The Preservation Of The Quran

Muhammad, founder of Islam, initially used oral recitation to companions in order to convey the alleged revelation from the angel Gabriel, the contents of which were eventually recorded in Arabic writing by others and meticulously copied.  The first caliph reportedly had multiple memorizers contribute after Muhammad's death so that the written Quran would mirror the original statements.  The preservation of the original Quran in Arabic--translations to other languages might have to make tradeoffs or exchange a word for a loose equivalent--is commonly emphasized in Islamic apologetics.  Since the events of the transmission entail a historical claim, and not in the logically necessary sense of there being an initial creation event for time and the material universe, of course one cannot truly prove and thus know with absolute certainty if this perfect preservation actually happened.  However, the veracity of this does not actually matter in the way some might imagine.

A book claiming erroneous or partially true metaphysical ideas could be perfectly preserved and still be false.  The mode or strictness of textual preservation is absolutely irrelevant to whether the entire philosophical system therein is correct.  I could make up a religious, a scientific, or a more foundational/abstract metaphysical system that is actually logically possible (as in, it could be or could have been true because it does not contradict logical axioms) tomorrow and have my friends or children, if I eventually have any, copy it perfectly and then have their own friends and family members do the same for many generations.  Total copy-to-copy accuracy in English could be attained with great care even if unlikely.  Nevertheless, unless the ideological system attested to was both logically possible and happened to be true out of all competing possibilities, the preserved text is not true, and even if it was, no one could know its worldview is true if it only contained non sequitur claims or presupposed notions.

Moreover, a book could be mistranslated or partly distorted over time and still convey truths, though perhaps only the original document(s) is fully true to reality in its meaning.  The ideas behind the words align with or deviate from reality no matter the wording used to communicate them, and words are arbitrary, shifting constructs anyway.  Accidental or perhaps even intentional alterations to the text might mean only that the text was not accurately transmitted from one time or group to another.  Logically, there is nothing necessarily true about this invalidating the whole of the text on a translational level when moving from language to language; small errors in some parts do not mean other parts were similarly distorted.  More importantly, none of this requires that the concepts the original words referred to are false.  Epistemology and metaphysics must as always be distinguished here.

The accuracy or inaccuracy of the Arabic Quran to the original documents might be of great significance to whether Islamic tradition/history is honest about itself.  It just does not mean one way or another than the Quran is truly accurate religious revelation from God.  Claiming something is true is not what makes it so, either in the sense of historical hearsay about copying or in the sense of the contents of a text saying this of themselves.  The purity of textual copying is a red herring to whether the text testifies to any real moral obligation when it says to cut off the hands of thieves (Surah 5:38) or to correct details about the afterlife like how people and stones are fuel for hellfire (Surah 2:24).  Is it true that Muhammad was visited by an angel?  Islam has inherent contradictions due to the Quran affirming parts of the Old Testament and yet conflicting with them, but the accuracy of one copy and another is not what determines if Islam is true or false.  Ultimately, it is very simply but wholly irrelevant.