Posted: Mar 17, 2010 8:12 pm
There's some interesting stuff on this from Hitchens' 'god is not great':
Arabic script was not standardised until the later part of the ninth century, and in the meantime [...] the koran was generating widly different explanations of itself, as it still does [...]To take one instance that can hardly be called neglible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version which appears in the koran.