Arguments, examined

Bukhari records the order and its reason in the same report: soldiers from Syria and Iraq were quarrelling over recitation, and Uthman acted to stop the community splitting over its Book. Burning a superseded copy is how Islamic law retires one respectfully.

The Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus, from the first Islamic century, preserves close to half the text in one manuscript, and early leaves cover much of the rest. The complete text was carried from the start by recitation, memorised in full and recited daily, with writing as its check.

Textual critics, Christian ones included, estimate around 400,000 variants among New Testament manuscripts. Most are trivial. Some are whole passages that modern Bibles bracket, such as the longer ending of Mark.

The Quran attaches its promise of preservation to the Quran. Each earlier message was entrusted to its community, and the last was guarded directly. Jesus wrote nothing that survives, and Christians do not conclude from that that his teaching was lost.

The Quran describes concealment and distortion of meaning within particular communities. Many classical scholars held that the distortion lay mainly in interpretation, with the words left standing. Neither requires a worldwide conspiracy.

The verse asks whether Jesus told people to take him and his mother as gods. It says nothing about the Trinity, which the Quran addresses in a different verse.

No surviving Jewish text says so, and that should be admitted. The tradition names Jews of Medina, and the Quran is very nearly the only record of what Arabian Jews believed. Jewish memory raised Ezra close to Moses, and one early text has him taken up to heaven.

No one, as no one saw the burning bush or the light on the Damascus road. Every prophetic call is private. Islam rests its case on the message, which anyone can read and test.

The account of Abraham and Ishmael raising its foundations comes from the Quran, and Muslims accept it on that basis. There is no archaeological record of Abraham anywhere, Hebron included, so the demand applies to Genesis as much as to the Quran.

The country with the most Muslims is Indonesia, with about 239 million, and it is not an Islamic state: its constitution names one God and recognises six religions. Its national mosque stands across the street from Jakarta Cathedral.

A Malaysian study of one ex-Muslim blog found that storytelling and sympathy carried much of the persuasion, and that accounts of the insults she received drew readers to her. The replies researchers thought could reach her answered her reasons with respect.

Possibly. Diodorus of Sicily described a temple revered by all Arabians, and Ptolemy listed a town called Macoraba, but scholars dispute both identifications. The Quran makes the claim on its own authority.

Dated 72 AH, about sixty years after the Prophet, they quote passages of the Quran that match the text recited today, and they allude to it in ways that assume their readers already knew it.

No. The story of the caliph Umar ordering it burned first appears nearly six centuries after the conquest, and the library had largely vanished centuries before the Arabs arrived. Historians, Muslim and Western, regard the story as a legend.

A graduated annual tax on adult non-Muslim men under Muslim rule, with exemptions for women, children, monks and those unable to work. It was tied to protection and military service, and it also marked a difference of religion.

Academic scholarship finds a standard text fixed under Uthman within two decades of the Prophet, followed by every later manuscript but one, with modest variation in matters the Islamic tradition itself recorded, such as surah order and verse numbering.

Mainstream Islamic law prescribes it, on the strength of the hadith, while the Quran condemns apostasy without naming a worldly penalty. Some senior scholars confine the penalty to treason; the question is debated among Muslims today.

It denies that Jesus was killed or crucified by his enemies, and says God raised him to Himself. Historians treat the crucifixion as well attested; Muslims hold to the Quran on the authority of revelation, and reject atonement by proxy on the Hebrew prophets' own principle that each soul bears its own sin.

The Quran sets no age but requires maturity and consent, and the Prophet gave a woman the right to refuse a marriage she disliked. Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey set the minimum at 18.

It did not abolish it in one step. It made freeing slaves the best of deeds, closed the sources of enslavement to a narrow channel, gave slaves rights, and scholars today hold slavery forbidden.

The Quran says houris, wide-eyed companions, with no number, and promises spouses to every believer. The figure seventy-two comes from one report in al-Tirmidhi that many scholars weaken, and nothing in the sources promises it as a reward for violence.

The Quran allows a person under threat of death or torture to hide his faith, as Ammar ibn Yasir did. It is a concession for compulsion and not a method, and the Quran and the Prophet demand truthfulness and keeping covenants.

Sharia means the path. The hudud punishments are a handful of offences, fenced by very strict proof, and most Islamic law concerns worship, trade, family and character.

The Quran says killing one person unjustly is like killing all of mankind, and the early rules of war protect women, children, the old and the monks. Scholars of every school have condemned beheadings and attacks on civilians.

The Quran threatens it with war from God, treats a loan as an act of kindness, and holds that profit should come with risk. Islamic finance uses partnership and sale instead.

The report in Bukhari says six at the contract and nine at the consummation, and some scholars argue from other reports that she was older. The question is open among scholars, and the rest of her record, as teacher and narrator, is rarely told.

Scholars of every school hold that the Quran asks women to cover, and they differ on how much. The Quran also says there is no compulsion in religion, and many scholars criticise enforcing it by law.

No image can stand for a God to whom nothing is like. Muslim artists answered with stylised pattern, geometry and calligraphy, and the arabesque is built to lead the eye past its own edge.

Chance produces noise. The universe has a beginning, finely balanced constants and law, and a multiverse moves the question back a step without answering it.

Atheists can plainly be good. The question is what grounds the duty, and flourishing, consensus and evolution each explain a feeling without making it binding.

Knowing is not forcing. The Quran says whoever wishes may believe or disbelieve and holds each soul to account, and the schools differ only on how God's decree and human choice fit together.