There Is No Historical Case for the Quran
Muslims agree that at the time of Christ the Jewish Torah was still the true and uncorrupted word of God, but then claim that the Bible was changed and corrupted sometime after Christ. Although they claim only a few copies of the true Torah and the Gospels existed at the time of Mohammed, they allege that all the other copies of the Bible had been corrupted by then.
Mohammed indeed wrote that there were still some copies of the Bible that remained uncorrupted in his day. There are 3 verses in the Quran which say some copies of the pure Bible were in existence at the time of Mohammed. Emphasis and brackets supplied:
3 (Al- Imran) 4 "And He has revealed to you the Scripture with truth, confirming that which was revealed before it, even as He revealed the Torah and the Gospel, previously for a guidance to mankind."
So here the Quran is saying that it confirms (and therefore must harmonise with) the Bible. Hence, Muslims claim that when the Quran was written, at least some copies of the Bible remained pure.
5 (Al- Ma'ida) 46 "...We bestowed on him [Jesus son of Mary] the Gospel [Injil], which is guidance and light, confirming that (which) was (revealed) before it in the Torah..."
Again the Quran says that the Bible is presently (at the time of writing c.640AD) uncorrupted and pure "guidance and light", "confirming" the Torah.
4 (An-Nisa') 136 "O you who believe! Believe in Allah and His Messenger and the Scripture He has revealed to His Messenger and the Scripture He has revealed before (you)."
Above, the Quran is telling you to believe the Bible.
10 (Yunus) 94 "And if you are in doubt concerning that which we revealed unto you, then ask those who have already read the Book (that was) before you."
Again the Quran is saying that at the time of writing, you should believe in the Bible.
There is further evidence from Islamic literature. Hadith: Abee Dawood, narrated Abdullah Ibn Umar:
"A group of Jews came and invited the Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) to Quff. So he visited them in their school. They said: 'AbulQasim, one of our men has committed fornication with a woman; so pronounce judgment upon them'. They placed a cushion for the Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) who sat on it and said: 'Bring the Torah'. It was then brought. He then withdrew the cushion from beneath him and placed the Torah on it saying: 'I believed in thee and in Him Who revealed thee'."
Ibn Taymiyyah used the Torah as evidence supporting Imam al-Bukhari's view that some copies of the Torah had not been changed and there existed some unaltered copies at the time of Mohammed.
Can this be true though? At the time of Christ (when Muslims agree the Torah was still pure) millions of copies of the Torah were in circulation and had been dispersed around the entire known world. It had been memorised, and read aloud every Sabbath in the synagogues around the world, and every year at the Feast of Tabernacles. So there was one massive coordination of the Torah around the entire known world.
It would have been literally impossible then to collect every single Torah scroll in the world, from every family and every synagogue, and miraculously wipe the memory of every Jew that had memorised it, without an unprecedented uproar and immense persecution of the vast majority of Jews who held their Torah sacred. This is what would be needed to destroy every Torah scroll at anytime after Christ, and if it did happen it would most certainly have appeared in the records of history somewhere as one of THE most major bloodbaths in Jewish, and ancient history.
Then, once all the Torah scrolls in the world were destroyed, they would have had to fabricate a corrupt version of the Torah that the Muslims allege came into existence sometime between Christ and Mohammed, and get every Jew and Synagogue in the known world to silently accept it without protest (as no protest is mentioned in 1st - 7th century history) and somehow re-record the memories of every Jew who memorised the old, pure Torah. These infidels would have had to mass produce millions of copies of this new and corrupted version of the Torah, and spread it around the world in one quick move, so fast that no one noticed! This is most definitely an impossibility.
Furthermore, Muslims say that the laws in the Quran were the true laws of God, that were originally in the Torah. But the laws in the Quran are VERY, VERY different from the Torah. So the changes would not just be small, unnoticable changes in this new, corrupted Torah. You couldn't just slip in a few verses and take out a few, so this would rule out the possibility of a slow and gradual corruption. Not only this, but any slow, gradual corruption would soon be ceased upon by the Jews and stamped out.
They would have to change so many fundamental doctrines, like the promise of Isaac instead of Ishamel, the exchange of all the Muslim holy days for the Feast Days and Sabbaths, the eradication of the events at Mount Sinai when YHVH came down from heaven to give the Ten Commandments. In fact the list would be massive so I will stop there. All you need to do is look at a Sunni Muslim today and see how they differ in their laws from a Karaite Jew to see the multitude of ways the Torah would had to have been changed. (Karaites and Sunnis believe in the Scriptures alone, without regard for the commentaries of the Talmud, or the commentaries of Ali.)
The bloodbath that this would have caused as each Jew would have raised up in rebellion to the corruption of their MOST sacred book is impossibly unrecorded in 1st to 7th century history. And by the way, if you could get your head around the above scenario somehow, you then have to repeat it all over again for the Christian New Testament that Muslims allege was also corrupted to the same extent and in the same time frame as the Torah. This would cause a second bloodbath against the Christians around the known world (and remember the known world was very large in those days, including the Far East as well as Europe and the Middle East), which has also impossibly escaped all historical records.
Remember, the Jews and the Christians were not allies or in cahoots between the 1st and 7th centuries. So whoever corrupted these books would have had to go after two separate groups of people dispersed all around the entire world. How would they even know where they all lived? They would have had to have been mobilised in one concerted effort, to go out to places such as deepest China, Africa and India, and collect the most sacred Scriptures from the most zealous peoples, without missing any significant number of scrolls, fragments, tablets or manuscripts, and without challenge, and they would have had to track down two totally separate groups, both the Jews and the Christians. Not only this, but Muslims allege that not one single pure, uncorrupted Torah or Bible survived this episode. So these infidels who corrupted the texts were even 100% successful, not missing one single fragment, scroll or manuscript in what is already an impossible task!
Remember, the Christians were no less zealous in defending the Old and New Testament than the Jews were in defending their Torah. All but one of the disciples were martyred (and that one; John the Revelator suffered a life in exile anyway), and the early Christians were martyred on the cross and in the Coliseum among other places. The 4th-18th Century Christians like the Waldenses, were persecuted and martyred by the Catholic Church, enduring shame and torture, literally guarding their Bibles with their lives. They lived in hiding in the most remote caves of Europe. So how did these infidels who stole these Bibles even find them, and then go on to corrupt their sacred manuscripts? These Waldenses also learned entire books of the New Testament, so how did these evil people wipe their memories of the true text, and then place the corrupted versions in their minds afterwards? A total impossibility! How did these people find these Christians whom the Catholic Church could not even find? And the Catholic Church was the superpower of the millenium.
Now then, if you can somehow accept these two scenarios as realistic, then your problems do not even end there - for there is the added problem of the change of the Major and Minor Prophets and the Psalms!! Another bloodbath that has escaped all records of history!
Where in the records of history do we find the vast armies that collected the pure texts from two separate peoples around the entire world, and redistributed the corrupted texts back around the entire world, unchallenged by the most zealous peoples (many who were hiding in the most remote areas of Europe), and who also managed to wipe the memories of those Jews and Christians who memorised their holy books and re-programme their memories, totally unnoticed and unchallenged, with 100% success? In fact, where in human logic can we sustain such allegations?
And if there is any Muslim out there that STILL thinks the above is realistic, then I say to them, that the Quran sometime between the 10th and 17th centuries became vastly corrupted. Ask me where the proof is for such an impossibility and I will answer, "The same place as your proof is for the corruption of the Bible - there isn't any, but you have to believe it anyways".