Well, I thought I would spend some time talking about the Gregg debate, but as soon as the intro music finished, I looked at my little tablet pc, which has our phone system software running on it, and who is the first caller, but Nadir Ahmed. And the attached description of the call is about why he won’t be doing our debate. And it just got stranger from there! Nearly 40 minutes with Nadir covering…well, you just sorta have to listen. Then the next call was on Mormonism, and then a call back on Islam! I’m tired just thinking about it! You won’t fall asleep during this one, to be sure!
Now, by the way. Nadir said it is a “lie” that there are any textual variants in the ancient manuscripts of the Qur’an. I do not have time to go into depth at this point in time, but I did want to provide the following scan of just a single page from Die dunklen Anfänge, a primarily German work edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd-R Puin (Schiler, 2005). Here we have a discussion of textual variants found in Surah 2:222 in the Fogg’s palimpsest. Briefly, the page not only shows a graphic showing the scriptio inferior and scriptio superior (palimpsests are manuscripts where the original has been wiped off and a new work written on top of it; they are often read by use of ultraviolet light); it gives the readings, showing how the original version of this text differed from the later standardized (i.e., called the “Uthmanic”) text. Note as well that the original reading of this manuscript tended to agree with the readings of Ibn Mas’ud over against the later standardized text. The point is, here is documentation of textual variation in an early manuscript of the Qur’an, something Nadir Ahmed called “a lie” on the program today.
