What the Quran Says About Adding Words to Itself
The Quran states clearly: ﴿إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ﴾, “We sent down the Remembrance and We will preserve it.” That preservation means the text is protected from addition, subtraction, and alteration. God further states that any human attempt to add to His words is met with severe punishment: ﴿وَلَوْ تَقَوَّلَ عَلَيْنَا بَعْضَ الْأَقَاوِيلِ * لَأَخَذْنَا مِنْهُ بِالْيَمِينِ * ثُمَّ لَقَطَعْنَا مِنْهُ الْوَتِينَ﴾, “Had he invented against Us some of the words, We would have seized him with the right hand, then cut his aorta.” The scholars of tafsīr from the earliest generations of Islam read this verse and others as a categorical prohibition on attributing to divine revelation any word that did not originate in divine revelation. That reading was not contested in the classical tradition; it was the tradition. Any contrary view, even when entertained rhetorically, was rejected on the same substantive grounds the verse itself establishes.
In a chapter published in the edited volume The History of the Qur’an: Approaches and Explorations (Kube Publishing, 2024, compiled by Redhwan Karim), Yasir Qadhi argues that a portion of the words now found in the canonical recitations originated not with God’s dictation to the Prophet but with the Companions themselves, who produced synonymic substitutions and dialectal alternatives from their own speech and memory, and that these human-origin words entered the canonical text under a divine concession that licensed such substitution — a position he calls the “Divine Permission Model.” Sohaib Saeed advances a related position: that the Prophet’s validation of differing recitations constitutes divine approval of variety built into the text from the beginning, and that the human scholarly process of selecting and transmitting readings is fully compatible with the Quran’s divine status. Both positions share the same operative claim: that words a human being produced from himself can acquire the status of divinely revealed Quran, provided a sufficient authorization framework is in place.
Part One: What the Quran Says
The Origin of the Prophet’s Speech
Al-Najm 3–4: ﴿وَمَا يَنطِقُ عَنِ الْهَوَى * إِنْ هُوَ إِلَّا وَحْيٌ يُوحَى﴾, “He does not speak from his own desire; it is nothing but revelation revealed.” The verse is a statement about the ontological source of the Prophet’s speech, not a description of his personal conduct. What he conveys in matters of revelation does not originate in personal inclination, mnemonic convenience, dialectal preference, or synonymic approximation. It originates exclusively in what God sent down. Al-Rāzī notes that if the Prophet had recited non-revealed words immediately following this declaration, the divine statement would have been falsified in that instant. [al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, Sūrat al-Ḥajj, v. 52] The verse does not leave room for a “divine permission” category that licenses human-origin words to enter the transmission as long as meaning is preserved, because the verse’s claim is about origin, not meaning.
The Impossibility of Self-Directed Substitution
Yūnus 15: ﴿قُلْ مَا يَكُونُ لِي أَنْ أُبَدِّلَهُ مِن تِلْقَاءِ نَفْسِي إِنْ أَتَّبِعُ إِلَّا مَا يُوحَى إِلَيَّ﴾, “Say: It is not for me to change it of my own accord; I follow nothing but what is revealed to me.” The verse was revealed when unbelievers demanded the Prophet substitute the text with something more to their liking. The divine response is not a refusal on grounds of policy but a statement of ontological impossibility: altering the text min tilqāʾ nafsihi is not a category that belongs to the prophetic office. The Quran does not say the Prophet chose not to substitute; it says substitution from himself is not something he is capable of doing in his prophetic capacity. Al-Māwardī deploys this verse alongside al-Ḥāqqah 44–47 to establish that the prohibition extends beyond the Prophet: no one may exercise independent reasoning to establish what the revealed text says, because the text’s source is what confers its status, and that source is not accessible through human reasoning. [al-Māwardī, al-Nukat wa-al-ʿUyūn, 6/86]
Divine Protection Against Near-Deviation
Al-Isrāʾ 73–74: ﴿وَإِنْ كَادُوا لَيَفْتِنُونَكَ عَنِ الَّذِي أَوْحَيْنَا إِلَيْكَ لِتَفْتَرِيَ عَلَيْنَا غَيْرَهُ وَإِذًا لَاتَّخَذُوكَ خَلِيلًا ۞ وَلَوْلَا أَنْ ثَبَّتْنَاكَ لَقَدْ كِدْتَ تَرْكَنُ إِلَيْهِمْ شَيْئًا قَلِيلًا﴾, “They were about to tempt you away from what We revealed to you, so that you might fabricate against Us something other than it; and had We not made you firm, you would nearly have inclined toward them a little.” The grammatical particle lawlā establishes that the consequence described did not occur because its condition, God’s making the Prophet firm, was met. Al-Rāzī reads this as proof that the inclination toward deviation was prevented absolutely. [al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, Sūrat al-Ḥajj, v. 52] The tempted act the verse identifies is the fabrication of something other than what was revealed. A model that licenses the entry of Companion-origin words into the transmitted text, however well-intentioned and however accurately meaning-preserving, produces this outcome structurally, because the words in question are other than what was revealed, regardless of the good faith of those producing them.
