Fernando wrote:We might still have countless versions, had not Uthman burnt them!Mughal wrote:The quran was passed on to people by the messenger of God both in written and memorised forms that is why the quranic text was copied from the copies provided by the prophet. Had that not been the case we ought to end up with countless variations in copies of the quran of unexplainable nature.
Dear Fernando, we can speculate all we like but we can only work on what we have. We do not have versions of the quran as explained clearly in the links provided already. False propaganda counts for nothing at all. People who have power always come up with a lot of excuses and they will continue and so their excuses will lead them to the ends they have been promised.
In olden times people use to wash off skins to rewrite on them texts of the quran when ink faded away. On other materials things were burnt or placed in water to be washed away or to decompose. This was thought to be respectable way for getting worn out copies of the quran out of circulation. Since copies which contained errors were of that nature they may have been burnt as well. If one knows islamic history muslims ruled a huge chunk of land at the time of uthmanic calaphate and it could not be possible to gather all the copies of the quran. Moreover if people wanted to hide their copies they wanted to keep they could not be found. So all this seems to have been done with full cooperation of the people. Moreover there are many books in which differences have been mentioned so what was point of writing those books if original copies were burnt forcefully?
Even today people have copies of the quran which still contain errors because no one in the area bothered to correct them. Despite all the differences we have only a couple of dozens of copies that have some differences between their texts which could be corrected easily if people decided to do so. All this because most people follow their local traditions blindly. Not only that any people of any country can print copies of the quran with errors and claim there are different versions of the quran. Even the copies which all muslims think have no errors at all may have error in them if one sat down and started to hunt for errors in them. Moreover error can be identified that is why they are called errors otherwise none will know about them. Such errors in my view do not invalidate the quranic text due to being correctable.
regards and all the best.