Answering Objections to Islam · Qur'anic Transmission

The Uthmanic Archetype in Manuscript Evidence

In short

1.Shared arbitrary spellings — such as the spelling of 'the grace of God' — recur across independent early manuscripts.
2.Arbitrary features are the strongest possible evidence of a common written source.
3.This places a fixed written archetype within decades of the Prophet's death.

The claim being examined

Critics argue the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts are too fragmentary to establish a stable early text.

The Islamic position

Marijn van Putten's orthographic analysis argues the opposite: the earliest manuscripts share arbitrary, idiosyncratic spellings that could only descend from one written exemplar.

Analysis

Van Putten's argument (JRAS, 2019) works exactly as stemmatics does in classical philology: shared errors and arbitrary conventions, not shared correct readings, establish descent. Because these orthographic quirks serve no phonetic or grammatical purpose, independent scribes would not converge on them; their recurrence across geographically separated early manuscripts entails a single written archetype. That archetype corresponds in date and character to the codex the Islamic sources attribute to Uthman. This is a case where a non-Muslim academic argument independently confirms the traditional Muslim account.

Sources

Marijn van Putten · Nicolai Sinai

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