Spelling and Literacy

If the Quran was solely, or even predominately, an oral transmission during the prophet’s life, then we would expect to find much variability in spelling between the oldest Quran manuscripts. Additionally, if the Quran was revealed only to the prophet as an oral recitation, then this would imply that the text of the Quran was not part of divine revelation, and therefore scribes should have been allowed to apply their own discretion in the spelling in their writing of the Quran. Except upon analysis of the earliest Quran manuscripts, we find this is not the case.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the earliest Quran manuscripts is the spelling across the entire text from the thousands of manuscripts is obsessively consistent. This is particularly interesting since several letters in Arabic have very similar sounds despite having completely different orthography (rasm).

• أ vs. ع
• ت vs. ط
• ح vs. ه
• ذ vs. ظ
• د vs. ض
• س vs. ص
• ذ vs. ز
• ك vs. ق
• ز vs. ظ

If we are to believe that the Quran was solely or predominately oral and given to illiterate people, then we would expect that there would be a vast amount of spelling differences among the thousands of the earliest manuscripts that are in existence. Except, this is not the case. It is so rare that when something like this is discovered, it gets a mass amount of attention, like in the word “basatan” ( بَسْطَةً) in , where in some manuscripts, it is written incorrectly with a saad ( ص) rather than with a siin ( س).