From topic about Satanic Verses:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1226113417/0
Re: The Satanic Verses
Reply #10 - Nov 10th, 2008, 4:31pm
Gaybriel, in case you think he is making it up, I have seen similar claims before and I suspect Abu agrees with them.

There is also apparently another part of the Koran which was destroyed a few centuries after Muhammed because the clerics (ie the ones that don't exist) found it too disturbing.
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You may download the article from http://www.derafsh-kaviyani.com/english/quran1.html

"Looking at the Fragments"

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The first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Puin, who had been sent by the German government to organize and oversee the restoration project, recognized the antiquity of some of the parchment fragments, and his preliminary inspection also revealed unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Enticing, too, were the sheets of the scripture written in the rare and early Hijazi Arabic script: pieces of the earliest Korans known to exist, they were also palimpsests -- versions very clearly written over even earlier, washed-off versions. What the Yemeni Korans seemed to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.
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The prospect of a Muslim backlash has not deterred the critical-historical study of the Koran, as the existence of the essays in The Origins of the Koran (1998) demonstrate. Even in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair the work continues: In 1996 the Koranic scholar Günter Lüling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism about "the wide extent to which both the text of the Koran and the learned Islamic account of Islamic origins have been distorted, a deformation unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamicists until now." In 1994 the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam published a posthumous study by Yehuda D. Nevo, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, detailing seventh- and eighth-century religious inscriptions on stones in the Negev Desert which, Nevo suggested, pose "considerable problems for the traditional Muslim account of the history of Islam." That same year, and in the same journal, Patricia Crone, a historian of early Islam currently based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, published an article in which she argued that elucidating problematic passages in the Koranic text is likely to be made possible only by "abandoning the conventional account of how the Qur'an was born." And since 1991 James Bellamy, of the University of Michigan, has proposed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society a series of "emendations to the text of the Koran" -- changes that from the orthodox Muslim perspective amount to copyediting God.
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Yadda wrote on Nov 28^th, 2008 at 1:49pm:


Actually there is no surprise there.

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The Koran are said to have been revealed, in 610, to an affluent but disaffected merchant named Muhammad bin Abdullah. Until his death, the supposedly illiterate Muhammad received through Gabriel divine revelations in Arabic that were known as qur'an ("recitation") and that announced, initially in a highly poetic and rhetorical style, a new and uncompromising brand of monotheism known as Islam, or "submission" (to God's will). Muhammad reported these revelations verbatim to sympathetic family members and friends, who either memorized them or wrote them down.
The Islamic tradition has it that when Muhammad died, in 632, the Koranic revelations had not been gathered into a single book; they were recorded only "on palm leaves and flat stones and in the hearts of men." (This is not surprising: the oral tradition was strong and well established, and the Arabic script, which was written without the vowel markings and consonantal dots used today, served mainly as an aid to memorization.) Nor was the establishment of such a text of primary concern as the Medinan Arabs united in a potent new faith and inspired by the life and sayings of Prophet Muhammad were at the time pursuing a fantastically successful series of international conquests in the name of Islam.

In the early decades of the Arab conquests many members of Muhammad's coterie were killed, and with them died valuable knowledge of the Koranic revelations. Muslims at the edges of the empire began arguing over what was Koranic scripture and what was not. An army general returning from Azerbaijan expressed his fears about sectarian controversy to the Caliph 'Uthman (644-656) -- the third Islamic ruler to succeed Muhammad -- and is said to have entreated him to "overtake this people before they differ over the Koran the way the Jews and Christians differ over their Scripture." 'Uthman convened an editorial committee of sorts that carefully gathered the various pieces of scripture that had been memorized or written down by Muhammad's companions. The result was a standard written version of the Koran. 'Uthman ordered all incomplete and "imperfect" collections of the Koranic scripture destroyed, and the new version was quickly distributed to the major centers of the rapidly burgeoning empire.
In the early decades of the Arab conquests many members of Muhammad's coterie were killed, and with them died valuable knowledge of the Koranic revelations. Muslims at the edges of the empire began arguing over what was Koranic scripture and what was not. An army general returning from Azerbaijan expressed his fears about sectarian controversy to the Caliph 'Uthman (644-656) -- the third Islamic ruler to succeed Muhammad -- and is said to have entreated him to "overtake this people before they differ over the Koran the way the Jews and Christians differ over their Scripture." 'Uthman convened an editorial committee of sorts that carefully gathered the various pieces of scripture that had been memorized or written down by Muhammad's companions. The result was a standard written version of the Koran. 'Uthman ordered all incomplete and "imperfect" collections of the Koranic scripture destroyed, and the new version was quickly distributed to the major centers of the rapidly burgeoning empire.

