The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 1) — Page cccxix
GENERAL INTRODUCTION One of the devices adopted by Muslims for safeguarding the purity of the text of the Quran and one which has been acted upon for centuries is that children who are born blind or who lose their sight during infancy are encouraged to commit the Quran to memory. This is done out of a feeling that as a blind person is not competent to adopt a normal occupation, he can turn his handicap to account by becoming a guardian of the text of the Quran. This practice is so common that in India a blind Muslim is indiscriminately given the courtesy-title of Hafiz (i. e. the guardian) meaning a person who has become the guardian of the text of the Quran by committing it to memory. During the month of Ramadan the whole of the Quran is recited aloud in the course of congregational prayers in all the principal mosques throughout the world. The Imām recites the Quran and another Ḥāfiz stands immediately behind him and keeps watch over the accuracy of the recitation, prompting the Imām when necessary. In this manner the whole of the Quran is recited from memory during the month of Ramadan in hundreds and thousands of mosques all over the world. These are the various devices and precautions adopted by Muslims to safeguard the purity and accuracy of the text of the Quran, with the result that even the bitterest enemies of Islam have had to admit that the text of the Quran has been fully safeguarded since the time of the Holy Prophet. It can, therefore, be asserted with the utmost confidence that the Quran exists today exactly as the Holy Prophet gave it to the world. We set out below the testimony of some Western writers in this behalf: " Sir William Muir in his work, "The Life of Mahomet", (p. xxviii) sums up his conclusion on this matter as follows: "What we have, though possibly corrected by himself, is still his own. . . . "We may, upon the strongest presumption, affirm that every verse in the Quran is the genuine and unaltered composition of Mohammad himself" (p. xxviii). "There is otherwise every security, internal and external, that we possess the text which Mohammad himself gave forth and used" (p. xxvii). And again,". . . and conclude with at least a close approximation to the verdict of Von Hammer that we hold the Quran to be as surely Mohammad's word as the Mohammadans hold it to be the word of God" (p. xxviii). Nöldeke says: "Slight clerical errors there may have been, but the Quran of 'Uthman contains none but genuine elements, though sometimes in very strange order. The efforts of European scholars to prove the existence of later interpolations in the Quran have failed" (Enc. Brit. 9th edition, under the word "Quran"). Arrangement of Chapters and Verses It is sometimes asserted that the arrangement of the chapters of the Quran ccxciii