Criticism of the Quran, the religious text held to be sacred by Islam, often concerns the text's factual accuracy, moral tenability, and supposed inerrancy claimed by ulemas. Muslims regard the Quran as the perfect verbatim word of God revealed to Muhammad.
In critical and historical study, scholars, such as John Wansbrough, Joseph Schacht, Patricia Crone, and Michael Cook, seek to investigate and verify the Quran's origin, text, composition, and history, examining questions, puzzles, difficult text, etc. as they would non-sacred ancient texts.Bible in Mohammedian Literature., by Kaufmann Kohler Duncan B. McDonald, Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22 April 2006. Common criticisms concern the corruption of the oral and textual transmission at the origins, imperfect preservation, reliance on various pre-existing sources, internal inconsistency, lack of clarity, and questionable ethical teachings. The Quran's oral formation and written transmission, before and after Muhammad, have been questioned on the grounds of manuscript variants, the existence of numerous early contradictory narratives of how the Quran was composed, and early sources themselves discussing actual variants among even the followers of Muhammad. Early sources by non-Muslims indicate that there was no Quran at the time of Muhammad since early Christian and Jewish sources on Islam show no awareness of a Muslim scripture during the prophet's lifetime.
Sunni and Shia sects of Islam have competing and contradictory narratives of the origins of the Quran. Scholars argue that the earliest Muslims had a confusing understanding of Muhammad's message and that the emergence of multiple conflicting traditions exhibits many attempts to make sense of the chaos of composition, including examples of dependence on Christian and Jewish texts. No critical text of the Quran, based on manuscript analysis, has ever been made, and this is considered problematic since all other ancient and even sacred literature has been studied for accuracy. Textual critics state that based on the diversity found in the manuscript evidence, the editing after Muhammad's death, early purges of variants, early standardization attempts (e.g., 653–705 AD and 936 AD), along with other factors, lead to the view that there "never was one original text of the Quran."
Historical authenticity
Traditional view According to Islamic tradition, which criticism may question or contradict, the Quran followed a passage from heaven down to the angel Gabriel (Jibreel) who revealed it in the seventh century CE over 23 years to a Hejazi Arab trader and shepherd, Muhammad, who became one of the prophets of Islam. Muhammad shared these revelations—which brought uncompromising monotheism to humanity—with his companions, who wrote them down and/or memorized them. From these memories and scraps, a standard edition was carefully compiled and edited under the supervision of Caliph Uthman not long after Muhammad's death. Copies of this codex (or mus'haf) were sent to the major centers of what was by this time a rapidly expanding empire, and all other incomplete or "imperfect" variants of the Quranic revelation were ordered by Uthman to be destroyed. In the next few centuries, the religion and empire of Islam solidified, and an enormous body of religious literature and laws was developed, including commentaries/exegeses (tafsir) to explain the Quran.
Thus, according to Islamic teaching, it was ensured that the wording of the Quranic text available today corresponds exactly to the literal, infallible, "perfect", "timeless", "absolute", unadulterated word of God revealed to Muhammad. That revelation in turn is identical to an eternal "mother of the book," the archetype of the Quran. In the Muslim religious and theological view, this was not created/written by God, but an attribute of him, co-eternal and kept with him, in heaven.
Muslim views of criticism For Muslims, the contents of the Quran have been "a source of doctrine, law, poetic and spiritual inspiration, solace, zeal, knowledge, and mystical experience." According to Professor Emeritus of Islamic thought at the University of Paris, Algerian Mohammed Arkoun "Millions and millions refer to the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations." In recent years, many consider it the source of scientific knowledge. Revered by pious Muslims as "the holy of holies", whose vary sound moves some to "tears and ecstasy", it is the physical symbol of the faith.
The traditional Muslim understanding of the Quran is not that it is simply divinely inspired, but the literal word of God. It is also the last and complete message from God, from his final messenger (Muhammad), superseding the Hebrew Bible; Christian Old Testament and New Testament; and purified the "accretions of Judaism and Christianity".
Traditional Islamic scholars have developed Quranic studies or "Quranic sciences" () over the centuries, following the Quranic encouragement, "Will they not contemplate the Quran?". There are two types of exegesis used to explain and interpret the Quran: tafsir a literal interpretation. ta'wil an allegorical interpretations.
Other areas of study include: the investigation of the foreign origin of some Quranic terms. naskh studying contradictory verses to determine which should be abrogated in favor of the other. connecting Quranic verses with episodes of Muhammad's career based on hadith and biographies of him known as sira. Chronology of revelations. Division of quranic chapters (surahs) into Meccan surah. Those believed to have been revealed in Mecca before the hijra. Medinan surah revealed afterward in the city of Medina.
