What have the mainstream academics in Quranic studies said about the existence (or non-existence) of internal contradictions or logical flaws in the text of Quran?

As far as I understand, Judaism doesn't use the prophet label for all of its important characters. Some are patriarchs (e.g. Isaac, Jacob, Joseph), some are kings (e.g. David, Solomon). The only thing in common among all of these characters is that they all seem to have received some kind of divine guidance.

How did the terminology shift from patriarchs and kings to messengers and prophets in Islam? Is this a Quranic concept? Or did this shift already happen before the time of Muhammad?

Hud and the Northwest Semitic Hadad

The Quran places Prophet Hud among the ancient Arabian tribe of Ad. Ad was destroyed by a fierce, roaring storm wind, a rih sarsar, lasting seven nights and eight days.

In Levantine, Amorite and Ugaritic mythology, there is a supreme deity of weather and destructive winds named Hadad, also spelled Haddu or Haddad.

The phonetic parallel is strong.

The story flow is also identical. On one side you have Prophet Hud and Ad, destroyed by storm. Over time, through deification, this memory becomes on the other side the Ugaritic god Hadad, the deity of storm and wind. One warned against arrogance and perished under wind punishment, the other became associated with thundering gales and roaring weather.

The Semitic storm-god, Hadad, was patron deity of both Aram and Ugarit. The King of Aram (Syria) was called Ben-Hadad.

I was curious whether or not there was evidence to suggest whether early muslims or even just people in general at the time of Muhummad perceived the stories of Ibrahim, Adam, Musa, etc. as historical accounts or if they were more accepted as legends/folklore or some parable with symbolic meaning.

The Quranic accounts of Nuh and Hud occur long before Moses, the Exodus, or Abraham, locating them in primeval antiquity. Exploring comparative mythology reveals striking parallels between these prophetic figures and Near Eastern deifications, shedding light on the Quranic framework of messenger deification.

*1. Deification of Messengers: The Quranic Framework*

Quranic theology explicitly acknowledges that human figures, particularly prophets and messengers, can be elevated into gods, mythologized, or deified after their departure.

Allah says: "They have taken their scholars and monks as lords besides Allah, and the Messiah, the son of Mary..." — Surah At-Tawbah 9:31

Two clear examples are given in the Quran itself. Isa AS serves as the primary example of a revered human prophet whose historical reality was transformed over centuries into a divine status as the Son of God. And in Surah Nuh 71:23, Allah mentions the idols Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Yauq, and Nasr. Early commentators like Ibn Abbas noted that these were originally righteous men between Adam and Noah. After their deaths, people built statues to honor them, which eventually morphed into direct worship.

If post-prophetic deification is an established pattern, then examining pre-Abrahamic Near Eastern mythologies shows how memories of figures like Nuh and Hud may have been adapted into regional pantheons.

*2. Nuh and the Egyptian Nu*

In the Quranic narrative, Nuh is inextricably linked to the primordial Flood that wiped out a corrupt world, resetting creation out of chaos and water.

In ancient Egypt, there is a figure named Nu or Nun. He is not a temple god, but the personification of the primordial watery abyss out of which all creation emerged and to which it can return.

The parallels are direct. Nuh's domain is preservation of life through global water and chaos. Nu's domain is the inert, chaotic waters themselves. Nuh represents the collapse of order into water followed by a new world order on Mount Judi. Nu represents that same state of non-existence and chaos prior to creation. Linguistically, Nuh comes from the Semitic root N-W-H related to resting and flowing water, while Nu in Egyptian means the watery deep.

Most striking is the role in creation. Nuh carries the seed of all life across chaotic waters on the Ark to birth a new humanity. Nu in Egyptian cosmology holds aloft the Solar Barque, the boat of creation, carrying life out of the chaotic waters.

In a mythologized memory system, Nuh's association with world-ending waters aligns closely with how Egyptians conceptualized Nu — the ancient cosmic waters that swallowed and birthed order.

