Just a quick heads up for all those trying to access the link to, “Response to Jay Smith’s Mistakes“. I’ve put the document on private as I’m beginning to finish and prepare it for final publishing. I’m still undecided  on whether or not I should respond to his statements on the Bible, but given the time frame I’m intending to push this response out at, I think there will end up being two articles. One on Jay’s mistakes about the Qur’aan and another about Jay’s mistakes about the Bible. I’m overwhelmed by the response the document has gotten, I did not expect it to reach so many people or to spread so quickly. I must admit that I’m not a person who likes to have too many eyes on myself, I prefer to be discreet and lead a very private life. So the many emails, the sharing of the link, the discussions about what I wrote really took me by surprise and for a few days I was uncertain on whether or not I’d continue or finish the document. The very moment I chose to make the document private I received an influx of emails asking for permission to view it. That’s been less than an hour ago and there are way too many emails requesting permission.

There were generally two problems with writing this response. Firstly, transcribing what Jay was saying was very difficult. Jay spoke very casually and so it was a problematic decision to transcribe word for word what he said, only for it to make absolutely no sense when completed. After thinking about it, I decided that it was more honest of me to leave his words as is, instead of trying to make them easier to comprehend for the readers. I didn’t want his response or missionaries to claim that I altered his words. As some of you have seen the nearly final draft, you’d notice that I quite literally, wrote word for word what he said. He fumbled a lot and generally was all over the place. While transcribing what he was saying, I found it odd that he was very inconsistent with his presentation. You’d notice he never once gives us a citation or reference. This was important to note, because there was a very clear pattern of intentional dishonest behaviour. He’d first drop a few names and then make an erratic claim, reading from a sheet that he wrote, presenting those statements as quotes! There were a few times I honestly could not believe what he was saying, as compared to what the documents he referred to was saying. The contrast between his claims and what the scholars had said was unbelievable.

The second problem I faced was verifying his claims. I have all the works of the scholars he referenced. Even an unpublished, private thesis by Daniel Brubacker, his personal friend who allowed him to take photos of his thesis. Jay got a few photos, I got the entire thesis, it was then obvious just how wrong he’d been during the debate. To me, it was obvious that he had not read the authors’ works he was referring to. I did not have a single citation from him to work with, so I had to check several works by these authors. There were a number of times I could swear he read a quote from one of the authors, only to realise he was paraphrasing or simply making it up. For those who saw the draft before I made it private, the claims he made of Sadeghi and Deroche were not only outrageous, they were blatantly false! I even had one of the E&AM apologists (the folks who arranged and moderated the debate) check one of Dr. Deroche’s book to verify that what I was reading in contrast to Jay’s statement was true. The pictures he sent, confirmed to me that Jay not only lied, he clearly falsified information on several occasions. Due to the embarrassing amount of errors Jay has intentionally made, I’m currently in talks for a video version of the response to be made. At this point we have several well known Muslim speakers who have volunteered to feature in this video.

Most importantly, I’ve had the document reviewed by several scholars in the field, both of whom are Christian and Muslim. As of the current draft they have found no errors in my citations or quotations and are well pleased with my cohesive and well structured response to Jay’s erratic claims. Perhaps the only criticism I have faced by the scholars for this document, has been that I may have made public information about Jay that should not have been exposed. After several discussions, it was concluded that Jay did make certain statements in 1998 in a public setting in Birmingham and as such, it cannot be considered private information. Nonetheless it is embarrassing and several Christians who witnessed the debate found that my releasing of this information is perfectly fine given the immoral and disrespectful insults Jay threw at Dr. Shabir during the debate. I look forward to Jay’s response and I hope that he does not do as he did with Klingschor’s exposing of him (especially the lies about Tom Holland that he made). Jay has a fanciful imagination, too fanciful. As you would know, in his Islam Origins lecture he claimed that he inspired Tom Holland to write a book about Islam, which led to the controvserial Channel 4 (UK) documentary.  Jay claimed that Tom also thanked him for inspiring him on his book and TV Documentary. When asked publicly, Tom Holland denied everything that Jay had claimed. Therefore it is not unusual for Jay to invent stories and to invent claims that are purely figments of his imagination.

Thank you for your patience and I pray that something good comes of all of this.

and Allaah knows best.

We’ll begin by responding to Jay Smith’s ridiculous email, most of which was plagiarized from Spencer’s Jihad Watch article, which is silly in and of itself. So, in responding to Smith’s email entitled, “Are Bart Ehrman’s Views on the Birmingham Fragments Correct?,” the following are my corrections of his lies and deceits:

1. Sahih al Bukhari 6:509 and 510 do not mention anything about canonizing the Qur’an or about corruption. Both hadiths mention the “fear” of corruption happening, but not the actual corruption of anything:

“…and I am afraid that more heavy casualties may take place among the Qurra’ on other battlefields…”

Therefore, the imagined claims of a yet to be canonized scripture cannot be qualified given anyone’s actual reading of either of these narrations. It then must be asked of you and not of Dr. Ehrman, if you yourself actually know the traditional story of the Qur’an’s preservation.

