Compilation of the Mushaf (Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁)

The wound that would not dry

Medina in the first weeks after the Battle of al-Yamamah was a city in two tempos. Outside the mosque, in the streets and in the markets, life went on as it goes on in every city after a great battle: the wounded were tended, the widows were provided for, the captives were counted. Within the mosque something moved more slowly, for there in the quiet hours the names were remembered. Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁, of whom ʿUmar ﵁ carried in his heart an empty place he did not want filled. Abu Hudhayfah ibn ʿUtbah ﵁ and his freedman Salim ﵁ who had been laid down hand in hand in the earth of Yamamah. Thabit ibn Qais ibn Shamas ﵁ whose voice from the minbar of the Prophet ﷺ would never return. Abu Dujanah ﵁ whose sword had struck against Musaylimah and who had himself fallen beneath the wall.

Seventy names. Suyuti ﵀ has recorded them in his account, and the Ummah has preserved them in its liturgy. But beneath those seventy something other than only men was buried, for among them were huffaz, carriers of the Quran in their breasts, men who had gone through whole surahs with the Prophet ﷺ and who had recited in the mosque before the other sahabah. Their mouths were now in the earth, their throats were silent, and what they had carried still existed, but existed somewhere else, in other breasts and on other fragments, without any one central authority having gathered it.

For most of the sahabah this was no problem, for they knew what they knew. They prayed Fajr and Dhuhr and ʿAsr and Maghrib and ʿIsha with the surahs they had learned from the Prophet ﷺ, and their prayer was their preservation. But for one man, a man with a far-seeing heart and a nature that in every matter thought the utmost through to its logical end, the silence of Yamamah was louder than for any other. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ could not sleep.

The footstep to as-Sunh

One evening, probably in the first months of 12 AH, ʿUmar ﵁ walked from his own house through the narrow streets of Medina to the outer quarter of as-Sunh, where Abu Bakr ﵁ had his meager dwelling. The caliph lived there in an ordinary house, without a court, without sentries, with a bait al-mal that lay in an unguarded chest behind his door, and whoever wished to speak with him knocked as a neighbor knocks.

ʿUmar ﵁ knocked. It was the second man of the Ummah coming to see the first man, not for a military question, not for a fiscal matter, but for a concern that as yet had no word. Abu Bakr ﵁ opened, and they sat down on the straw mat in the half-dark room. The little lamp burned low. On the mat between them lay nothing, but in the silence between them lay the Battle of Yamamah.

ʿUmar ﵁ came with a sentence he had polished in his head as a stone is polished between two hands.

He spoke it, and it hung in the air like a heavy cloak that does not fall at once. Abu Bakr ﵁ looked at him. It was not a request for an opinion, it was a proposal that would overturn the whole hitherto known practice of the Ummah. The Prophet ﷺ had not left the Quran as one bound book. He had transmitted it orally and had it written down in pieces, surah by surah, verse by verse, on whatever material was at hand, and he had fixed the order within each surah under the guidance of Jibril ﵇. But one codex, one bound unity, one central archive-text of all the surahs between two boards, that he had not left behind. It had never been his charge, and now ʿUmar ﵁ was asking Abu Bakr ﵁ to do something that the Messenger ﷺ himself had not done.

The answer of Abu Bakr ﵁ was not what ʿUmar ﵁ had expected. It was not the assent of a politician who embraces every good plan, but the hesitation of a believer for whom every deviation from what the Prophet ﷺ had done is a first suspicion of bid’ah.

In that one question lies the whole carefulness of the first caliphate. Abu Bakr ﵁ was the man who had sent out his army on an expedition that even ʿUmar ﵁ had wanted to hold back, with the words that he would not unfasten a banner of the Messenger ﷺ as long as he breathed. That same man now did not want to undertake an action that the Messenger ﷺ had not taken, precisely because he did not want to go ahead of the Messenger ﷺ. It was not laziness, it was taqwa, the wakeful caution of a man who knew that a caliph does not have the room to be creative with what had been sacred under his predecessor.

The perseverance of ʿUmar ﵁

But ʿUmar ﵁ did not leave, for he had not come to accept a no as the final word. He began to argue with the same calm with which the Quran itself in Surah al-Anfal urges the believers to exchange matters in shura until clarity descends. He spoke of the huffaz who had fallen. He spoke of the campaigns that still waited, in Iraq, in Syria, in Bahrain, in Oman, in which again huffaz would fall. He spoke of the scattered fragments in hundreds of households, on pieces of parchment and bone and palm-stalk, without any central authority knowing which fragment was authentic and which fragment a Companion ﵁ had written in the margin as a personal explanation.