The Completeness Obligation
Al-Māʾidah 67: ﴿يَا أَيُّهَا الرَّسُولُ بَلِّغْ مَا أُنزِلَ إِلَيْكَ مِن رَّبِّكَ وَإِن لَّمْ تَفْعَلْ فَمَا بَلَّغْتَ رِسَالَتَهُ﴾, “O Messenger, convey what has been sent down to you from your Lord; if you do not, you have not conveyed His message.” The verse establishes a binary: convey exactly what was sent down, or fail the transmission obligation entirely. There is no category of approximate transmission that partially satisfies it. Al-Rāzī uses this verse to ground his logical argument that there is no rational distinction between reducing the revelation and augmenting it: both constitute the same failure of the transmission obligation, and both produce the same epistemic consequence for anyone who receives the text. [al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, Sūrat al-Ḥajj, v. 52]
The Divine Guarantee
Al-Ḥijr 9: ﴿إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ﴾, “We sent down the Reminder and We are its Guardian.” God is the guardian of the dhikr itself, not of a human scholarly effort to approximate it through careful selection and transmission. A model that grounds the preservation of the canonical recitations in a process that included human synonymic substitution, memory-lapse variants, or ijtihad-based decipherment of the skeletal script is in direct tension with this guarantee, because what is preserved under such a model is not the dhikr as sent down but a human approximation of it, however refined.
The Consequence: Al-Ḥāqqah 44–47
﴿وَلَوْ تَقَوَّلَ عَلَيْنَا بَعْضَ الْأَقَاوِيلِ * لَأَخَذْنَا مِنْهُ بِالْيَمِينِ * ثُمَّ لَقَطَعْنَا مِنْهُ الْوَتِينَ * فَمَا مِنكُم مِّنْ أَحَدٍ عَنْهُ حَاجِزِينَ﴾
“Had he invented against Us some of the words, We would have seized him with the right hand, then cut his aorta, and none of you could have defended him against Us.”
These verses do not describe what the Prophet actually did; they describe what would have happened had he done something specific, and they define that something with precision. Ibn Kathīr’s formulation is the most analytical: had he been, as they claimed, fabricating against God — adding to the message, subtracting from it, or producing words from himself and attributing them to God (fa-zāda fī al-risāla aw naqaṣa minhā, aw qāla shayʾan min ʿindih fa-nasabahu ilaynā). [Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, Sūrat al-Ḥāqqah, v. 44] The consequence in each case is the same: immediate divine punishment, with no intervening grace period and no distinction between minor and major alterations.
Al-Samʿānī reduces the definition to its minimum: the prohibited act is saying what God had not said (qāla mā lam naqulh). [al-Samʿānī, Tafsīr al-Samʿānī, 6/42] Al-Qurṭubī sharpens the lexical analysis: taqawwala means he labored to produce and brought a saying from himself (takallafa wa-atā bi-qawlin min qibali nafsih). [al-Qurṭubī, al-Jāmiʿ li-Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, Sūrat al-Ḥāqqah, vv. 44–46] Al-Baghawī adds: fabricated and concocted, then attributed that fabrication to the divine source (takhārraṣa wa-iktalaq). [al-Baghawī, Maʿālim al-Tanzīl, 8/214]
Muqātil ibn Sulaymān anchors the verse to a specific historical moment: a group surrounding the Prophet through the night and proposing that he simply claim divine authorization for content God had not revealed. The verse was sent down to foreclose that possibility. [Muqātil ibn Sulaymān, Tafsīr Muqātil ibn Sulaymān, 2/231] The structural parallel to the Divine Permission Model is exact: the model functions as a claim that God did in fact authorize words He had not revealed, granted through a general concession rather than explicit dictation.
Ibn Kathīr records the tradition of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, who heard Sūrat al-Ḥāqqah before his conversion and, struck by the Quran’s composition, accused the Prophet first of being a poet and then a soothsayer. Both accusations were answered by the passage culminating in these verses: “Had he invented against Us some of the words, We would have seized him with the right hand, then cut his aorta.” [Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, Sūrat al-Ḥāqqah, vv. 43–44, citing Musnad al-Fārūq] The function of the verse in that narrative is to close the gap between what the Prophet says about the source of the recitation and the reality of that source. A model that requires the Prophet’s statement “this is how it was revealed” to mean “your recitation is divinely approved” rather than “I taught you this” reopens that gap.
