Spelling Issues

This is an extract from my post Odd Spellings and Other Quranic Oddities

There is a number of spelling oddities in the Quran. One consistently misspelled word is 'angel', which is ملك malak in the said book but it should be ملاك mal'ak, from the Hebrew מלאך malakh. The Quranic spelling is the same as the word for 'king', malik. In the Quran the angel in charge of Hell is called Malik. S 43:77 Article: Allah’s Need for Human Sacrifice to Appease Hell’s Angelic Ruler – Answering Islam Blog

Another oddity is Jibril جبريل, the Quranic form of جبرائيل Gabriel. A more glaring one is Mikal ميكال, which should be ميخائيل Mikha'il, Michael. In Al-Fatihah we find بِسْمِ اللَّهِ bismi Allah, a misspelling for باسم الله bi-ismi Allah. In other passages we find باسم. One or two online versions have tidied up the spellings to some degree. So the reader will not find, for example, سموت but سماوات samawat 'skies'.

In an article we read:

Saudi Journalist: The Quranic Text As We Know It Contains Some 2,500 Mistakes Of Spelling And Grammar

In his January 10, 2020 article, titled "Amending The Quran," Saudi journalist Ahmad Hashem wrote: "The Quran as we know it was written down during the period of the [third] caliph, 'Uthman bin 'Affan, using the 'Uthmani script, which is named after him. Most Muslims believe that this version [of the Quran], which was written in the 37th year after the Hijra, when the compiling of the Quran was completed, and has been passed down from generation to generation to this very day, is sacred and must not be amended.

"However, [the Quran] in its present form contains errors of spelling, syntax and grammar; it is estimated that there are about 2,500 such mistakes. They were made by the committee tasked with compiling the Quran, and include the addition or omission of letters in some words or the substitution of one letter for another. For example, in Surah 68, verse 6, [the word] بِأَيِّيكُمُ ["which of you"] appears, instead of بأيكم. In other words, an extra ي was added. In Surah 25, verse 4, [the word] جَآءُو ["they committed"] appears, instead of جَاءُوا or جاؤوا. In other words, the alif in the plural masculine suffix وا is missing. In Surah 28, verse 9, the word امرأت ["wife"] appears, instead of امرأة. In 54 instances, the name إبراهيم [Ibrahim] appears… as إبراهم , omitting the letter ي , and the word سماوات ["skies"] is written in this way only once, whereas in 189 other instances it appears [incorrectly] as سموت, without the letter ا… The word قرآن ["Quran"] appears 68 times without the letter ا… The word سنة ["year"] appears eight times with the letter ة [at the end] and five times with the letter ت .

"The 'Uthmani script, in which the Quran is written, was formed by several of the Prophet's Companions and several members of the following generation, and they deserve credit for the effort they made, according to their ability at the time. [However,] the legacy they left us can be developed and amended if there is a better and more convenient alternative, as was done [in later years] when diacritics and punctuation marks were added [to the Quranic text]. The time has come to amend the spelling errors and other errors it contains, and adapt it to the rules of the Arabic language and grammar – for the Quranic text is open to any amendment that will make Allah's book easier for Muslims to read and linguistically more correct."[5]...

"The errors of the 'Uthmani script [were discussed] in an article titled 'Amending the Quran' by the Saudi writer Ahmed Hashem… who showed, based on the Quranic text, that the Prophet's scribes made errors when they wrote down the Quranic verses… Further examples of discrepancies between the 'Uthmani script and the [modern] standard script, involving the omission of letters, are the following: omission of the letter ا, for instance in writing الكتب ["the book"] instead of الكتاب…, [and] omission of the letter ن, [as in] نجي ["we will save"] instead of ننجي… The greatest error made in the 'Uthmani script 1,441 years ago was writing the word Becca instead of Mecca in Surah 3, verse 86, [which says]: 'Indeed, the first House [of worship] established for mankind was that at Becca - blessed and a guidance for the worlds.' Another error was made in verse 55 of Surah 22, which contains the phrase يوم عقيم ["useless day"] instead of يوم عظيم["great day"]… due to a scribal error in which the letter ق was substituted for the letter ظ. For some 1,500 years no credible authority dared to call for correcting "Becca" to "Mecca" [in Quran 3:86].

Saudi Writers Call For Amendments To Errors In Quran | MEMRI