Muslim Scholar Says "Holes" in Traditional Account of Quran

Are there "holes" in the traditional Muslim understanding of how we got the Quran? One respected and conservative Sunni scholar thinks so. Dr. Yasir Qadhi is a Pakistani-American Muslim scholar who is widely respected in the Muslim community — he holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from Yale University and is Dean of Academic Affairs at the Islamic Seminary of America, making him precisely the kind of insider whose testimony is difficult to dismiss as uninformed or hostile to the faith. In a 2020 interview with Muhammad Hijab, he described a crisis he had while completing graduate studies at Yale. The crisis had to do with the various ahruf and qira'at (i.e., variant readings or versions) of the Quran. In the interview, Qadhi does not explain the issue further, and he repeatedly states that the issue should not be discussed in public.

What makes this admission striking is not simply that Qadhi encountered a difficulty in his studies — scholars encounter difficulties all the time — but that a figure of his standing felt the need to actively conceal the nature of the problem from ordinary believers, even while confirming to Hijab that it is real and unresolved. This is not the posture of someone raising a minor technical footnote; it is the posture of someone protecting the faith of ordinary Muslims from a question he does not believe can currently be answered.

The interview caused quite a controversy amongst Muslims, such that Muhammad Hijab (the man interviewing Qadhi) decided to almost immediately delete this portion of the dialogue from the video on his YouTube channel. A few weeks later, in July 2020, Qadhi set the entire interview to "private" on his YouTube channel, thereby preventing anyone from watching it in its entirety. The issue has caused so much controversy because it affects the oft-repeated claim that the Quran in existence today is exactly the same as the Quran that the "prophet" Muhammad gave to the first Muslims — a claim that functions as a foundational pillar of Islamic apologetics, frequently contrasted with the more complicated textual history of the Bible. If a scholar as credentialed and orthodox as Qadhi privately doubts that this claim can be fully defended, it raises the question of how many other Muslim scholars share the same private doubts while publicly repeating the standard narrative.

Here are some quotes from that interview.

And I would never bring it up in public… When you do a deep dive is when things get very, very awkward and difficult… This is not a joke brothers and sisters… Now for the first time I’m telling you here… these are very, very difficult issues and the most advanced of our scholars, they’re not quite fully certain how to solve all of the unanswered questions… These issues should only be discussed amongst people who know what qira’at are… and by the way this is now a well known open secret amongst many Muslim graduate students and academics around the world. Traditional understandings of ahruf and qira’at cannot answer some of these pressing questions that are now being poked by… academics outside of the faith tradition. You see, in a Muslim environment there is always some respect that we have for the Quran… When you go to academia they don’t have that red line. And they’re gonna just, you know the famous story of the emperor with no clothes, they’re gonna just point out, ‘no, that doesn’t make any sense’ or ‘that’s not true’ and ‘this and that.’ And they’ll bring issues which I’m not going to mention explicitly, that you know are true because they’re in your own books. They’re not inventing anything new… I don’t even want to be explicit… and it’s very clear… that the standard narrative has holes in it. That’s what I’m gonna say. The standard narrative does not answer some very pressing questions…

Notice the pattern in this quote: Qadhi repeatedly gestures toward specific evidence — "they're in your own books," "they're not inventing anything new" — while declining to name what that evidence actually is. This is a curious rhetorical position for someone defending the faith to occupy. If the traditional narrative could withstand scrutiny, one would expect a scholar of Qadhi's caliber to want the issues aired and answered, not quarantined from public view. His own metaphor is telling: he compares Western academics to the child in "The Emperor's New Clothes," the one voice willing to say aloud what everyone can supposedly already see. That is not typically how believers describe critics whose objections are baseless.

This is no longer hidden news. More and more professors and academics are writing stuff and it’s being publicized on Twitter… And by and large our ulema [i.e. scholars] in the eastern world are not aware, by and large, of what’s going on in the western side of things. And they’re not answering those questions in a manner that it needs to be answered. This is something all of us, that are in academia, fully acknowledge.

This quote adds an important detail: the problem, according to Qadhi, is not confined to a small circle of specialists in one country. He describes a divide between Muslim scholars trained in Western academic institutions — who are aware of these textual difficulties and, in his words, "fully acknowledge" them — and the ulema in Muslim-majority countries, who by and large are not engaging with this scholarship at all. In other words, the very scholars best equipped to evaluate the traditional narrative's textual history are, according to Qadhi, the ones least confident it can answer the mail, while the scholars most confident in the narrative are the ones least exposed to the relevant scholarship. That is a significant admission from someone speaking as an insider on both sides of that divide.

This issue of ahruf and qira’at has troubled the ummah [i.e. Muslim community] from the very beginning… You will not find one lecture of mine about this issue. It should never be brought up in public… This is not something you discuss amongst the masses… It’s not wise. These problems are now becoming mainstream.

Qadhi's closing remark here is worth sitting with: he says the issue has troubled the Muslim community "from the very beginning" — meaning this is not a modern controversy invented by Western academics with an axe to grind, but a difficulty embedded in the earliest history of the text's transmission. Yet his prescribed response is not to investigate and resolve the difficulty, but to manage its exposure — to keep it out of lectures, away from "the masses," confined to those already credentialed enough to be trusted with it. His admission that "these problems are now becoming mainstream" suggests he recognizes that this strategy of containment is failing, and that ordinary Muslims will increasingly encounter these questions whether or not their scholars are willing to address them directly.

Taken together, these three quotes present a striking picture: a mainstream, Yale-trained Sunni scholar acknowledging, in his own words, that the standard account of the Quran's preservation faces real and currently unanswered difficulties — and that this is understood as such by other credentialed scholars, even as it is deliberately withheld from public discussion.

Learn More

Short Blog: "Every Fifth Sentence or So [of the Quran] Simply Doesn’t Make Sense"

External Video (below): This video features clips from the full interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d225z-Yn0vk

Reference

Yasir Qadhi’s full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dc1HJ8Uif4&app=desktop

(See 1 hr 20 min to 1 hr 30 min for the quotes above.)

Note: As of (approximately) July 2020, Dr. Qadhi has set this video to "private" so that it is no longer viewable. However, you can still watch much of the interview by searching YouTube for "yasir qadhi muhammad hijab preservation of quran" or similar words.