The "Da Vinci Code" Meets the Koran? Part 2

Following up one of my more frequently visited posts (usually as a result of searches on Google), here is another article on the claims of the Koran and research:

According to this [Islamic] account, the Koran represents the uncorrupted word of God, "constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable." It was transmitted to man through Muhammad, a prosperous Meccan merchant who received it via the angel Gabriel as a series of verse revelations between 610 and his death in 632. Uneducated and illiterate, Muhammad committed these revelations to memory before reciting them to his followers, who memorized them verbatim in turn. The killing of hundreds of these "memorizers" in the battle of Yamama in 633 alerted his successor as Muslim leader, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, to the danger that the revelations could be lost. He therefore gathered all available sources into a loose compilation called the suhuf which was then used by the third caliph, Uthman, to produce in the mid-650s a standardized text of the Koran. Copies were sent to Islamic communities with orders that all other versions be destroyed. Muslims believe this Uthmanic recension is the Koran as we have it today.

Note to self: Don't rely exclusively on memorizers.

But according to the New Historians, there is no evidence that the Koran was compiled by Muhammad or canonized under Uthman; in fact, there is no proof it existed in any form before the end of the seventh century, and the first signs of a standardized codex date from the early 800s, 150 years after Uthman's death. ...

The fact that it is "strikingly lacking in overall structure, frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content... and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions" is evidence, he argued, that it "is not the carefully executed project of one or many men, but rather the product of an organic development from originally independent traditions during a long period of transmission."

If you ever read the Koran yourself and tried to make sense of it, this explanation sounds perfectly reasonable. Read it (the article) and see what you think.