He did not say: you are wrong, he said: look at it this way. He did not say: the Prophet ﷺ left work unfinished, he said: what he left behind can be completed in his name because he commanded us to preserve the Book. The Prophet ﷺ had had the Quran noted down by every wahy-scribe, he had ordered that it be memorized and recited, he had commanded “whatever comes from me, write it down”. What ʿUmar ﵁ now proposed was no innovation but the logical completion of what the Prophet ﷺ himself had left behind on the threshold of his death.

The conversation lasted long. What Suyuti ﵀ records of it is concise: they exchanged positions, ʿUmar ﵁ brought his argument, Abu Bakr ﵁ posed his question again, ʿUmar ﵁ took up his argument anew. And then, at a certain moment, something turned in Abu Bakr ﵁. The turning did not come through persuasion in the ordinary sense; it came because Allah ﷻ, as Abu Bakr ﵁ would later say, opened his breast to the matter. He received inner room where first there had stood hesitation, and he saw what ʿUmar ﵁ saw.

Four words, Wallahi, innahu khayr. In them lies the whole decision. It is not only permitted; it is khayr, a good, not a neutral deed but a meritorious one, not a deviation from the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ but a defensive fortress around it. Abu Bakr ﵁ went to sleep that night with the certainty of a man who has made a great decision he had not at first thought possible, and ʿUmar ﵁ went to sleep with the certainty of a man who knew that he had not persevered in vain.

The choice of Zayd ﵁

The next morning, in the same mosque that still carried the names of the seventy in its pillars, Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ summoned Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁. He was a young man in his early twenties, an Ansari from Banu an-Najjar, a pupil who as a child in Medina had been personally trained by the Prophet ﷺ in reading and writing and who later, in the years of the revelation, had grown into one of the chief wahy-scribes. He had noted verses under dictation at the moment they descended, he had read them back to the Prophet ﷺ for checking, and he had been present at the twofold ʿarda of the last year, the annual review in which Jibril ﵇ and the Prophet ﷺ recited the entire Quran together from beginning to end, and which in that last year was carried out twice. He was, in short, the most qualified living man for what now had to be done.

Abu Bakr ﵁ addressed him in a phrasing that in its sobriety makes all later praise of Zayd ﵁ superfluous.

Five qualifications packed into two sentences. He is young, so he can bear the physical exertion. He is intelligent, so he can command the judgment the work requires. He stands above suspicion, for no one in the Ummah had anything unpleasant to say of him. He has himself written down the revelation under the Prophet ﷺ, so the text in his hands is not new. And in the implicit fifth qualification lies his presence at the final ʿarda, for whoever has gone through the text twice with the Prophet ﷺ in the last year knows the final version.

What stirred in Zayd ﵁ at the moment he heard the charge, he later put into words himself. It is one of the most moving testimonies in the whole textual history of Islam, and Suyuti ﵀ preserves it almost verbatim.

Moving a mountain, not a mountain in a parable, but one of the actual mountains that lie around Medina, Uhud or Sal’ or those anonymous black elevations south of the city. Zayd ﵁ compared the work for which he was asked not with a great intellectual exertion but with a physical impossibility. And yet he said yes. He did not refuse, he did not postpone, he did not ask for a colleague, but he bowed his neck and accepted, as the Prophet ﷺ had taught him to accept every command in the Message: with the heart first, the mind after.

The method

What Zayd ﵁ then did is what gave the Ummah its consolidated text. The method he laid down for himself, in its strictness, has not been surpassed by any later school of textual criticism. He set one rule: no verse is admitted unless there are two witnesses for it. And behind that rule he applied a protocol that in its discipline was sharper than modern philology would dare to demand.

What did “two witnesses” mean? Not two huffaz who knew the same verse by heart, for that Zayd ﵁ could already have verified sufficiently with his own memory and that of his colleagues. It meant a written fragment that had been noted down in the direct presence of the Prophet ﷺ, corroborated by the oral confirmation of someone who had heard it together with him or in the same session. No copy of a copy, no recollection of what someone had heard somewhere, but first-hand written evidence, corroborated by first-hand oral confirmation.

Zayd ﵁ knew the whole Quran by heart. He had gone through it twice with the Prophet ﷺ during the ʿarda, he had noted it down under dictation in his own handwriting, and he could have written out the complete text from his head and his personal writings and finished the work in a few weeks. He refused to do this. He refused to rely on his own memory alone, he refused to rely on his own writings alone, and he demanded of himself the same double burden of proof that he demanded of every other Companion ﵁. His name, his nearness, his role as wahy-scribe, his presence at the ʿarda, none of that gave him an exemption. For the Quran there was one standard, and that standard applied to himself as well.

