The Quran - An Ancient Blockchain?
- 1 min
The Quran states that it is the unchanged word of God, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad over 1400 years ago. As technology has advanced, an interesting parallel can be drawn between the protection of the Quran’s text and the security mechanisms of blockchain technology.
Blockchains rely on a distributed network of entities, each holding an identical copy of the ledger. This makes altering the ledger very difficult, as changes would need to be made across all copies.
Similarly, the Quran’s integrity is maintained through the vast number of Muslims who have memorized it word-for-word over the centuries. This tradition of memorizing the entire Quran is highly encouraged and rewarded in Islam. Just as blockchain networks incentivize mining to confirm transactions, Islam incentivizes memorization to preserve the Quran.
There are millions of “Hafez” (people who have memorized the entire Quran) worldwide. Even if all physical copies of the Quran were hypothetically altered, the true text would still be preserved in the minds of Hafez around the globe. This demonstrates how Islamic tradition mimics blockchain technology’s distributed redundancy to protect against unauthorized changes.
While the verification mechanisms differ, the end result is the same - an immutable document preserved across a decentralized network. The Quran’s perseverance over centuries, even before the invention of the printing press or digital storage, is a testament to the power of distributed information. Just like Bitcoin’s code, the Quran’s text has remained intact throughout history, demonstrating how ancient religions used some of the same principles as modern blockchain technology.