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The Qur’aan

Any true scholar of Arabic knows that the language of the Qur’aan reveals much about the book’s origins, showing clearly how it has been altered over the centuries. Islamic pundits like to claim that the Christian Bible has been corrupted from its original, but they ignore the glaring facts of the corruption of the Koranic texts.
It is necessary to know something of the classical Arabic language at and before the time of the Prophet, and to compare this with the early copies of the Qur’aan, and then with the later copies of the late 7th century onward.
The earliest Qur’aan is written in a bare kind of Kufic script with no diacritics, no vowels added and none of the pointing which distinguishes ‘nun’ from ‘ba’, or ‘sin’ from ‘shin’ etc. It is immediately clear to a linguist that the language of the early texts is in early Quraishi dialect, and not ‘standard Arabic’ at all. This was the dialect spoken in Mecca, which had long ago lost much of the inflection of the classical language. It had also totally lost the glottal sound of alif, and the letter had become a mere sign of a long ‘a’, where the glottal sound occurred it was replaced by alif, waw or ya.
However, at the time other dialects were considered more elegant than Quraishi, Calif Uthman’s scholars had to reconcile the language of the holy book with what was considered to be the best Arabic. They therefore set about inventing ways of adapting the basic text, which was considered too holy to change, by gradually adding all the diacritical marks which we know today : the vowels, nunation, shadda, or tashdid, sukun, and so on. Where the missing glottal should be, it was written with hamza over or under the appropriate letter. Up until the 10th century, many copies were written in the old style without these signs.
In this way all the ancient inflectional forms were reintroduced, and the language of the Qur’aan was completely changed from what had been spoken by the Prophet, and was turned into kind of hybrid form of classical Arabic. It is sometimes claimed that Koranic Arabic is Quraishi, but this is not strictly true : Koranic Arabic was developed out of Quraishi. Once one understands this process, the reasons for some of the strange spelling conventions becomes clear, however it is also clear that Uthman’s committee of scholars could often subtly alter the meaning of a word or phrase, whilst at the same time leaving the basic consonantal text unchanged. The mere transposition of a tiny dot can change the whole meaning of a sura.
For this reason, it is impossible to state truthfully that the contents of the Qur’aan is accurately what was spoken by the Prophet, who in his own lifetime never intended his lectures to become a holy book.