Has the Quran been changed or corrupted?

The letter-perfect preservation Muslims are usually taught to expect is not what the Quran's own history shows. This does not mean the Quran was wildly corrupted or rewritten - by the standards of ancient texts it is remarkably stable, and that charge would be unfair. The narrower, honest point is that the popular claim of one flawlessly preserved, letter-for-letter text does not hold. There is not one single Quran text in use today but several canonical 'readings' (qira'at) — most of the Muslim world uses the Hafs reading, while much of North and West Africa uses Warsh, and the two differ in wording in places. Islam's own most trusted source (Sahih al-Bukhari 4987) reports that within a generation of Muhammad's death the caliph Uthman standardised one version and had the others burned — which is hard to square with a text that was already perfectly and identically preserved everywhere.

This is not said to mock a book Muslims love, but to invite an honest question: the strong claim of flawless, letter-perfect preservation only needs a few solid counter-examples to fall, and the qira'at and the Uthmanic standardisation are exactly that. A thoughtful Muslim will respond that these readings descend from the divinely permitted ahruf, so they are revelation faithfully transmitted, not corruption - but that reframing concedes the decisive point: there is no single letter-perfect text, and one caliph burned the variants other Muslims were using. The deeper point for a Christian conversation is that the case for Christianity never rested on a claim of mechanical preservation in the first place — it rests on the historical evidence for the resurrection.