A Critique of Blacher's Views Regarding the Development of Variant Readings [in the Quran]

Since the beginning of the Prophet’s mission, the heavenly verses of the Qurʾān have been attacked by the enemies and ignorant people. Orientalists who study the Qurʾānic revelation have considered the variant readings as a good pretext for presenting the text of the Qurʾān as a confused jumble. They sometimes equate it to the presence of distortion in the Qurʾān, and at other times attribute it to the permissibility of abrogation, or as evidence of defects and redactions in the Qurʾān, or the result of
changes introduced into the text of the Qurʾān. Blacher, like other Orientalists, latches on to this idea and has to some extent been caught up in this fallacy. The present paper carefully studies his statements, as well as some of the roots, causes and factors that led
to the variant readings (such as the influence of the centers where [famous] reciters lived on the modes of reading, the different manuscripts and their relation to the variant readings, the large number of reciters, the long time gap from the era of revelation, the
influence of political factors and the preference of a particular reading by certain sovereigns). After a systematic analysis of this, we show that none of these factors could have led to weakness, defects, or distortions in the text of the Qurʾān.