*3. Hud and the Northwest Semitic Hadad*

The Quran places Prophet Hud among the ancient Arabian tribe of Ad. Ad was destroyed by a fierce, roaring storm wind, a rih sarsar, lasting seven nights and eight days.

In Levantine, Amorite and Ugaritic mythology, there is a supreme deity of weather and destructive winds named Hadad, also spelled Haddu or Haddad.

The phonetic parallel is strong. Hud in Arabic and Hadad in Northwest Semitic share the Semitic root H-D-D, which conveys a loud crash, thunder, or roaring noise.

The story flow is also identical. On one side you have Prophet Hud and Ad, destroyed by storm. Over time, through deification, this memory becomes on the other side the Ugaritic god Hadad, the deity of storm and wind. One warned against arrogance and perished under wind punishment, the other became associated with thundering gales and roaring weather.

*4. Historical and Mythological Synthesis*

This leaves us with three points.

First, the pattern of deification. Quranic theology posits that monotheism was the original state of humanity. When messengers passed away, later generations distorted their legacies, turning historical leaders into mythological guardians or gods.

Second, geographical continuity. The ancient Near East — Mesopotamia, Canaan and Ugarit, Arabia, and Egypt — shared trade routes, linguistic roots, and oral traditions.

Third, echoes in pagan pantheons. Rather than coincidence, these parallels suggest that names like Nu in Egypt and Hadad in Ugarit could represent paganized, deified distortions of Nuh and Hud — retaining the key elements of their stories like floods, storm winds, and boats of salvation, while replacing the God who sent them with personified nature deities.

Also Hud AS is related to Iram. This is what I found on Wiki.

The Semitic storm-god, Hadad, was patron deity of both Aram and Ugarit. The King of Aram (Syria) was called Ben-Hadad (English: son of Hadad; Aramaic: Bar-Hadad).

How believer scholars either biblical or quranic handle the conflict between historical critical method which study the origins of religions in the lens of natural world causes and their faith in divinity of origin of their holy books?
please don't delete this post, it's not in a bad faith and doesn't violate that rule, i'm genuinely curious.

Reynolds examined 29 extended (>= 9 words) verbal doublets in the Qurʾān and noted that most all of them fall strictly within Meccan sūras (13) or Medinan sūras (12), while only 4 cross the Meccan–Medinan boundary. He interpreted this concentration as evidence for two separate pre-canonical bodies of text that were later combined during redaction.

In the article linked, I expanded and standardized the dataset to 39 controlled, single-verse doublets. Even though the expanded dataset replicates the ~90% within-category split, the article illustrates why that finding does not provide independent support for the two-corpus model.

The main reasons:

Verse Length Sampling Bias: Nöldeke’s chronology relies heavily on verse length as a key stylistic indicator alongside other criteria, moving generally from short, rhythmic verses in early Meccan sūras to long, prose-like verses in Medinan ones. Because doublets select for long passages contained within a single verse, they naturally create a built-in sampling bias toward later, formally similar parts of the text. Reynolds notes in his article that sorting sūras strictly by average verse length produces counterexamples and reversals compared to Nöldeke’s precise order. However, Nöldeke’s composite method only requires the sequence to be strongly associated with verse length overall, not identical rank-for-rank.

Boundary Geometry: Turning a 114-position ordinal sequence into a binary M/D split (at N90/N91) naturally hides chronological distance. If you take the actual distances of these doublets and calculate how many pairs separated by those distances would cross N90/N91 just by pure chance/geometry, you get an expected count of $E(X) = 4.78$. The corpus contains 4.

Boundary Geometry: Reducing Nöldeke's 114-position timeline to a binary Meccan/Medinan split (between positions 90 and 91) hides actual chronological distance. When you take the actual chronological distances between the sūras containing these doublets and calculate how many pairs separated by those exact distances would cross the boundary by pure placement geometry, the expected number is about five. The corpus contains four.

That is, the high concentration of same-category doublets is simply what happens when localized recurrence along an ordered sequence is divided by a single boundary line.

