Learning and Knowledge In the Carolingian Times / Erudition et savoir à l'époque carolingienne, http://schoolsempire.6te.net. Page Editor: G. Guichard. last edited: 12/28/2010. contact us at ggwebsites@outlook.com
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