Protected by Recitation, Not by the Page

So the Qurʾān itself — and this is really important to understand — the written Qurʾān is not the primary source in which the Qurʾān is protected. It is protected through oral transmission. The written text is used, one, for people who do not memorise the Qurʾān, and two, as a crutch for people who do memorise it, to go back and be reminded if their teacher is not there, or somebody else who is not a ḥāfiẓ. But when a printing of the Qurʾān is finished, it is sent to people who have memorised the Qurʾān orally to check it. They do not check it against other copies of the Qurʾān; they send it to several ḥuffāẓ, the people who have memorised the Qurʾān, and they will look at it.

Imam al-Qurṭubī tells a very interesting story in his tafsīr, in his commentary on the Qurʾān, under the words where the Qurʾān says that We have revealed this reminder and We have taken it upon Ourselves — meaning God, it being like a royal "we" in Arabic — to protect it:

Imam al-Qurṭubī says that there was a Jewish man who wanted to find out about the three traditions and their books. So he took a Torah and he copied the entire Torah in Hebrew, and he put mistakes in it specifically. He went to a rabbi and he gave him the Torah and he asked him to read the entire Torah and to tell him if it was a good edition. When he came back, the man said it was an excellent edition, even though he knew there were mistakes in it. When he went to the Christian, he did the same thing with the Gospels, and the Christian also said that it was an excellent edition of the Gospels. He did the same thing for the Qurʾān: he went to a Muslim scholar and asked him to read it, and he had his mistakes in there, and the Muslim scholar told him, when he came back: you have to burn this, because there are mistakes in it.

Now, this may be an apocryphal story; its historical validity is not known. But the point is very well made: that the Muslims really do view the Qurʾān — and rightly and justifiably so — as a book that has been preserved since this early time.