No offense meant.
As I have been searching, the Quran is untouchable, and cannot be written or translated. It is as it is, and Muhammad (pbuh) has only received it via the Archangel Gavril. There is no written form prior.
Worse, there are many translations of the perceived Writing. I have one of these translations, and it is really bad. So bad, that anyone can see it is not the Quran, not even a translation of that.
Are there any opinions or, better, Fathwas on that point?
Just asking.
The Quran can be written or translated but few can reach and touch deep layers of Quran, and when it is said that the Quran is untouchable, it refers to this verse:
none but the Purified shall touch (handle or explain) 56:76
This text is about the profound meanings and accurate interpretations of the Quran. And also, it means touching the words of the Quran without wudu is Haram.
I very much like your question. A few days ago I was reading a book about history of Quran, as a written book. The book to a great deal addresses different scholarly/historical ideas how the manuscript was collected, with a writing system which was far from being mature at the time, like e.g. some glyphs were not written at all, no alphabet in its written form has had any point over or below, no diacritic, and even some reciters used to read Quran with their own accent so much different to recite ع like ح and vice versa, and etc. The point maybe is that the writing system should reflect exactly what is going to be read, and pronounced. Many writing systems now have alphabets written but not pronounced, and this having historic reasons are against the purpose, but anyway a chain to make us able to be able to read our ancient books and not to forget them all, although maybe if we time-travel to the era we would hardly understand what they say when they talk and pronounce what we don't today.
Having said all this, yet Quran as written in Arabic (no matter in which font, be it Naskh, or Nastaliq, or Kufi, or else) is considered as holy, and untouchable unless one has purity, the apparent purity to touch its lines, and a level of purity in heart to touch its meanings, and the more being healthy in heart and mind the deeper meaning can be touch by the spirit. Why is that so? Maybe because it was in the era of the holy prophet PBUHH that Quran was started to be written, and the holy prophet PBUHH approved this writing, and respected the written Quran as such, so that other Muslims also learned how to behave.
But there are also other reasoning that can be said here. For example consider yourself, a thinking human. You have some abstract ideas, up your mind, so fuzzy that you should think how to shape it a way that carry what mean as intact as possible. Then you bring the shaped idea into words and say it. Then at the bottom end of the chain you can write it, and somewhat substantiate it at the lowest possible level of communication. This is how revelation of Quran resembles, as far as I can say. There is an abstract Quran, then there is a worded Quran revealed to the 4th Heaven, and from there revealed to Dunya, and the last part is from the holy prophet PBUHH to others, memorizing and writing down what they hear from him.
This is not the whole story. Let me grab your attention to what Allah says here:
إِنَّا أَنْزَلْنَا إِلَيْكَ الْكِتَابَ
Indeed, We have revealed to you, [O Muhammad], the Book
and کتاب in Arabic comes from the root کَتَبَ which stands for writing, so that the book stands point to a written book, not merely like in audio-books. Maybe that is to say Allah has already meant the written book, although Archangel Gabriel was only the messenger for a part of the whole process, and even there are Ahadeeth that describe how Gabriel himself received the inspirations from Allah, there were also other entities involved in between. That the Muslims being a part as well is not far from being acceptable, although it will have margins that translations seemingly don't fit in, maybe because any translation reflect the purity of its writer, so even if being free of common errors and flaws, it will at most reflect the depth of meaning of the verses the translator touched.