This is no smallness, this is the highest form of scholarly discipline. It is the recognition that a text which will forever remain the Word of Allah ﷻ cannot rest on the authority of one man, however pious or learned. It must rest on a network of independently checked testimonies that confirm each other in all directions.

The materials

Abu Bakr ﵁ issued a general call in Medina. Whoever possessed even one verse of the Book of Allah ﷻ in written form, corroborated by two witnesses, came to the gate of the mosque to hand it in. Zayd ﵁ set up a workspace within the mosque itself, the central point of the community, so that the work would be public and visible. No hidden editing behind closed doors, no secret selection. The Ummah could see the streams of material come in day by day.

And the material flowed in with a diversity that takes the modern reader’s breath away. Zayd ﵁ himself later described it, and his words are preserved by the transmission. He collected the Quran, he said, min al-riqāʿ wa al-likhāf wa al-ʿusub wa min sudūr ar-rijāl.

Riqāʿ, parchments, made of worked hides, the most high-quality material, costly, and therefore available in limited quantities in a desert city. Likhāf, flat white stones, thin enough to be written on. ʿUsub an-nakhl, palm-leaf stalks, the dry base-piece of the palm branch, on which the revelations had been noted in ink. Aktāf, shoulder-blades of sheep and camels, flat and broad enough for a few lines. Adlāʿ, ribs of animals. Qitaʿ al-adīm, pieces of worked leather. Alwāh, wooden boards.

And sudūr ar-rijāl, the breasts of men, the memory of the huffaz, not as a main source but as a verifying pillar beside the written pillar. What the community brought in of fragments was laid down on the table of Zayd ﵁; what it carried in its collective memory was laid beside it. The two pillars had to support each other.

The image that rises here is of a community that lifted its own textual archive literally out of its houses. A man came in with a shoulder-blade on which, in the presence of the Prophet ﷺ, he had written three verses of Surah al-Furqan. Another came with a palm-stalk on which he had noted verses of Surah al-Hadid. A woman sent her son with a piece of parchment that her deceased husband had kept. For each fragment two witnesses were sought, for each verse the oral version was laid beside the written version, and the Ummah was witness to its own textual preservation.

The two verses of Surah at-Tawbah

In every compilation comes the moment when the procedure reaches its own limit. For Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ that moment was the last two verses of Surah at-Tawbah, also known as Surah Bara’a. He knew them, he knew them by heart, and he had undoubtedly recited and heard them many times in the mosque. Other huffaz among his colleagues could likewise recite them from memory. But Zayd ﵁ did not find them on a written fragment that met his protocol, and without a written document that had been noted in the direct presence of the Prophet ﷺ, he refused to admit them.

Here a man with less discipline would have made the exception. Everyone knows these verses. I know them myself. Write them down. But Zayd ﵁ had set for himself a law that rose above his own memory, and he refused to make for himself an exception to a law he demanded of others.

It is at this moment that Khuzaymah ibn Thabit al-Ansari ﵁ appeared in the mosque. He was an Ansari from the Aws tribe, a man whose special status in the community was known. The Prophet ﷺ had once, in a dispute over a horse, accepted the testimony of Khuzaymah ﵁ alone as equivalent to the testimony of two men, and since then he had borne in the Medinan community the byname Dhū ash-Shahādatayn, the bearer of two testimonies.

And Khuzaymah ﵁ had the document. He had the closing verses of Surah at-Tawbah on a fragment that had been written in the presence of the Prophet ﷺ, and he brought it to the mosque. Zayd ﵁ compared it with his own memory and with that of the huffaz present. The text agreed, and the verses were admitted.

These are not just any two verses. They are the closing verses of a surah that closes the Quran with the figure of the Prophet ﷺ himself, with his compassion for the Ummah and with his Lord as his rest. And the fact that they were brought by one man, one Ansari who had the special status to count for two, gives this moment something moving. Khuzaymah ﵁, who had once in a worldly dispute been made by the Prophet ﷺ a bearer of double testimony, now bore the double testimony that placed these verses in the official archive.

But we read this story wrongly if we see Khuzaymah ﵁ as an exception to the rule of the two witnesses. The verses were not accepted on the basis of his testimony alone; his parchment was the written pillar, and the oral pillar came from the collective memorization of Zayd ﵁ himself and of a group of other huffaz who were present in the mosque. That is precisely why the scholars see in this story the capstone proof that the oral was verified against the written, and not the reverse. The tawātur, the overwhelming parallel evidence of many independent channels, was strong enough to admit these last two verses with certainty.

