Holes in the Narrative: On al-Firas and a Muhammadan Qur’an — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/05/holes-in-the-narrative-on-al-firas-and-a-muhammadan-quran/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as a comment on r/AcademicQuran, in the thread “Holes in the Narrative: Some Thoughts on al-Firas’ arguments for a ‘Muhammadan’ Qur'ān.”, copied here as written.
This entire post (I did not read Firas’ original article) is a great example of speculative & fallacious HCM reasoning. In particular, the entire analysis is an example of the Hindsight Bias – a well researched error in cognition.
Hindsight Bias describes a tendency to interpret historical events according to subsequent, not preceding, events. Naturalistic historiographers may attribute intent or causality, prior effects, to historical events based on subsequent consequences – despite there being no justification for doing so. Historical conclusions about manuscripts, influences, effects, intents, must occur based on evidence prior to an event, not based on information that is only known in hindsight. Essentially, accurate historiography would consider only the past relative to the datum being analyzed, not all the history subsequently. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,
“Hindsight bias refers to the tendency by individuals to exaggerate, in hindsight, what they could have predicted in foresight. In other words, after a past event, individuals tend to believe they were more certain about the outcome that happened than they actually were, a phenomenon that Baruch Fischhoff labelled “creeping determinism.” … That is because, in hindsight, people have a hard time recalling how much they did not know at the time (i.e. their past uncertainty), and their knowledge of the outcome influences their memories.
“While hindsight bias refers to an inflated confidence that one had foreseen a past outcome ex ante, explanation bias refers to an inflated confidence in a particular explanation for a past outcome ex post.”
Here, you assert that it is possible the political & theological climate after the Prophet’s death could have affected the content of the Uthmanic codification. Yet, your subjective perceived parallels between those events & Quranic content cannot evince causality.
Your analysis is with benefit of having both the Uthmanic text and the settled histories of the fitan. Yet you have no causal historical evidence of these fitan affecting the texts. In fact, based on your reasoning, it could also be argued that these fitan were /caused/ by the Quranic texts.
The analysis doesn’t account for the contrapositive. It does not account for unrelated convergent evolution of historical events and the original Quranic text. It also doesn’t account for the fact that these perceived similarities projected could be entirely projected onto the text by OP. OP has not presented any way to objectively quantify the similarities between what is in the Uthmanic codex & these post-Prophetic events.
The entire analysis is based on plausibility and demonstrative entirely of the Hindsight bias effect.
Claims about manuscripts, sources, influence, audience, or authorial intention must be grounded in evidence available prior to or contemporaneous with the event being analyzed, not in patterns that become intelligible only after centuries of subsequent history. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,
“Yet, once events have occurred, people armed with the knowledge of hindsight tend to exaggerate those events’ predictability and inevitability. To be sure, with the passage of time, documents, research, and perhaps interviews with participants may enable a better understanding of past happenings. Nevertheless, it is inconsistent to view the future as being uncertain but the past as having been predictable.”
This problem is especially acute here. You believe that you have observed possible parallels between Qurʾānic passages and post-Prophetic but pre-Uthmanic events. Yet, the existence and perceived similarities of the two alone does not establish dependence, borrowing, or causal influence. Yet from the vantage point of later history, it mat appear “plausible” that the Utjmanic Qurʾān was influenced by these events. That plausibility, however, is an artifact of hindsight. It assumes a later picture of textual interaction and projects it backward onto the Qurʾān’s original milieu without evidence.
The methodological problem here is that there are several competing explanations: direct influence, indirect, convergent formulation, coincidence, or even resemblance produced by the scholar’s interpretive framing. Unless OP can establish a historically credible transmission pathway, chronological proximity, linguistic mediation, and contextual reason for dependence; the claim of influence remains entirely speculative.
The mere subjective resemblance that the Uthmanic codex may bear to a post-Prophetic controversy does not determine the direction, mechanism, or reality of causation. Since we observe history from the vantage point of the future, and cannot isolate any particular historical developments, OP is attributing possible causality between data sets that has no evidentiary basis.
Posted May 15, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
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