Thank you for visiting our site.
Please send us email with your remarks and suggestions to Info Desk.
| Comparitive Studies |
It is said that an account of Moses and the later Prophets (peace be upon them) and of their teachings is contained in the Old Testament. But look at the Bible from the historical viewpoint. The original text of the Torah, as revealed to Moses (peace be upon him), had been destroyed at the time of the sack of Bait-ul-Maqdas (Jerusalem) in 6 B.C., and along with it had perished the Scriptures of the former Prophets (peace be upon them). In 5 B.C., when the tribe of Israel after their release from the Captivity in Babylon arrived in Palestine, the Prophet Ezra with the help of some venerable collaborators prepared an account of the life of Moses (peace be upon him) as well as a history of the tribe of Israel. In this work were incorporated in appropriate places such verses of the Torah as were readily available to the author and his associates.
Consequently, in the period falling between the fourth and second century B.C., various authors (unknown) penned down the Scriptures (from which sources we know not) of those Prophets who had preceded them by several centuries. To take an instance, in 300 B.C., an unknown person wrote a book in the name of Jonah and incorporated it in the Bible, despite the fact that Jonah was a Prophet of the 8th century B.C. The Psalms was committed to writing five centuries after the death of David and to it were also added sonnets composed by about a hundred poets. We have no knowledge of the sources from which the compilers of the Psalms had gleaned those Sonnets.
Soloman departed from the world in 933 B.C., and an Anthology of
Solomon's Proverbs was compiled in the year 250 B.C. which also
incorporated the maxims of several other sages.
In short, no book of the Bible bears an authentic connection with any
Prophet to whom it is ascribed. What's more, even these books of the
Jewish Bible perished at the second sack of Baitul-Maqdas in 70 A.D.,
leaving extant only their Greek Translation, which dates back to the
period falling between 258 B.C. and the first century B.C.
In the second century A.D., the Jewish scholars prepared a Jewish
Bible with the help of manuscripts which had survived the vicissitudes
of time. The oldest copy of this Bible extant now dates back to 916
A.D. Apart from this, no other Jewish manuscript exists anywhere
today.
The Jewish scrolls discovered from the cave of Qumran on the Dead Sea
are not older than the first and the second century B.C., and even
these contain a few scattered fragments of the Bible.
The earliest manuscript comprising the first five Books of the Bible
current among the Samartians was written in the eleventh century A.D.
The Greek Translation prepared in the second and the third century
B.C. was marred by countless errors. A retranslation form Greek into
Latin was done in the third century A.D. By what standard can you
judge this material as an authentic source of the life histories and
teachings of Moses and the later Prophets of the Jews?
In addition to the above, there were certain unwritten legends called
oral law, current among the Jews. For a span of thirteen of fourteen
centuries they remained unwritten until in the later part of the
second and the beginning of the third century A.D., a priest known as
Yahudah b. Sham'un committed them to writing under the title of
`Mishnah'. Commentaries on this work by the Palestinian Jewish scholars
under the name of `Halaka' and by Babylonian scholars under the title
'Haggada' appeared in the third and the fifth century respectively.
The 'Talmud' is, in fact, an anthology of these three works.
Significantly, authoritative evidence which may reveal the chain of
transmission is lacking in the case of all traditions incorporated in
these books.
A similar state of affairs exists for Jesus's character and teachings. Jesus conveyed orally to the people the Bible that Allah (God) had originally revealed to him. His disciples, too, propagated it among the people by the spoken words in such a manner that they presented an admixture of their Prophet's life-story and the revealed verses of the Bible. None of this material was put into writing during the lifetime of Jesus (peace be upon him) or even in the period following him. It fell to the lot of the Christians whose vernacular was Greek to transform the oral traditions into writing. It must be borne in mind that Christ's native tongue was Syriac or Aramaic and his disciples, too, spoke the same language.
Most Greek-speaking authors heard these traditions in the Aramaic vernacular and committed them to writing in Greek. None of these writings is dated prior to the year 70 A.D.; there is not a single instance in these works where the author has cited an authority for an event or maxim attributed to Jesus in order that we might construct a chain of transmission. Furthermore, even their works have not survived. Thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament were collected, but none of them is older than the 4th century A.D.; rather the origin of most of them does not go beyond the period intervening between the 11th and the 14th centuries. Some scattered fragments on papyrus found in Egypt claim no greater antiquity than the third century. Who translated the Bible from Greek into Latin and when did he do it, we cannot say.
In the 4th century A.D., the Pope commissioned a review of the Latin translation. In the sixteenth century, this was discarded and a fresh translation from Greek into Latin was prepared. The four Bibles were more probably rendered into Syriac language from Greek in 200 A.D., nevertheless, the oldest Syriac manuscript extant was written in the 4th century. A hand-written copy dating back to the 5th century A.D., contains in most parts a different version.