My question is for both Muslims and non-Muslims who chose to study the Quran in the secular way.

If you're a Muslim: Why would you study it like this, when you have religious schools that would give the Quran more respect?

If you're a non-Muslim: Why are you investing years of your life to get a diploma about a book that you don't believe in?

Ibn Taymiyyah is a figure hotly contested by both his supporters and detractors, but who was he really? And what exactly were his beliefs? Did he believe hell was temporary? Join us for our discussion with Professor Jon Hoover as we explore the legal philosophy and metaphysics of Ibn Taymiyyah.

Link to the interview is in the comments below!

After the two PhD theses by Joshua Little from Oxford and Hala Al-Wardi from the Sorbonne in Paris, who dug deeper into Hadith science, both found that it is impossible for Aisha to have been 9 in 624 but much older

While Adnan Ibrahim who hold a PhD in philosophy from Vienna , he refuting the age of Aisha based on the reporta of early historians like Ibn ishaq and Tabari who both confirmed that Aisha converted to Islam before Bitha while she was young ( so she converted to Islam and was young before 610 )

And according to Hadith science made by Shooba , if a Hadith contradict the events of historians , this Hadith should be deemed as Daif ( weak ) and shound be rejected

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Not boukhari who claim that she was born in 614 .

The problem is not Aisha’s age itself. The Hadith about her being 9 was narrated around 120 years after her death by a scholar called Hisham ibn Urwah, particularly through his transmissions when he was in Iraq.

The problem is that the chain of narrators ends with Hisham. If Hisham’s hadiths when he was in Iraq are considered unreliable, then Bukhari, the holiest Hadith book in Salafi Islam, included weak chains of narrators in his book. This would seriously damage the reputation of the book because, according to Hadith science, if one narrator is suspected of lying, having poor memory, or becoming confused, then all of his narrations from that unreliable period have to be questioned.

If Hisham developed dementia or serious memory problems when he was in Iraq, that means it would not only affect the Hadith about Aisha being 9, but potentially hundreds of other hadiths narrated by Hisham that appear across the six major Hadith books.

And that could create a much bigger problem for the traditional Hadith canon — arguably one of the worst nightmares for Salafis because their worst ennimies the Quranists already accuse boukhari and the 6 books of hadiths that they are full of weak chain of transmission

I think, this one verse and its associated hadith is enough to establish that scientific research on Quran is absolute mandatory for Muslims.

Quranic verse

Surah Ali Imran verse 190

Complementary Hadith

Sahih Ibn Hibban, no. 620

There are 700+ emperical scientific verses in Quran though, which is roughly 12% of the entire Quran. I haven't yet factored in the philosophy of science, and human psychology and other social sciences, which otherwise would make it above 50% of the entire Quran.

You can explore more here: https://hassanmalik673070.substack.com/p/1-the-quran-is-a-book-of-hidayah?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1h9fq

Hello friends – I’ve just published a new long-form discussion with Dr. Saqib Husain on his Oxford University Press book “Wisdom in the Qur’an.” The Qur’an refers frequently to God teaching or sending down wisdom (Arabic hikma) – to Jesus, to David, to Muhammad, and to all the believers. This raises a critical question: What is it that God is teaching or sending down? The idea that wisdom comes from heaven is an important theme in Jewish and Christian writings (beginning with the Bible) and Dr. Hussain makes a case for a distinctly Qur’anic view of wisdom. We also discuss the cogency of the classical argument (for example, Shafi`i) that hikma in the Qur’an is a reference to prophetic Sunna. Thanks for taking a look: https://youtu.be/TdhZFzSUUog?si=SN771nBOlqhVfoO1

The passage describes Allah preserving the believers in the cave, what did traditional scholars suggest this verse meant when saying God moves them right and left

https://youtu.be/ZpnfRmgAa6k?is=ZkVJ8OBGJ30hF4g1

For those interested in Qur'anic Jihad and Medinan Political Theology check out my dissertation "Divine Discourse and Historical Conflict: The Quran’s Engagement with the Last Great War of Antiquity" Pg 32-49 supervised by Professor Nicolai Sinai and Professor Phil Booth

Available to read Open Access on academia.edu

https://www.academia.edu/170295905/Divine_Discourse_and_Historical_Conflict_The_Quran_s_Engagement_with_the_Last_Great_War_of_Antiquity

For more details and to listen to a comparative recitation, see my video
https://youtu.be/a3zNG3y-4Qc

For more technical details, see my blogpost.

