Western Academia and the Islamic Charge of Textual Corruption in Previous Scriptures
There is a misguided claim that suggests only Muslims with a bias against the Bible interpret Islamic sources as stating that the Torah and Injeel underwent textual corruption. However, this assertion does not align with the reality that a significant number, if not the majority, of Western academic scholars share a similar perspective. Consider some of the statements below.
Dr. Christine Schirrmacher says in Islamic Views about Christian Scriptures:
As is well known, doubt about the authenticity of Christian scripture was current among Muslims at a very early stage. References in the first biographies of the Prophet to pages of the Bible being glued together or to passages being excluded in order to conceal or remove predictions of 'Ahmad', or to unspecified Jewish predictions of a prophet to come,3 all reflect doubt about the way in which Christians and Jews preserved their texts. These are, of course, related to verses in the Qur'an which refer to mainly Jewish contemporaries of the Prophet altering 'the speech of God' (2:75), changing words from their places or meanings, mawad? (4:46f., 5:13, 5:41), and giving incorrect oral (3:78) and written (2:79) versions of the sacred words.4 Whether in their original context these accusations referred to wholesale corruption or only incidental distortions, they were employed in later centuries to support many forms of criticism of both Jewish and Christian scriptural authority, and constituted the source of the Muslim attitude.
Dr. Walid Saleh states in A Review of Narratives of Tampering in the Earliest Commentaries on the Quran:
However, Nickel states his objectives in a roundabout way. He is thus too dismissive of the position of the majority of scholars who have worked on the verses in the Qurʾān that discuss tampering (tahrīf ). The majority view is that these verses do imply an accusation of textual tampering, not merely corruption of meaning or other lesser forms of tampering.
Dr. Gabriel Said Reynolds says in On the Qur'anic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (tahrîf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic:
According to most Western scholarship, the Qur'an is referring to textual alteration with the verb yuharrifüna (the noun tahrlf itself does not appear in the Qur'an)
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