According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, these traditional religious sciences: " ...provide all the answers to questions posed by modern Western orientalists about the structure and text of the Koran, except, of course, those questions that issue from the rejection of the Divine Origin of the Koran and its reduction to a work by the prophet. Once the revealed nature of the Koran is rejected, then problems arise.
But these are problems for orientalists that arise not from scholarship but from a certain theological and philosophical position, usually hidden under the guise of rationality and objectivity. For Muslims, there has never been the need to address these problems ..."
In contrast, many of the original non-Muslim scholars of the Quran worked "in the context of an openly declared hostility" between Christianity and Islam, to debunk Islam or proselytize against it. The nineteenth-century orientalist and colonial administrator William Muir wrote that the Quran was one of "the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known." In the twentieth century, scholars of the early Soviet Union working in the context of dialectical materialism and fighting the "opium of the people" argued: Muhammad and the first Caliphs were "mythical figures." The motive force of early Islam was the mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina and slave-owning Arab society.
Partly as a reaction, some Muslims have fiercely opposed the "Orientalist enterprise of Qur'anic studies." In 1987, Muslim critic S. Parvez Manzoor denounced it as conceived in "the polemical marshes of medieval Christianity". "At the greatest hour of his worldly triumph, the Western man, coordinating the powers of the State, Church and Academia, launched his most determined assault on the citadel of Muslim faith. All the aberrant streaks of his arrogant personality—its reckless rationalism, its world-domineering fantasy and its sectarian fanaticism—joined in an unholy conspiracy to dislodge the Muslim Scripture from its firmly entrenched position as the epitome of historic authenticity and moral unassailability."
Muslim scholars in the 21st century have cautioned against lending "legitimacy to non-Muslim scholars' understanding about Islam" by interacting with them. They point out that even a scholarly work on Islam such as the Brill Encyclopedia of Islam "... is filled with insults and disparaging remarks about the Quran."
Textual criticism of the Quran, especially the structure and style of the surahs, has been opposed on the grounds that it calls into question the Quran's divine origin. Seyyed Hossein Nasr has denounced the "rationalist and agnostic methods of higher criticism" as similar to dissecting and subjecting Jesus to "modern medical techniques to determine whether he was born miraculously or was the son of Joseph."
In his influential Orientalism, Edward Said declared Western study of the Middle East — including the religion of Islam — inextricably tied to Western Imperialism, making the study inherently political and servile to power.
These complaints have been compared to those of other religious conservatives (Christian) against textual historical criticism of their own sacred text (the Bible). Biblical scholar John Burgon wrote: "The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the Throne! Every Book of it, every Chapter of it, every Verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it ... every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High!" Non-Muslim scholar Patricia Crone acknowledges the call for humility toward the sacred of other cultures — "who are you to tamper with their legacy?" — but defends the challenging of orthodox views of Islamic history, saying, "we Islamicists are not trying to destroy anyone's faith."
Not all Muslims oppose criticism. Roslan Abdul-Rahim writes, "... critical study of the Quran will not hurt the Muslims ... it will only help them because no amount of criticism can change that fact that the Quran is truly a divine piece of work as the Muslim theology stipulates and as the Muslims have so strongly defended".
However, some scholars have suffered for attempting to apply literary or philological techniques to the Quran: Egyptian "Dean of Arabic Literature" Taha Husain, who lost his post at Cairo University in 1931. Husain published a book (Fi'ish-Shi-r al-Jahili) questioning the historical veracity of the Quran. He was "charged with blasphemy, forced to withdraw his book, and lost his university post" Egyptian professor Mohammad Ahmad Khalafallah, whose dissertation was rejected. Non-Muslim German professor Günter Lüling (dismissed), Egyptian professor Nasr Abu Zaid, who was forced to seek exile in Europe after being declared an apostate and threatened with death for violating a "right of God". Jewish professor and Arab scholar Suliman Bashear argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet. He was injured after being thrown from a second-story window by his students at the University of Nablus in the West Bank.
Non-Muslim views
Not all non-Muslim scholars of Islam are interested in critical examination and analysis. Patricia Crone and Ibn al-Rawandi argue that Western scholarship lost its critical attitude towards the sources of Islam's origins around the time of the First World War. Andrew Rippin has expressed surprise that:"for students acquainted with approaches such as source criticism, oral-formulaic composition, literary analysis, and structuralism, all quite commonly employed in the study of Judaism and Christianity, such naive historical study seems to suggest that Islam is being approached with less than academic candor."
Some scholars like Karl Binswanger have complained about "dogmatic Islamophilia of most Arabists". French philosopher Jacques Ellul points out that in one Western country (France as of 1983) "it is no longer acceptable to criticize Islam or the Arab countries." French historian Maxime Rodinson states that among some historians, like Middle Ages historian Norman Daniel, their understanding of Islam "has given way to apologetics pure and simple."