The Human Transmission Fallacy
Why the Qurʾān Cannot Claim Exemption from Its Own Logic
A Critical Response to “The Limitations of Human Textual Inerrancy” (Medium, May 2025)
1 · Introduction — When Logic Catches Its Own Tail
Every argument that begins with logic must end with logic.
When an author claims that all human textual transmission is fallible, yet insists that the Qurʾān alone is divinely protected from the same limitations, he has already set the trap into which his thesis will fall.
Dr Mohamed’s article, “The Limitations of Human Textual Inerrancy,” attempts to show that the Bible’s human copying proves its imperfection, whereas the Qurʾān’s divine protection ensures its purity.
It sounds persuasive — until the same reasoning is applied to Islam’s own textual history.
If human memory, scribal copying, and oral transmission introduce error, then the Qurʾān, which passed through every one of those channels, is subject to the same vulnerabilities.
The law of identity (A = A) and the law of non-contradiction dictate that two things sharing identical properties cannot yield opposite results without additional proof. None is provided.
2 · The Central Contradiction
| Claim | Historical Reality |
|---|---|
| Human copying introduces error | The Qurʾān was copied, edited, standardized |
| Memory is unreliable | The Qurʾān relied on oral recitation for decades |
| Only divine protection ensures accuracy | No empirical evidence demonstrates such protection |
A text cannot be both humanly transmitted and immune to human limitation.
Either divine protection overrides natural law — in which case verifiable evidence must exist — or the same natural constraints apply.
Invoking “divine guarantee” without demonstration is assertion, not argument.
3 · Historical Transmission of the Qurʾān
The early centuries of Islam were defined by variation, compilation, and suppression.
Multiple codices existed: those of Ibn Masʿūd, Ubayy b. Kaʿb, and ʿAlī.
ʿUthmān’s recension (c. 650 CE) standardized one version and ordered all others burned.
Early manuscripts — such as Ṣanʿāʾ 1 and Paris BNF 328 — contain variant readings, omissions, and additions.
These are not theological rumors; they are paleographic facts.
To argue that human transmission guarantees corruption everywhere except in the Qurʾān is to violate the law of non-contradiction.
4 · The Myth of Perfect Memorization
Islamic tradition claims that thousands memorized the Qurʾān flawlessly.
Cognitive science dismantles that ideal.
Human recall decays predictably over time; reconstructive memory alters details subconsciously.
Even the Qurʾān implies loss: reports of verses about stoning or suckling ten times are preserved only in secondary hadith literature.
If perfection truly existed, no such reports could arise.
Memorization is redundancy, not immunity.
It multiplies copies — and thus multiplies potential error.
Redundancy is a human safeguard, not evidence of supernatural editing.
5 · Logical Self-Defeat
Let us apply Dr Mohamed’s own syllogism:
1️⃣ All human transmission is fallible.
2️⃣ The Qurʾān was transmitted by humans.
3️⃣ Therefore, the Qurʾān’s transmission was fallible.
To escape, he inserts an unproven premise:
“But God protected it.”
That premise demands evidence distinguishable from mere assertion.
Without it, the syllogism stands unbroken, and the conclusion follows necessarily.
A self-referential system that exempts itself from its own rule collapses logically; it becomes circular.
Divine protection is claimed precisely because human fallibility is admitted.
6 · Historical Comparison with the Bible
The Bible and the Qurʾān share identical transmission dynamics: hand-copying, translation, canon selection, and oral recitation.
The difference lies not in process but in transparency.
Bible: tens of thousands of manuscripts spanning continents and centuries, enabling textual reconstruction within > 99 % accuracy.
Qurʾān: far fewer early witnesses, many incomplete, and evidence of editorial standardization.
Ironically, manuscript evidence for the Bible’s preservation is stronger than for the Qurʾān’s.
Yet Islam insists on the reverse.
The double standard is clear: what disqualifies the Bible is ignored when found in Islamic history.
7 · Claim ≠ Evidence
Q 15 : 9 — “We will guard it.”
This is a claim of protection, not a demonstration of preservation.
To treat it as proof is to commit circular reasoning: “It is perfect because it says it is perfect.”
Compare: the Bible claims divine origin too (2 Tim 3 : 16).
If self-attestation proves inerrancy, every scripture is equally inerrant, nullifying the distinction Islam depends on.
A truth-claim must be tested externally.
Once tested historically, the Qurʾān’s transmission mirrors every other human text.
8 · Information Theory and Error Propagation
Claude Shannon’s principle: every transmission channel introduces noise.
Without perfect error correction, information degrades.
Human scribes are the channel; ink, parchment, and memory are the medium.
The Qurʾān’s chain passes through each — therefore subject to entropy.
To claim “divine error-correction” is to introduce an unobservable mechanism.
If such intervention occurred, identical Qurʾāns would exist worldwide.
They do not.
Variant qirāʾāt (7 or 10 canonical, 14 recognized) prove divergence, not divine checksum.