The perseverance in the workspace

The work lasted months. Some reports place the completion in 12 AH, others in early 13 AH, before the end of the caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁. It was no short sprint, it was a patient, day-by-day shunting of fragments on a table in the mosque, with Zayd ﵁ as the central figure and with coming and going sahabah as the suppliers and the witnesses. Abu Bakr ﵁ came to look regularly, ʿUmar ﵁ sat in certain reports at the gate of the mosque to receive the material before it reached Zayd ﵁, and Bilal ibn Rabah ﵁ walked through the streets with a proclamation to those who still had fragments in their possession.

Three pillars buttressed the process. One, a general call, so that no one could later complain that his fragment had been passed over. Two, a central location within the mosque, so that the work was public and visible. Three, the law of the two witnesses, so that no verse entered the archive without double confirmation.

And so Zayd ﵁ worked off the mountain, not by moving it, for that he had in his first reaction called impossible, but by breaking it down stone by stone at his feet. Every morning new fragments lay on his table, every evening a few verses had been verified, checked, admitted. He ate meagerly, he slept little, he spoke only when the work required it. The Ummah looked on, and with the Ummah something in history itself held its breath.

The result: the suhuf

When the last verses had been inserted, before Zayd ﵁ lay not what we today would call a book. He had no bound codex, no uniform leaves, no title page. He had what the sources call suhuf, a plural of sahifah, a leaf: loose parchments of unequal size, placed in a fixed order by surah, with the surahs among themselves in an arrangement not yet definitively fixed. Only later, under ʿUthman ﵁, would the revenues from conquests make parchment of uniform dimensions possible, and only then did the word mushaf, a bound codex, arise.

This suhuf, this bundle of verified parchments, was handed over to Abu Bakr ﵁. Zayd ﵁ delivered it to him in person in his house in as-Sunh, and Abu Bakr ﵁ placed it in the official caliphal archive of his bait al-mal. The Quran lay for the first time in history consolidated in one place, in one bundle, with double confirmation for each verse.

What the suhuf were must be clear: a complete written Quran. Every verse the Prophet ﷺ had left behind was admitted, with double testimony for each fragment. The verses within each surah stood in their definitive order, fixed by the Prophet ﷺ himself under the guidance of Jibril ﵇. Not a single surah had verses in the wrong position, not a single verse had been torn by accident out of its surah.

What the suhuf were not must likewise be clear: they were not bound, they were not written on uniform parchment, and they were in all likelihood not yet provided with one single, fixed surah-order for the whole book. The Ummah recited the surahs in an arrangement that grew out of its liturgical practice, and the definitive Mushaf order we know today came under ʿUthman ﵁.

The testimony of ʿAli ﵁

What stands in Suyuti ﵀ as the most telling testimony about the role of Abu Bakr ﵁ in all of this comes not from his own mouth nor from that of Zayd ﵁, but from the mouth of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁. He was the cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, the son-in-law, the father of al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁, the man who had himself been a wahy-scribe in the early years. He had watched the works of his three predecessors in the caliphate pass before him, and he was not a man who readily used great words. But over this one matter he spoke with a clarity that in its conciseness bound the whole Ummah to a single pronouncement.

Bayna al-lawhayn, between two boards. The expression is that of a physical codex, even though what Zayd ﵁ actually delivered to Abu Bakr ﵁ was a suhuf without a uniform binding. What ʿAli ﵁ fixes in this pronouncement is not the material form but the deed. For the first time the Quran lay consolidated in one central repository, under one authority, with one confirmed text. Whoever ever wishes to recite a verse, and whoever ever wishes to verify a verse, can return to this one source. That is what Abu Bakr ﵁ brought forth, and that is why, in the eyes of ʿAli ﵁, the greatest reward belongs to him among all who ever exerted themselves for the written Book.

That pronouncement is for the Ummah a kind of sealing. When ʿAli ﵁ gives Abu Bakr ﵁ the highest tribute in this matter, then no later group of Muslims, however much it has wrestled with the political aftermath of the caliphate, can belittle the contribution of Abu Bakr ﵁ to the preservation of the Book. The fact has been fixed by ʿAli ﵁ himself: the caliph who had been chosen in haste at the Saqifah, who had said from the minbar that he was not the best of them, bore in the textual history of the Quran the greatest merit of all.

The handover to ʿUmar ﵁ and to Hafsa ﵂

With the handover to Abu Bakr ﵁ the work was not ended; it had begun its chain of preservation. The suhuf lay in his house in as-Sunh until his passing in Jumada al-Akhirah of the year 13 AH. On his deathbed he designated ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ as his successor, and with that designation he also handed over the bundle of parchments. ʿUmar ﵁ received it in the awareness of what lay in his hands, for it had been his own proposal that had kindled this work, and now the fruit of that proposal lay under his authority.