Among the Arabic translations made from Syriac none is known to have been prepared before the 8th century A.D. It is a strange fact that about seventy different versions of the Bible were prepared, four of which were approved by the leaders of the Christian religion, while the rest were rejected by them. We have no information as to what were the grounds of their approval or rejection. However, can this material be credited with authenticity to any extent as regards the character and message (Gospel) of Jesus?
In this Book, the Holy Prophet's life, the history of the Arabs and the events which occurred during the period of the revelation of the Quran have not been mingled with the Divine Verses, as is the case with the Bible. The Quran is the pure word of God. Not one word therein is not divine. Not a single word has been deleted from its text. The Book has been handed down to our age in its complete and original form since the time of Prophet Muhammad. From the time the Book began to be revealed, the Holy Prophet had dictated its text to the scribes. Whenever some Divine Message was revealed, the Holy Prophet would call a scribe and dictate its words to him. The written text was then read out to the Holy Prophet, who, having satisfied himself that the scribe has committed no error of recording, would put the manuscript in safe custody. The Holy Prophet used to instruct the scribe about the sequence in which a revealed message was to be placed in a particular Surah (chapter). In this manner, the Holy Prophet continued to arrange the text of the Quran in systematic order till the end of the chain of revelations. Again, it was ordained from the beginning of Islam that a recitation of the Holy Quran must be an integral part of worship. Hence the illustrious Companions would commit the Divine verses to memory as soon aas they were revealed. Many of them learned the whole text and a far larger number had memorized different portions of it.
Besides, those of the Companions (pbut) who were literate used to keep a written record of several portions of the Holy Qur'an. In this manner, the text of the Holy Qur'an had been preserved in four different ways during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet (pbuh):
a) The Holy Prophet (pbuh) had the whole text of the Divine
Messages from the beginning to the end committed to writing by the
scribes of revelations.
b) Many of the Companions learned the whole text of the
Qur'an, every syllable of it, by heart.
c) All the illustrious Companions, without an exception, had
memorized at least some portions of the Holy Qur'an, for the simple
reason that it was obligatory for them to recite it during worship.
An estimate of the number of the illustrious Companions may be
obtained from the fact that one hundred and forty thousands Companions
had participated in the Last Pilgrimage performed by the Holy Prophet
(pbuh).
d) A considerable number of the literate Companions kept a
private record of the text of the Qur'an and satisfied themselves as
to the purity of their record by reading it out to the Holy Prophet
(pbuh).
It is an incontrovertible historical truth that the text of the Holy Qur'an extant today is, syllable for syllable, exactly the same as the Holy Prophet (pbuh) had offered to the world as the Word of God. After the demise of the Holy Prophet, the first Caliph Hadhrat Abu Bakr (pbuh) assembled all the Huffaz and the written records of the Holy Qur'an and with their help had the whole text written in Book form. In the time of Hadhrat 'Uthman (pbuh) copies of this original version were made and officially dispatched to the Capitals of the Islamic World Two. Of these copies exist in the world today, one in Istanbul and the other in Tashkent. Whosoever is so inclined may compare any printed text of the Holy Qur'an with those two copies, he shall find no variation. And how can one expect any discrepancy, when there have existed several million Huffaz in every generation since the time of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) and in our own time? Should anyone alter a syllable of the original text of the Qur'an, these Huffaz would at once expose the mistake. In the last century, an Institute of Munich University in Germany collected FORTY-TWO THOUSAND copies of the Holy Qur'an including manuscripts and printed texts produced in each period in the various parts of the Islamic World. Research work was carried out on these texts for half a century, at the end of which the researchers concluded that apart from copying mistakes, there was no discrepancy in the text of these forty-two thousand copies, even though they belonged to the period between the 1st Century Hijra to 14th Century Hijra and had been procured from all parts of the world. This Institute, alas! perished in the bombing
attacks on Germany during World War II, but the findings of its research project survived. Another point that must be kept in view is that the word in which the Qur'an was revealed is a living language in our own time. It is still current as the mother tongue of about a hundred million people from Iraq to Morocco. In the non-Arab world too, hundreds of thousands of people study and teach this language.
The grammar of the Arabic language, its lexicon, its phonetic system and its phraseology, have remained intact for fourteen hundred years.
A modern Arabic-speaking person can comprehend the Holy Qur'an with as much proficiency as did the Arabs of fourteen centuries ago. This, then, is an important attribute of Muhammad (pbuh), which is shared by no other Prophet or Leader of Religion. The Book which God revealed to Him for the guidance of mankind is todays in its original language without the slightest alteration in its vocabulary.