What's the Difference Between a Translation and a Version

[Minimalist]

Your uncle has been sold a bill of goods.

http://www.muslimhope.com/QuranVariants.htm

Two common misconceptions taught by some is that one proof of the Qur’an being from Allah is that there are no manuscript variations, and the Qur’an today is identical to the Qur’an just after Mohammed.

However, a manuscript was discovered in Samarkand, and over 15,000 pages of old Koran text were discovered in Yemen. According to an article by in the Jan. 1999 Atlantic Monthly (p.43-56)

"Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries -- they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God."

The point of this paper is not to try to say which variants are correct; it is simply to show that variants exist, and these cannot be swept under the rug.

I'm sure he was a willing purchaser.