During the next few centuries, while Islam solidified as a religious and political entity, a vast body of exegetical and historical literature evolved to explain the Koran and the rise of Islam, the most important elements of which are hadith, or the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad; sunna, or the body of Islamic social and legal custom; sira, or biographies of the Prophet; and tafsir, or Koranic commentary and explication. It is from these traditional sources -- compiled in written form mostly from the mid eighth to the mid tenth century -- that all accounts of the revelation of the Koran and the early years of Islam are ultimately derived.
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However progressive way lasted only a two hundred years if that


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By the end of the tenth century the influence of the Mu'tazili school had waned, for complicated political reasons, and the official doctrine had become that of i'jaz, or the "inimitability" of the Koran. (As a result, the Koran has traditionally not been translated by Muslims for non-Arabic-speaking Muslims. Instead it is read and recited in the original by Muslims worldwide, the majority of whom do not speak Arabic. The translations that do exist are considered to be nothing more than scriptural aids and paraphrases.) The adoption of the doctrine of inimitability was a major turning point in Islamic history, and from the tenth century to this day the mainstream Muslim understanding of the Koran as the literal and uncreated Word of God has remained constant.
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tallowood,

I came across this today.....

Dec 4, 2008
Guest Columnist: The gospel truth?
.....Spearheaded by scholars at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), it focused largely on the Koran, which these so-called new historians of Islam subjected to modern historical and philological analysis. Their findings flatly contradict the Islamic account of its origins.
.....The fact that [the Koran] is "strikingly lacking in overall structure, frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content... and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions" is evidence, he argued, that it "is not the carefully executed project of one or many men, but rather the product of an organic development from originally independent traditions during a long period of transmission."
The existence in Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock of Koranic inscriptions which differ from Uthman's text, and the discovery in 1972 of a Yemeni "paper grave" containing thousands of Koranic fragments exhibiting other textual variations, further indicate that, far from being divinely revealed in its unchanging entirety, the Koran evolved as a literary artifact.
IN A follow-up study, The Sectarian Milieu, Wansbrough postulated that the Koran emerged out of a two-centuries-long dialogue between Muslims and the Christians and Jews they encountered during the Islamic conquests. Its precepts slowly developed in opposition to the older religions, resulting in a tradition distinctively Arabian but based on Judaeo-Christian foundations. Wansbrough saw rabbinical Judaism as the Koran's overriding influence, citing its biblical and talmudic borrowings.
Other scholars, however, have highlighted its Christian substrates. The German scholar Christoph Luxenburg contends that it is based on the qeryana - lectionaries used in seventh-century Syrian Christian churches.
......THE IDEA of an evolving Koran has been developed by Wansbrough's former SOAS students Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. In Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, they eschew Muslim sources for Islam's early history in favor of contemporary Armenian, Greek and Syrian accounts. These, they maintain, demonstrate that Muslim tradition is a myth, a "pious fraud" created after the Islamic conquests to provide an ideological foundation for the expanding empire. The Koran was compiled as part of this process, to provide a coherent scriptural basis for the growing body of law that its governance required. It was then attributed back to Muhammad to give it unassailable authority.
In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Crone also challenges the convention that the Koran was compiled in Mecca and Medina, arguing that internal evidence like its description of Muhammad's "polytheist" opponents as olive growers suggests a Mediterranean milieu. Gerald Hawting, SOAS professor of Near Eastern history, agrees, arguing that these "polytheists" actually espouse a form of monotheism, placing the Koran's development not in idol-worshipping Arabia, but further north in the Fertile Crescent.
Unsurprisingly, such theories have been denounced by Muslim academics who consider the Koran's historicization as blasphemy.
.....For example, S. Parvez Manzoor, mindful of the manner in which biblical criticism helped break Christianity's stranglehold on European civilization, interprets it as "an unholy conspiracy to dislodge the Muslim scripture from its firmly entrenched position as the epitome of historic authenticity and moral unassailability" and "rid the West forever of the problem of Islam."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1227702431692&pagename=JPost%2FJPArti...
over 2 pages




I found the article link here....

Good article in jpost.com on how the Koran is syncretic, and was probably compiled after the Arab conquests as a way of regulating and justifying them:
Posted by: jewdog
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023797.php#c605730

Dictionary,
syncretism = = the amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.