The only near direct citation off the top of my head is from the Psalms, but it seems like a sort of textual variant. Close enough.

A large part of the Qur'an, as a sentient book's, justification for it's own authority seems to come from it's claim that it's in a sort of continuity with it's previous Scripture. If this is the case, and the Qur'anic author and the Qur'an itself as a sort of quasi-sentient entity, wanted to convince the People of the Book to more easily convert why didn't it just bother to directly cite things, instead of giving a ton of ambiguities and "it's in there" without further elaboration? One claim I've from Muslims (not western academia) as to why this was done is "because it's poetry" but this explanation doesn't seem sufficient because if the author can do all possible things, what was preventing them from making it rhyme, using Arabic at max caliber, creating ring structures, and so on and so forth, all while giving direct citations? Clearly the author was able to do it at least once with the Psalm citation.

The Appendix to the History of Baghdad — Page 120
Contributors: Ibn al-Najjar al-Baghdadi.
https://ablibrary.net/book_content/b/5909/120

”UbaydAllah ibn Muhammad ibn Hafs al-Ayshi said: I heard my father say: 'When the sons of al-Abbas (the Abbasids) seized the treasuries of Banu Umayya (the Umayyads), they found a sealed casket. They opened it, and inside was a piece of parchment with the words written on it: (The healing by permission of Allah). He said: So it was opened, and inside was:

وبالله ولا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله العلي العظيم أسكن أيها الوجع سكنت بالذي له ما سكن في الليل والنهار وهو السميع العليم بسم الله وبالله ولا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله العلي العظيم اسكن أيها الوجع بالذي يمسك السماء أن تقع على الأرض إلا بإذنه إن الله بالناس لرءوف رحيم بسم الله وبالله ولا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله العلي العظيم اسكن أيها الوجع الذي بالذي إن يشأ يسكن الريح فيظللن رواكد على ظهره إن في ذلك لآيات لكل صبار شكور بسم الله وبالله ولا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله العلي العظيم اسكن أيها الوجع سكنت بالذي يمسك السماوات والأرض أن تزولا ولئن زالتا إن أمسكهما من أحد من بعده إنه كان حليما غفورا

(Bismillâhi ve billâhi ve lâ havle ve lâ kuvvete illâ billâhil-aliyyil-azîm.
Uskun eyyühel-veca'u, sekente billezî lehû mâ sekene fil-leyli ven-nehâri ve huves-semî'ul-alîm.
Bismillâhi ve billâhi ve lâ havle ve lâ kuvvete illâ billâhil-aliyyil-azîm.
Uskun eyyühel-veca'u, billezî yumsikus-semâe en teka'a 'alel-ardı illâ bi-iznih, innallâhe bin-nâsi lerâûfun rahîm.
Bismillâhi ve billâhi ve lâ havle ve lâ kuvvete illâ billâhil-aliyyil-azîm.
Uskun eyyühel-veca'ul-lezî billezî in yeşe' yüskinir-rîha fe-yazlelne ravâkide 'alâ zahrih, inne fî zâlike le-âyâtin li-kulli sabbârin şekûr.
Bismillâhi ve billâhi ve lâ havle ve lâ kuvvete illâ billâhil-aliyyil-azîm.
Uskun eyyühel-veca'u, sekente billezî yumsikus-semâvâti vel-arda en tezûlâ, ve le-in zâletâ in emsekehumâ min ehadin min ba'dih, innehû kâne halîmen gafûrâ.)

UbaydAllah said: He told me, 'After that, I no longer needed any treatment or medicine' “