For ten years the suhuf remained in the keeping of ʿUmar ﵁ while under his caliphate the Quran spread to Basra, Kufa, Damascus, Hims, Palestine, and the Egyptian frontier. In every new city Muslims were born who knew the Quran only as their local reciters taught it to them. The suhuf in Medina was the reference for whoever needed it, but for the daily practice of the Ummah it was not an active manuscript; it was, in modern terms, the master copy. It awaited its moment.

When ʿUmar ﵁ was stabbed in Dhul-Hijjah 23 AH by Abu Lu’lu’ah in the fajr prayer-row of the mosque, he refused on his deathbed to appoint a successor; he formed a council of six to decide that. But the suhuf itself was another matter, for in the preservation of the written Quran he could form no ad-hoc council. He entrusted the archive to his daughter Hafsa bint ʿUmar ﵂, the widow of the Prophet ﷺ.

Why Hafsa ﵂? This choice too was not arbitrary, for three reasons overlap. First, she was herself a hafiza; she knew the Quran by heart and could thus, should a question arise about the content of the suhuf, compare the loose parchments with her own memory. Second, she was literate, a rarity for women of her time, and a literate keeper could not only guard the text, she could read it, check it, compare it. Third, and this is perhaps the deepest, she was a widow of the Prophet ﷺ himself, and thereby a Mother of the Believers. Her house stood at the mosque, and she belonged to a group of women whose authority in the community was undisputed.

The preservation was, in other words, not only material; it was relational. The official written archive of the Quran lay in the hands of someone who was living proof of the milieu in which the revelation had descended. Only later, in the caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁, would the Ummah request these suhuf back from the house of Hafsa ﵂ to produce the definitive, bound Mushaf, written on uniform parchment, that would be distributed to all the capitals. But that is a story for later. For now, in 12 AH or early 13 AH, the Quran lay for the first time consolidated in one bundle in the house of as-Sunh, and that alone was already a wonder.

The theological breadth of this moment

Whoever pauses here for a moment sees what the Ummah received. The Prophet ﷺ left the world without leaving a bound Mushaf; he left it with the Quran in hundreds of breasts, on hundreds of fragments, living, breathing, recited in every mosque and every house. What he left behind was not incomplete, it was the entrusting of the Message to a community that would preserve it by carrying it. But communities lose men to wars, and without a central repository the Message can lose its anchoring.

Abu Bakr ﵁ did what the Prophet ﷺ had not needed to do, and thereby he did what the Prophet ﷺ himself would have most rewarded. He joined the two pillars, the oral and the written, in one central archive, he placed the Quran in a form that no war could take away, and he did this with the hesitation of a man who knew that he was doing something new, with the assent of a man who knew that this new thing was good, and with the handover to a young man who knew that he had to move a mountain.

Zayd ﵁ moved it not by seeing it as one whole. He moved it by dividing it into so many thousands of separate verses that each verse could be verified separately, and all those separate verifications formed in the end the mountain-sides of the text we hold today in our hands. That is scholarship in its highest form: not the illusion that one man moves a mountain, but the wisdom that a mountain is broken down into manageable pieces, with each piece doubly proven.

The chain to the present

The written Quran that you today, wherever you are, have standing on your nightstand or in your bookcase, carries on every page the legacy of what happened in these months in Medina. Every verse that stands in it was confirmed by Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ with double testimony, in the same mosque where the Prophet ﷺ walked. Every verse that does not stand in it was held back by that same Zayd ﵁ because the double testimony was lacking. The Mushaf that ʿUthman ﵁ would have uniformly copied and distributed two decades later was not a second compilation; it was the typographical completion of what Abu Bakr ﵁ and Zayd ﵁ had fixed in Medina. The text was the same, the witnesses were the same, only the parchment was made uniform.

ʿAli ﵁ knew it when he spoke of the two boards, and the Ummah knows it when it today opens a Mushaf and reads the first sura. The seventy huffaz who fell in Hadiqat al-Mawt did not fall without fruit, for their death shifted a hinge that would otherwise never have been shifted. Their names, recorded in the account of Suyuti ﵀, lead by one straight line to the page that their brothers in Medina then opened, to the table where Zayd ﵁ ordered his parchments, to the chest of Abu Bakr ﵁ in as-Sunh, to the house of Hafsa ﵂ in Medina, to the Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ in Damascus and Kufa and Basra, and finally to the hand that today, in whatever city in the world, opens a Quran in the name of the Lord who has taught by the pen.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 64–65.