Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: brief thoughtsbulletpoints about the idea of — February 12, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

Here is the livestream of the 2024 USA memory championship where competitors literally memorize - verbarim - long amounts of random words and recite it back.

They aren't allowed to reference a text.

https://youtu.be/EykPcQ1iczE

The strategies being used here go back to Greek times, in particular the method of the loci or mnemonics.

I would really recommend "Moonwalking with Einstein".

While I think there's no need to argue that the Quran was ever primarily transmitted orally and that's not what the evidence shows, I am a bit concerned that there's this hyperspecialization going on where we just aren't aware of other fields of knowledge.

I also think that there were some people who clearly had a concept of verbatim oral transmission even if others didn't. Yasir Qadhi's view on the dispensation for using loan words for people that didn't grasp verbatim transmission seems clearly borne out of the evidence and was the position of classical Islamic scholarship until some time after al-Jazari.

That being said, there are hadith that describe sahabah arguing about variations in their recitation. Even if we date these hadith 200 years later, it demonstrates an awareness of this issue.

There is a wider neuro-psychological discussion about analytic/syncretic thinking that needs to be had. But more primarily, the claim that rapid verbatim memorization and oral transmission is not possible just isn't true. Even if we have no recorded incident of it being the primary way any text was transmitted, it is clearly possible, people do it today, and people have done it for thousands of years.