Heisa om Nederlands onderzoek naar Koran recitatie

Marijn van Putten, onderzoeker verbonden aan de Universiteit van Leiden, kreeg in maart 2022 een financiële bijdrage van twee miljoen euro van het European Research Council om onderzoek te doen naar de geschiedenis van de recitatie van de Koran. De onderzoeker beschrijft het project op zijn social media account als volgt:

“The project aims to find out how the Quran was recited before the canonization of the seven and how the seven became authoritative, by looking at early vocalised manuscripts.”

Het project dat ook op de website van de Universiteit van Leiden staat beschreven is in januari 2023 begonnen en duurt vijf jaar. Naast Marijn van Putten zijn er nog vier andere onderzoekers betrokken bij het project.

In de afgelopen maanden heeft de onderzoeke zijn bevindingen met zijn volgers op social media gedeeld. Maar niet iedereen is enthousiast. The Muslim Paradigm, een platform op YouTube, publiceerde een misleidende filmpje dat werd overgenomen door DeenShow die daar vervolgens een van de vele 01 minuut Instagram filmpjes van heeft gemaakt en gedeeld. Maar het werd op een dubieuze manier gepresenteerd: “Marijn van Putten kreeg twee miljoen euro om fouten te vinden in de Koran”. DeenShow heeft meer dan 650 duizend abonnees op YouTube en meer dan een miljoen volgers op Twitter.

The Muslim Paradigm publiceerde het bericht met de titel: “Paid 2 million to find mistakes in Qur'an. Shocked by what he found.” Bobby’s Perspective, een ander platform op YouTube, nam het bericht over met een ander titel: “2 million dollar discovery. Scholar uncovers unexpected truth about Qur'an.”

Miljoenen islamitische volgers over de hele wereld lazen de berichten op Internet en reageerden negatief op het onderzoek. De geschrokken Marijn van Putten nam contact op met de betrokken platforms om de bedoeling van zijn onderzoek uit te leggen maar niemand wilde luisteren.

Op dinsdag 15 augustus heeft hij een reactie in het Engels op zijn social media account geplaatst. Hij verwijt de beheerders van de islamitische platforms doelbewust liegen, het verspreiden van halve waarheden en een gebrekkig fact checking. Wij publiceren hieronder met toestemming zijn gehele reactie:

In the past months you may have run into videos about "Marin van Putin (sic) who was paid 2 million dollars (sic) to find mistakes in the Quran and was SHOCKED by what he found." So was I? No. It's intentional lies, half-truths and poor fact-checking.

The video and derivatives have been going viral for a couple of months now, racking up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and millions on Instagram. There is even a German version! This deceitful viral message started with the YT channel "The Muslim Paradigm"

I didn't want to reply to this video because it is so insidiously dishonest that I expected it would fly over. Which it did at first. But it got picked on Instagram and exploded. TheDeenShow very responsibly shared that version with his 1 million followers

I'm now getting daily emails, texts from randoms, old students, friends and colleagues and friends who ran into these videos asking what's going on. I'm happy many people who felt like something didn't add up and thought to search or ask me, but for them millions of others...

So let's go through this claim by claim:

1. Marijn received a €2 mil grant from the European Research Council. > That's correct! For my Quran project, which is a 5 year project involving 2 postdocs, 2 PhD students and myself. The project is still ongoing, started Jan 1st 2023.

2. I received this grant in order to find mistakes in the Quran. Original video formulates it a bit more carefully than its clickbaity title; but it's still equally wrong. This faux-nuance was lost in later derivates.
> No this is not the goal of the Quran project at all!

This can be found out quite easily by typing "ERC van Putten" in Google. The project aims to find out how the Quran was recited before the canonization of the seven and how the seven became authoritative, by looking at early vocalised manuscripts.

2. My analysis in this ERC project showed that the Quran contains no mistakes! This is, of course, absurd. The project started this January and is set to run for 5 years. There are no "results" yet, and in any case it is not about finding mistakes, at all.

If you're interested in finding out what I actually think about Grammatical Mistakes in the Quran you can check out my discussion with @tafsirdoctor. As a linguist, I don't think the category of "mistake" makes sense in any language, so also not Arabic.

3. The videos then show clips of me on @DerekPodcast talking about the fact that the standard text is an extremely stable text from its moment of canonization (I think during the reign of Uthman) until today, remaining virtually unchanged.

> You'd think that directly quoting me would make this unlikely to be dishonest but well...
> #1 This was recorded before I learned I got the ERC grant (9 march 2022).
> #2 It refers to research that was published in 2019!
> #3 it doesn't prove there are no mistakes in the Quran

The article I wrote, "The Grace of God", is free to read and download for everyone. In it I show that all but one early Quranic manuscripts we have access to today all descend from a single written archetype through written transmission.

The precision of these written copies is so precise that you can see a clear "reflection" of the original written form through the meticulous precise copies. I think this proves that the text we have is more-or-less the text that ʿUthmān distributed across the empire.

This actually says *nothing* about the presence of mistakes or not. The whole point of precise copying is that you *also* copy any mistakes that are in the text. So if there *would* be a scribal error or some other mistake in the original, it would be accurately copied.

I can see why Muslims see a fulfilment of the Quran's promise that the Quran will be preserved (Q15:9). It has been preserved (at least in its form that ʿUthmān collected onwards). It's totally fair game to use it for apologetic purposes if you think it helps your case.

And people have been doing that for years. What's new are the lies: 1. that this is new and research. 2. that my goal is to uncover mistakes in the Quran.

3. The ERC would think it's worth paying me 2mil euros for such a banal polemic non-research question.

t's disappointing to see an amazing research funding body to be cast in such a negative light. Muslims, just like non-Muslims, are capable of important scholarly research that is worth funding. Casting the ERC in an antagonistic light against Muslims is really unhelpful.

4. The Quran we have today is the same as from the time of revelation.
> This is a mutation through oral transmission and was not there in the original video, but present in Instagram derivatives. My paper *only* pertains to the (post-prophetic!) Uthmanic recension.

So: fake news. It's deceitful and it is *not* an honest mistake. I told the original maker that it was dishonest and he should take it down, but he was too interested in the worldly gains of his YouTube channel to consider honesty. And continued plastering it everywhere.

The other derivative videos are equally or even more wrong, and could have avoided the embarrassment by using Google, sending me an email, or tagging me here on Twitter and ask. But going viral and seeing the numbers go up is so much nicer than due diligence...

I hope that this has cleared up some anxieties that this video clearly caused for some people. If you see these videos or derivatives being peddled anywhere, please feel free to link this thread to set the record straight.

These months and this nonsense have caused me significant distress and have been a significant waste of time spending time replying to distressed emails I get from people. It has made me wonder whether doing public scholarship on social media is worth it. I hope it still is.

I love sharing my research, I love all my nice followers who think my research is interesting, I love the nice and critical questions that I've received over the years. It has frequently challenged my assumptions, and made my research better. Shall we keep things honest and nice?

I'm looking forward to the research my team will be doing in the following years. Peeling back the layers of the beautiful ancient vocalised manuscripts, which frequently deviate in their readings from what ends up becoming the standard is research really worth exploring!

(einde reactie)