You mention that since these manuscripts date before the time of ‘Uthman’s alleged rescension, that this must mean they are corrupted. To the contrary, only manuscripts which were not authorized (read as modern “to be published”) were brought into conformity with the “rasm” (read as orthography) of the Prophetic tradition. The fact that the text of Mingana Arabica 1572a agrees with our modern text, clearly contradicts your assertion that it must be “examples of those very corrupted manuscripts” (a term, not found in either of the narrations you referenced).

You then proceeded to copy paste Spencer’s woeful argument that the stories mentioned in Surah 18 must have been written later, therefore the dating must be wrong. In the real world, we do not conform our theories to evidences, rather we let the evidences work for, or against our theories. In this case, it is called “proof by contradiction”, in that both you and Spencer seem unable to grasp the reality that the manuscript has been properly dated and that its text is in conformity with the traditional story of preservation. This does not mean the datings are wrong, it means your timeline of perceived development of the text is wrong. In other words, the proof of the datings, contradicts your claims, ergo you’ve been proven to be wrong.

2. For a person who has studied Islam and the Qur’an for over 20 years, you are severely uneducated when it comes to Islam and the Qur’an. You made the absurd assertion, and let me quote you here, that:

“The Qur’an, unlike the Biblical documents, was never written on papyrus….”

Jay……, Jay………, Jay. I don’t know what to say, except that not only are you wrong, you’re very wrong and at this point you’re just embarrassing yourself. Take a look at this wonderful manuscript of the Qur’an, from the 1st century AH, written in Hijazi, that’s written on….papyrus! Given that you “professionally study the Qur’an”, it esacpes me how one of the only major news stories of 2014 concerning the Qur’an would slip by you.

You went on to argue:

“So where are those four complete Qur’anic manuscripts, all from 650 AD, all of which should be identical, without any manuscript variants? A folio or two discovered here and there (Birmingham and Tubingen) do not the Qur’an make.”

I think he means codices and not manuscripts, because if he means manuscripts, then yes we do have several folios of complete manuscripts of the Qur’an that pre-date 650 CE. What manuscripts would that be? Well it would be the four from Birmingham, that’s just one example off the top of my head that would be extremely relevant to the very topic at hand! Also, as pointed out in my paper to you, we do have 100% of the Qur’an from within the 1st century of hijrah. So, to the contrary, yes, a folio or two does add up when you end up with 100% of the text you were aiming to find.

You went on to argue:

“What’s more, Ehrman seems to suggest that these two folios, dated early, thus validate the entire Qur’an as being early. Using that criteria, would he be willing to accept that the 2nd century Bodimer Papyrus and the John Rylands fragments now validate all 27 books of the New Testament? Of course he won’t, and neither do we.”

Well that isn’t Dr. Ehrman’s argument, and although we do have the entire text from within the first century of hijrah, your argument is still bad. Why is it bad? Mostly because, if we quote the Dr., his assertion, and let me quote him here (something you were unable and unwilling to do for obvious reasons), was to say the following:

“My historical question is this. If these pages of the Qur’an do indeed show that the text of the Qur’an is virtually the same in, say 630-40 CE as it is in 1630-40 as it is in 2015, that would suggest that Muslims are indeed correct that at least in some circles (it would obviously be impossible to prove that it was true in *all* circles), scribes of the Qur’an simply didn’t change it. The made sure they copied it the same, every time, word for word.”

“And so back to my question. If Muslim scholars over the centuries – from the very beginning – made dead sure that when they copied their sacred text they didn’t change anything, why didn’t Christian scribes do the same thing???”

All he’s saying is that what was copied, would somewhat prove that it was copied correctly. I’m looking for where he does not say, “these pages of the Qur’an” and where he says “entire Qur’an”, and well, I can’t find it. Essentially, what Smith did, was open his mouth, make up something, argue against that made up statement and then cheer himself for winning an argument that he himself made. It’s just embarrassing and depressing.

3. Smith claims that the 4 folios (pages) do contain variants when compared with the Qur’an of today. To the contrary, the manuscript contains 0 variants (orthography aside). What it does contain are two words that the scribe changed from the reading of Ibn Masud, and Isa b. Amr and Al-Thahak b. Muzahim on lines 13 and 30, to the reading of ‘Uthman. Therefore, the manuscript, in its state as left by the scribe does conform to the Qur’an of today. Even if the scribe had preferred the reading of one word (واشدد), it is from the Qira’at of the Prophet (ﷺ) through Ibn Masud, or if the scribe had preferred the reading of the other word (طاوى) through Isa b. Amr and Al-Thahak b. Muzahim, it is also from the Qira’at, both of which are from the Qur’an. Therefore, by all measurements, there are no variants except for the notable difference in use of the letter “alif” which is due to orthographic development.

