See Hythem Sidky’s review below: https://www.academia.edu/40931921/Daniel_Alan_Brubaker_Corrections_in_Early_Qurʾānic_Manuscripts_Twenty_Examples_Lovettsville_Think_and_Tell_Press_2019_ Basically, the corrections mostly concern scribal errors. In some cases, the text that was written by the original scribe is ungrammatical or doesn’t make any sense. For each example, if you look at earlier and contemporary manuscripts, you’ll always find the text that we have today. So the best explanation is that they’re scribal errors. The book is also of minimal value from a scholarly point of view. Almost none of those variants have a significant impact on the meaning of the verse and many of the examples Brubaker brings are from 8th and 9th century manuscripts. No serious scholar thinks that the Quran wasn’t standardized by then so Brubaker tries to argue instead that the text was still “fluid”. Even this theory is contradicted by Marijn Van Putten’s “Grace of God” article: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bulletin-of-the-school-of-oriental-and-african-studies/article/grace-of-god-as-evidence-for-a-written-uthmanic-archetype-the-importance-of-shared-orthographic-idiosyncrasies/23C45AC7BC649A5228E0DA6F6BA15C06, I have made over 15+ threads arguing for early canonization anyways. This doesn’t mean that the earliest manuscripts don’t have any variants at all. They do, but they’re extremely rare. Ironically, it’s the scholars who don’t make a huge deal out of “corrections in early manuscripts” that have actually found convincing examples of such variants (such as Alba Fedeli, Déroche, Marijn and Hythem Sidky).
Really good article: https://www.academia.edu/44414539/The_Insignificance_of_Corrections_in_Early_Qurān_Manuscripts_a_response_to_Daniel_Alan_Brubaker
There’s another book by Prof. Altıkulaç responding to Brubaker: https://www.ircica.org/publications/studies-on-the-holy-quran/refutation-of-daniel-alan-brubakers-corrections-in-early-qurʾan-manuscripts
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