If I can prove to you that the Quraan we have today is 100% provable to be the same as revealed 1444 years ago, what does that mean to you? Has it changed anything for you? Well it should. So letâs take that journey.
Ok, so first, the religious basis. Allaah said Himself in the Quraan that He has given us this âReminderâ & that He will preserve it. So thatâs a promise from the start. But in practice, what actually happened? Well, hereâs the case for its preservation.
Let me try to explain in a way a Bitcoiner can relate to. One of the reasons why itâs so difficult to destroy the âżitcoin network is bcoz itâs distributed. Even if nuclear war breaks out in the world & 90% of all computers are all wiped out, itâs still highly likely the #BTCÂ will survive.
Copies of the blockchain is scattered throughout the world in such a way they we can know 100% it has been preserved. They are all the same, byte for byte. By design.
So when it comes to the Quraan, we have a similar situation. Not exactly the same but similar. Let me demonstrate
Let me first explain how the Quraan and blockchain is different.
Blockchain: Each block is âsolidifiedâ with a nonce, that verifies that itâs valid & it is proof that the work was done to mine that block. There is no ânonceâ of the Quraan.
Blockchain: You could have countless different chains for btc & they would all be mathematically valid as all you need is data & the Nonce. But we only accept and build on top of the âlongest chainâ. That obviously doesnât exist with the Quraan.
Iâm just making it clear how they are different so itâs not misunderstood that somehow âQuraan and blockchain are the sameâ. Thatâs not my point. But what I am saying is that âdistributionâ is a powerful mechanism for âpreservationâ
But the âpreservationâ part of the history is the important part.
Muhammad, unlike Jesus, was a prophet & messenger for 23 years. And during that time the people he was sent to (including himself) were mostly illiterate, as most people were in the past. Reading was a privilege.
So as the Quraan was ârevealedâ in stages over that period of time it was memorised by Muhammad & his followers. Again, unlike Jesus who was a single individual, Muhammad was a leader of a nation. So 1000âs memorised it word for word
This is the âdistributionâ part. The entire area of what is now Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman and Yemen came under Islamic rule within his 23 year mission, and 1000âs of people memorised the entire book from cover to cover and 1000âs more memorised smaller parts. And that was just the beginning.
His main 4 followers who lead the Muslim nation to expand the Islamic boarders all the way further from Egypt to India & China, reaching as far north as Iraq and Syria happened in the next 30-40 years. Thatâs a total of 63+ years where Islam spread an area larger than Europe.
During that time, schools were set up across that land mass from those original 1000âs of people who memorised it to teach 1000âs more. This is how we have preserved the Quraan.
One of the main motivators to memorise the Quraan is bcoz we pray 5 times a day, reciting it in every prayer from memory
Islam today spread as wide as from Indonesia (the country that has the most Muslims in it of any Muslim nation) to morocco, from Russia (that has more Muslims that the GCC countries combined) to Somalia and Nigeria. In all of that, we still memorise the whole book cover to cover
And since 1444years ago until today, across that massive land mass, you donât find any difference between any copy of the Quraan in even a single letter. So from an information distribution perspective through time & space, itâs actually impossible by normal means for them all to have agreed upon a lie or mistake.
But it doesnât even stop there. At this point itâs pretty confirmed, but there is another final piece to the puzzle. We have something called âisnadâ which is called âchain of narratorsâ. And this is where the similarities to âżitcoin comes again.
If a person memorises the whole Quraan, they could take it to the next level & read the entire Quraan from start to finish to his teacher. His teacher will listen to it entirely & if it is exactly as he heard it from his teacher he will give him âthe chainâ.
This âchainâ is exactly like the blockchain in that it is a list of teachers who did exactly the same thing all the way up to the prophet Muhammad. And there are millions of these chains scattered across the world as people themselves scattered and moved to different lands.
We know exactly who every single person is in that change. Their names, their fathers names, their grandfathers names, where they were born and died, all the way up to the top, to the source. A continuous chain of people who memorised the Quraan & verified it with their teachers
And if you were to gather all these chains from across the world & compare them, you will see it spread out like the roots of a tree, some of them coming together and so on.
So when you put all of the above together, it becomes practically impossible to claim it was not preserved
1) No two copies that are different
2) So many people who memorised it at every level that itâs impossible to have agreed upon a lie
3) We know exactly who each memorise was, so nothing is anonymous like the Bible
4) Historical manuscripts all confirm the above.
5) Every Muslim on planet Earth, from the moment they can start to recognise letters start memorising the Quraan, some complete it and some memorise some, but you now have today more than 1 billion humans who actively memorise and read the Quraan at least 5 times a day.
Sorry, this turned out to be a bit longer than a few note, but I think one can agree, that if all what Iâve said above is true (you can easily verify that) then it is indeed preserved. Just remember, what is Quraan is ONLY what has reached the above criteria.