Al-Māwardī extends the verse’s scope beyond the Prophet: it establishes that no one, not even a prophet, may exercise independent reasoning to determine what the revealed text says. [al-Māwardī, al-Nukat wa-al-ʿUyūn, 6/86] Al-Rāzī states the logical consequence: there is no rational distinction between reducing the revelation and augmenting it (lā farqa fī al-ʿaql bayna al-nuqṣān ʿan al-waḥy wa-bayna al-ziyāda fīh), and if either is permitted, the security of the entire transmission collapses, because every individual word in the text becomes unverifiable as revealed rather than substituted. [al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, Sūrat al-Ḥajj, v. 52]
This account spans eleven scholars from Muqātil (d. 150 AH) through al-Ṭabarī (d. 310), Makkī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 437), al-Māwardī (d. 450), al-Bayhaqī (d. 458), al-Samʿānī (d. 489), al-Rāghib al-Aṣfahānī (d. 502), al-Baghawī (d. 516), al-Rāzī (d. 606), al-Qurṭubī (d. 671), and Ibn Kathīr (d. 774).
Part Two: The Contemporary Positions
Qadhi’s model encompasses three distinct types of human-origin variants: synonymic substitutions made by Companions under the aḥruf concession, word variations produced by memory lapse (which he identifies as a feature of the concession, citing the case of Hishām ibn Ḥakīm as a new convert, p. 225), and ijtihad by grammarians and reciters of the first two centuries in vocalizing the Uthmanic skeletal script. He describes the last category as “an extremely narrow field of ijtihād” but acknowledges it is operative. Saeed’s formulation is softer — he does not attribute variants to memory lapses and retains the three classical conditions for a valid reading as genuine gatekeeping criteria — but the operative claim is the same: words a human produced from himself can acquire the status of divinely revealed Quran through a sufficient authorization framework.
All three types produce words that God had not said. The narrowness of the ijtihad field does not change the principle; al-Ḥāqqah 44–47 does not distinguish between large and small additions. A word produced by a memory lapse is still a word God had not said regardless of the speaker’s intention, and a word produced by a grammarian’s vocalization judgment is still a word of human origin regardless of the grammarian’s qualifications. Al-Māwardī’s extension of the verse to cover all independent reasoning in determining what the revelation says applies to the grammarian precisely because the verse’s logic is not restricted to moral failure; it is epistemic. What the Quran requires is that the words originate in revelation, not that the human agent be culpable for their not doing so.
The Argument That Cannot Be Answered by Invoking the Permission
Al-Rāzī identifies why the invocation of a divine authorization framework does not resolve the epistemic problem. The question is what the acknowledgment of human-origin words in the text does to the knowability of the text as a whole. If synonymic substitutions, memory-lapse variants, and ijtihad-based vocalizations exist within the canonical recitations, then no individual word in those recitations can be verified as revealed rather than substituted, remembered rather than misremembered, or deciphered rather than imposed. A divine permission that licenses words of human origin to enter the text produces exactly the same epistemic collapse as outright fabrication, because from within the text the two are indistinguishable.
Qadhi acknowledges this problem in the final paragraph of his chapter: “a systematic and thorough extrapolation of how the qirāʾah bi-al-maʿnā paradigm is fully compatible with the normative belief in the preservation of the Qur’ān and its iʿjāz still requires further study.” Al-Ḥijr 9 states that God is the guardian of the dhikr itself. A model in which the preserved text contains human-origin words, however refined the human process that produced them, is not a model in which God is the guardian of the dhikr in the sense that verse establishes.
Eleven scholars across six centuries read al-Ḥāqqah 44–47 as a categorical prohibition on attributing to divine revelation any word that did not originate in divine revelation. Qadhi and Saeed advance a position the classical scholars who knew it examined on its merits and refused. Al-Bāqillānī and Ibn Jinnī, both cited by Qadhi as evidence of classical awareness of the view, rejected it precisely because it collapses the distinction between revealed text and human speech in ways that make the Quran’s own claims about itself impossible to sustain. That refusal was not incidental to the tradition; it followed from the same Quranic testimony assembled above.
Joe Bradford is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Fiqh and Uṣūl al-Fiqh at the International Islamic University Malaysia. He writes at joebradford.net. This article has also been published on substack.