CHAPTER TWO Divine Arrangement

the Muslims progressively gained dominance over a vast inhabited territory of the ancient world and established the greatest and the strongest empire of the time. This empire, too strong to be overcome by any other power, was well able to guard the authenticity of the Quran, resisting all onslaughts for over a thousand years. Then with the advent of the age of the press, the possibility of the Quran ever being destroyed was finally ruled out. In the age of the press it became possible to print a million copies from just one manuscript – something which had been an impossibility in ancient times, when each copy was separately handwritten. That was why one copy differed from another to some extent. This happened with all ancient books. It was only in the case of the Quran, of which tens of thousands of copies had been separately hand-written before the age of the press, (a large number of copies are still available in museums and libraries) that, amazingly, there was not the slightest difference between one manuscript and another. If Muslims became so alert and sensitive to maintaining the perfection of the Quran, it was because of God’s special divine succour. Besides this, there was another God-inspired arrangement. That is, the unique method of committing all of the text to memory, which came to be practiced in the case of the Quran—a method which had never before been applied to any other book in the history of mankind. Hundreds of thousands of people were motivated (by God) to learn by rote the text of the Quran from beginning to end. Right from the beginning of the Quran down to our own day, thousands of people known as hafiz (those who commit the whole Quran to memory) have existed in every generation. History tells us that there is no other book whose followers have shown such extreme care in memorizing its text. It was this custom of remembering the Quran by heart that made its preservation possible. This unique system was termed by a French orientalist as ‘double-checking’, i.e. first matching the contents of one copy with another and then checking it again from memory. Every procedure followed for the protection of the Quran for 1500 years of Islamic history was assisted by God. However, in order that this world should remain a testing ground for mankind, all this took place under a veil (that is, although it was God who influenced events and motivated the people, He remained hidden, because man is on trial in this world). On Doomsday, when all realities are laid bare, people will observe how God Himself was directly performing the task of guarding the Quran right from the beginning of the Islamic revolution to the advent of the age of the press, which with its more sophisticated method of replication, facilitated the rapid propagation of God’s message. There is another vital aspect of this special divine arrangement for the eternal continuance of the