9 · Philosophical Implications — The Inerrancy Loop
If God protects revelation from corruption, two possibilities follow:
1️⃣ He failed three times (Torah, Zabūr, Injīl), then succeeded once — implying imperfection in divine preservation.
2️⃣ Or He never failed, meaning those scriptures remain valid — nullifying Islam’s claim of their corruption.
Either option contradicts core Islamic doctrine.
The loop cannot be closed without breaking logic’s spine.
The Qurʾān’s own verses (6 : 34 / 6 : 115 — “none can change the words of Allah”) apply universally or not at all.
Selective application violates the law of identity: what is called “the word of Allah” cannot change in one instance yet remain immutable in another.
10 · Historical and Forensic Reality
The Qurʾān is not a floating text preserved in the heavens.
It is a historical artifact transmitted through ink, parchment, and people — all within the same fragile chain of causality as every other human record.
The Ṣanʿāʾ palimpsest alone disproves absolute textual uniformity.
Its erased under-text shows an earlier Qurʾānic form differing from the Uthmānic standard.
This is material evidence, not conjecture.
The difference between acknowledging and denying such data is the difference between scholarship and apologetics.
11 · The Empirical Burden
A claim of divine preservation is empirical, not metaphorical.
If true, it must manifest in observable stability beyond human capability.
What we find instead are:
variant consonantal skeletons,
differing regional readings,
lost codices,
and historical admissions of verses once recited but now absent.
That is not divine invariance; it is normal textual history.
12 · The Appeal to Mystery
When pressed, defenders retreat to mysticism:
“God’s word endures spiritually even if humans distort it.”
But that redefines preservation as re-interpretation.
You cannot shift from physical inerrancy to metaphorical endurance without conceding the first claim.
Preservation of meaning admits loss of text — precisely what the doctrine denies.
13 · Epistemic Honesty and Verification
Truth requires coherence and correspondence.
A belief coherent with itself but divorced from evidence is fantasy;
evidence without coherence is chaos.
Islam’s inerrancy claim fails both tests.
It contradicts its own premises and conflicts with physical evidence.
The honest path is not mockery but measurement: follow the data wherever it leads.
So far, it leads to ordinary human transmission, not divine exception.
14 · Comparative Manuscript Evidence
| Corpus | Earliest Complete Codex | Variant Families | Evidence of Standardization |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hebrew Bible | Dead Sea Scrolls (2 BCE – 1 CE) → Masoretic Text | Minor orthographic variants | No state-enforced burning |
| Greek New Testament | Codex Sinaiticus (4 CE) | Thousands of independent copies | None standardized by force |
| Qurʾān | Uthmānic codex (7 CE) | Multiple qirāʾāt, regional orthographies | Standardization by destruction |
Only one of these was enforced by government decree; only one destroyed competing manuscripts.
Such action is historical evidence of variance, not perfection.
15 · Re-examining the Scientific Analogies
Dr Mohamed invokes psychology and information theory to prove the inevitability of error.
He then exempts the Qurʾān through divine correction.
Yet information theory itself forbids unverified exceptions.
Error correction requires observable redundancy codes; the Qurʾān’s variants show no such mechanism.
Cognitive science shows that oral cultures innovate, adapt, and normalize variations — a living process, not robotic replication.
The Qurʾān’s own history follows that exact human pattern.
16 · The Appeal to Authority
Quoting scholars like Ehrman or Barton to critique the Bible while ignoring equally critical Islamic scholarship (Puín, Small, Sinai, Sadeghi) is selective evidence.
If Western critical methods are valid against Christianity, they remain valid against Islam.
You cannot wield textual criticism as a sword and then forbid its return stroke.
17 · The Divine Protection Claim Re-examined
The verse “We will guard it” (15 : 9) is often read as a promise of textual preservation.
Yet the Qurʾān uses identical protective language for the Torah (5 : 44 — “entrusted to the prophets and rabbis to preserve”).
If divine trust was once human stewardship, why reinterpret it as divine micromanagement only for Islam?
Consistency demands parity.
18 · When Faith Requires Selective Logic
The article concludes that ultimate certainty resides only with God.
That statement is true — but self-defeating.
If certainty resides only with God, then no human claim — including Qurʾānic inerrancy — can be asserted with certainty.
Faith may accept mystery; logic cannot.
19 · Reconstructing a Consistent Position
To salvage coherence, one must choose:
Option A: Admit that all scriptures, including the Qurʾān, share human vulnerability — a position consistent with evidence.
Option B: Produce verifiable proof of supernatural preservation — a claim still unfulfilled after fourteen centuries.
Any third option is rhetorical smoke between them.
20 · Conclusion — Truth Under Its Own Rules
The principle Dr Mohamed uses to challenge biblical inerrancy rebounds perfectly upon Islam.
Once the laws of logic and the realities of history are applied consistently, the Qurʾān stands in the same human category as every other text: transmitted, edited, and preserved as best as fallible minds and hands could manage.
Faith may still believe it divine — but that belief cannot claim exemption from its own logic.
Truth that needs protection is no longer truth.
It is preservation of belief, not preservation of fact.
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