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How authentic is the Quran?

Islam and the Quran

Is Islam an alternative?

A real scientist should look at religion in an unbiased way. Looking at the Bible he is bound to find that it contradicts not only science but also itself repeatedly. Even Christian scholars agree to this. After all, the entire Bible is a collection of books from many different centuries. But do all other religious books contradict modern scientific knowledge as well? Let's look at one of them, Islam.

Muslims for example, the followers of a major religion by numbers (1.2 billion followers, supposedly the fastest growing) called Islam, still see their book as the true word of God. They also seem to think that it is still scientifically correct and does not contradict modern knowledge at all! This is the opposite of what most Christians would say about their book. Let's investigate this. If there really are scientifically correct statements in the Quran that have only been known for a century or maybe for a decade and people are taking that as a proof for the existence of God, we would first have to make sure that the source is really old enough to wonder about it and take it seriously.

How authentic is the Quran?

The age of the Quran, old and current manuscripts:

How authentic is the Quran really and is it old enough for us to wonder about any scientific statements in it? Companions of the Prophet Mohammed are supposed to have written this book about 1375 years ago after having commemorated it and are supposed to have done it under the advice of the Prophet, who is told to have been illiterate and received the Quran as a revelation from God or Allah (meaning "the God") via the Archangel Gabriel. The Quran is the most treasured book of the Muslims.

Figure 6. A 1200 year old copy of the Quran is presented by Muslims in Kashmir
There are manuscripts that are over 1000 years of age scattered all across the world and many are in the possession of European and American museums as well. But has each word of the Quran stayed in the same position since the moment of "revelation"? Or were the scientific verses added later on, after the scientific discoveries had been made that it is said to refer to?

The Quran has been preserved

The fact that the Quran in its present form is more than thousand years old and hasn't changed since then is apparently undisputed even among very critical non-Muslim historians.

Archaeologists, experts of Oriental Studies and scholars of other disciplines seem to agree to the fact that the Quran hasn't changed for more than a 1000 years (see The Atlantic Monthly; January 1999; What is the Koran? Volume 283, No 1; pages 43-56).

Furthermore, there are very old manuscripts from the early Middle Ages (800 AD.) exhibited in the British Museum and have been in British possession for centuries (The Quran, M.Lings and Y.H.Safadi, London, 1976). One copy in the Egyptian National Museum written on gazelle skin has been dated back to 688 AD, 58 years after Mohammed and all these old findings are still the same versions as the ones that are being currently distributed among Muslims. This is nothing unusual as such since some Bibles are older than that. You can see an image of a manuscript of 1200 years age exhibited during a ceremony in Kashmir (Figure 6).

Figure 6. A 1200 year old copy of the Quran is presented by Muslims in Kashmir

So the Quran has been preserved in its original form and came historically after the Hindu Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagwandgita, the Torah, the Tao, the Zarathustran scripture, the Buddhist scriptures or all the books of the Bible. Now, could the people in Arabia have known phenomena that are described in it? After all the Arabs are known to have been skilled and there were ancient people before them who had deep universal knowledge. The Egyptians built huge pyramids. The Chinese drew maps and the Indians calculated solar eclipses.

All the questions

The Muslims were scientifically advanced when they came to Spain and Istanbul, so did Islam actually destroy the scientific civilisation and culture of the Arabs in the same way that the Inquisition tried to do in Europe? Or did the Muslims actually rise as a culture after the Book came to them by following it? And why are the Muslims no longer pioneers in sciences? Are they really following their book or does that book actually forbid them to think rationally? Did the Muslims spread their religion with violence or did they convince the tribes they brought on their side in Africa, Asia and Europe? All these questions arise. Also, is the Quran something new or is it just a copy of the Bible or parts of it? And is that book really scientifically correct in its descriptions? How intensive and detailed are these descriptions anyway?