4. Smith claims that BBC sensationalized the story by leaving out the mention that the original scribe chose to conform to the ‘Uthmani recitation in two words. Since this is an autographic text and the scribe chose to write the text according to the ‘Uthmani rasm, then it is not a variant, as it already agrees with the modern text. If the scribe had chosen to keep the two different words (one due to use of an ‘alif), it would still conform as it is from the Qira’at of the Prophet (ﷺ), which the textual critic Alba of Birmingham University also mentions.

5. Smith refers to intentional changes to conform to the published edition from his friend’s Dan’s thesis, which I tore apart as being unqualified in my paper here. Not only does Dan confuse the orthography of the Arabic language with “intentional” changes, he seemed unable to find the most basic variants that belonged to the Qira’at. Most of his paper focused on him being unable to find the variants in the Qira’at literature, yet somehow I was able to find several and without much time.

6. Smith refers to orthographic differences as “scribal errors”. I suggest he reads any book on language development or of textual criticism. Lapsus calami, or scribal errors, do not include orthographic development. If that were the case, almost all medieval NT manuscripts would then have to be considered erratic en toto because of the shift of majuscule scriptio continua to miniscule polytonic. In other words, not only is he wrong, he spent 20 years not understanding the basics of textual criticism, for someone the age of all his years of study to correct him on it (me).

7. Lastly, Smith argues that Muslims have no complete manuscript of the Qur’an:

“…it is striking that we cannot find any complete manuscripts of the Qur’an at all from any of the vast area they dominated.”

I suggest he Google’s the term manuscript. The very folios we are looking at right now from Birmingham do contain a manuscript (folio, leaf, page) that has no lacunae (Smith, this term means gaps or missing data), the recto and verso of Mingana Arabica 1572a which contains Surah 20, is complete. You’re free to see the scans yourself, which I am sure you are able to access, as I have been. You’re free to point out to me, which lines from 1 to 40 on the manuscript are incomplete. At that point, when you realise you were wrong, feel free to contact me and I’ll forgive you and pray for you.

Spencer mentioned in his Jihad Watch article that the manuscripts from Birmingham cannot be dated so early due to the use of diacritical marks. However as Sadeghi has pointed out, this is a feature also from the Sana’aa C1 text:

“Surprisingly, the lower script on occasion appears to use what are possibly diacritics, in the form of perfectly round dots, to signify short vowel marks (and possibly elided alifs, i.e. hamzat al-waṣl). These dots are in the same ink as the rest of the lower writing and do not appear to have been added later.” – Arabica 57 (2010), page 359.

Why is this of significance? Well, because according to his latest datings, as linked to us by Goudarzi himself (Dr. Sadeghi’s research partner), Dr. Sadeghi dates Sana’aa C1 to the first half of the first century hijrah, the same as our Birmingham manuscripts. The same can also be found, in Qaf 47, which is also dated to the same time as our Birmingham manuscripts. In other words, Spencer is not a textual critic and as it stands, these non-Muslim textual critics seem to be in unanimous agreement about the early datings of several folios and their use of diacritical marks in the early hijazi script. Ergo, Spencer is wrong.

As a closing point, I’ve dealt with Spencer and Smith’s ridiculous claims and for the fun of it, I’ve decided to include my favourite Qadiani-Trinitarian into the mix. Nabeel, you cannot count, nor can you read. I’m sorry if you feel insulted by this, but you posted something wrong in public and it is my job to correct you when you slip up. Which these days, seems to be quite often.

The same goes to you as it did to Smith. There are no variants in the manuscript. None. Except, if we are to be pedantic, that there are changes the original scribe made, then at the very least we can stretch to say there are two “variants”. How 2 = 5, I do not know. Hopefully, once you solve the mystery of the Trinity, you can help me solve how 0 = 5 or, for the sake of argument, how 2 = 5. I’m afraid your logic does not follow with me, and I am pretty bad at math.

Addendum:

Br. محمد بن شمس الدين has done a nice comparison image of the folios for us and he has also created a handy image, explaining what some of the symbols and numbers mean (source).

Lastly, another brother has created a PDF responding to each possible variant claim (mostly orthographic and from the qira’at) that any missionary can bring forth as an argument of “changes”. He has given me permission to publish it at my will. I will do so accordingly. It is in English and explains the Arabic quite succinctly.

and God knows best.