Inside the Koran

Another one of those History Channel shows that has been on the DVR forever.

The show was actually worth watching, and it provided a lot of insight into interpretations of the Koran.  Using the interpretation that the History Channel went with, which as I understood it was based on Islamic consensus contemporary accounts, the book isn’t nearly as violent as many would have you believe.  The problem of course becomes those who accept the more radical interpretations and decide they need to act on them.

Here is what bothers me about the Koran, believers accepting it as the absolute word of God (Allah).  I knew that there was a time lag between when Mohammed began preaching and when the words were actually written down, but I thought that Mohammed had written them himself.  It turns out I was wrong.  The Koran wasn’t put into written form until after Mohammed had died.  Where people had written down some of his preaching it was gathered up, otherwise people wrote down what was remembered and it was recorded.  According to Wikipedia Mohammed’s followers were made to recite the Koran precisely many times in so it’s possible that his words were recorded correctly, but it seems like there is room for error.  Also according to Wikipedia there were multiple versions initially:

According to Shias, Sufis and scarce Sunni scholars, Ali compiled a complete version of the Qur’an mus'haf ^[2] immediately after Muhammad's death. The order of this mus'haf differed from that gathered later during Uthman's era. Despite this, Ali made no objection or resistance against standardized mus'haf, but kept his own book.^[32][36]

After seventy reciters were killed in the Battle of Yamama, the caliph Abu Bakr decided to collect the different chapters and verses into one volume. Thus, a group of reciters, including Zayd ibn Thabit, collected the chapters and verses and produced several hand-written copies of the complete book.^[32][37]

9th century Qur'an manuscript.

In about 650, as Islam expanded beyond the Arabian peninsula into Persia, the Levant and North Africa, the third caliph Uthman ibn Affan ordered the preparation of an official, standardized version, to preserve the sanctity of the text (and perhaps to keep the Rashidun Empire united, see Uthman Qur'an). Five reciters from amongst the companions produced a unique text from the first volume which had been prepared on the orders of Abu Bakr and which was kept with Hafsa bint Umar. The other copies already in the hands of Muslims in other areas were collected and sent to Medina where, on orders of the Caliph, they were destroyed by burning or boiling. This remains the authoritative text of the Qur’an to this day.^[32][38][39]

So my question is, how do you maintain that this can possibly be the unaltered word of God? At least with the bible the vast majority of Christians accept that it is the interpreation of God's word by prophets, or in the case of the New Testament a record of Jesus's life a teachings. Not the direct word of God.