The compilation of the Qur’an

The moment on the northern front

It was not in Medina that the history of the official Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ began. It began on the northern campaigns, at the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, in the camp of a Sahabi ﵁ who had always held the same place in the heart of the community: the place of the watchman, the place of the man who sees the fitnah coming before others do. Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman ﵁ returned from the summer campaign to Medina with an unease that no longer let go of his hands and that he could not keep to himself. What he had heard in the tents of the Muslim soldiers was not the customary variety of recitation, but something far more serious: the beginning of dispute over the text of the Qur’an itself.

In the previous article we followed ʿUthman ﵁ through the expansion of the mosques in Mecca and Medina, and through the first signals of financial pressure and changes of governor. In this article we turn to the work for which he has become immortal in the history of the ummah, and which Suyuti ﵀ summed up in a short but load-bearing sentence on page 177 of his Tarikh al-Khulafa. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Mahdi, as Ibn ʿAsakir narrates in Suyuti ﵀, said that ʿUthman ﵁ possessed two qualities that neither Abu Bakr ﵁ nor ʿUmar ﵁ had possessed. The first was his self-restraint until the moment of his death. The second was, in the words that Suyuti ﵀ faithfully renders, his uniting the people upon a single mushaf, the uniting of the people upon a single written copy of the Qur’an. It is this second quality that is named in the shortest part of Uthman’s chapter in Suyuti ﵀, and that receives its full form in the broader narrations that Suyuti ﵀ includes earlier in his book.

What Suyuti ﵀ sets down beforehand: the first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁

For whoever wishes to grasp the official Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ in its true historical weight, one must not forget the two steps that lay before it. Suyuti ﵀ treats the first of those two steps on pages 64 and 65 of his Tarikh al-Khulafa, in the chapter on Abu Bakr ﵁. It is there that he narrates at length the collection of the Qur’an in the first years after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ. He does this by means of a long narration from Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, which al-Bukhari ﵀ recorded and which Suyuti ﵀ cites in its full form.

It had been the battle of Yamamah, in the year 12 of the Hijra, against the false prophet Musaylima and his following, that had set the matter in motion. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ had after that battle come in to Abu Bakr ﵁ with a fear that had arisen from the counting of the fallen. Many of the qurra, the bearers of the Qur’an in their breasts, had fallen on that day. If the war were to last longer, the community would keep losing bearers, and with them a part of the Qur’an could vanish. It is in this context that Suyuti ﵀ narrates the dialogue that took place between Abu Bakr ﵁, ʿUmar ﵁ and Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁.

ʿUmar ﵁ kept returning to the matter, as Suyuti ﵀ narrates on page 64, until Allah ﷻ opened the breast of Abu Bakr ﵁ to it. Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ was summoned. He was a young man, he had been the scribe of the revelation in the days of the Prophet ﷺ, and he had heard the Qur’an from the Messenger ﷺ himself. To him was entrusted the heaviest task he had ever been given. In his own words, as Suyuti ﵀ narrates them on page 64:

But Zayd ﵁ accepted the charge. He sought out the Qur’an, as he says in the same narration, from fragments of paper, from shoulder-blade bones, from palm branches, and from the breasts of men. Two verses from Surah at-Tawbah he found solely with Khuzaymah ibn Thabit ﵁: There has certainly come to you a Messenger from among yourselves (Qur’an 9:128–129). The leaves on which the Qur’an was brought together in this first collection remained with Abu Bakr ﵁ until his passing, then they went to ʿUmar ﵁ until his passing, and then they came into the keeping of Hafsah bint ʿUmar ﵂, the daughter of the second Caliph ﵁ and the wife of the Prophet ﷺ. It is from her hands that ʿUthman ﵁ would, years later, at the moment of the second step, have these leaves fetched.

Suyuti ﵀ closes his passage on the first collection on page 65 with the words of Abu Yaʿla, narrated through ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁: The man with the greatest reward for the written copies of the Qur’an is Abu Bakr ﵁. Abu Bakr ﵁ was the first to collect the Qur’an between two boards. Suyuti ﵀ repeats this in his chapter on the Firsts (the matters in which he was the first) of Abu Bakr ﵁: the first to collect the Qur’an, the first to call it Mushaf, the proof of which has already been given. That is the first step. No complete edition for the provinces, no distribution to Kufa, Basra or Damascus, but one authoritative collection, in the hands of the Caliph ﵁, then of his successor, then of his daughter.

The occasion under ʿUthman ﵁: the alarm bell of Hudhayfa ﵁

Between the first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁ and the second step under ʿUthman ﵁ lay about eighteen years. In those years the community had expanded with speed. What in 12 AH was a community still dwelling within the borders of Arabia was in 30 AH a community that stretched from the Atlantic edge of Ifriqiya to the borders of Khurasan, from Egypt to Armenia, from the Levant to Sijistan. Soldiers from Medina fought beside soldiers from Kufa, soldiers from Basra beside soldiers from Fustat. Reciters from the school of ʿAbdullah ibn Masʿud ﵁ in Kufa taught differently from reciters from the school of Ubayy ibn Kaʿb ﵁ in Damascus. The seven ahruf, in which the Prophet ﷺ had received the revelation and had permitted the Qur’an to be recited, had begun to grate against one another in these campaigns, for what in the time of the Prophet ﷺ had been a richness of permitted recitations had in the time of the young soldier at the front become an occasion for dispute.

Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman ﵁ was one of the men to whom the Prophet ﷺ had in his lifetime entrusted the knowledge of the hypocrites. He was the man who saw the fitnah before others saw it, the man whom the Caliph ʿUmar ﵁ had for that reason often informed in silence during his lifetime. When he returned to Medina in 25 AH, in the second years of ʿUthman’s Khilafah, from the campaign in Armenia and Azerbaijan, he carried with him a weight that he could not leave alone. In the tents of the soldiers he had heard how the warriors from the Levant and the warriors from Iraq began to accuse one another’s recitation of being wrong. He had heard how a soldier said: My reading is the correct one, yours is not that of the Prophet ﷺ. He had heard how another answered: My reading is that of Ibn Masʿud ﵁, and he learned it from the Prophet ﷺ when you were still a child. He had heard how it came from words to shouts, and he had feared the day on which it would come from shouts to swords.

Suyuti ﵀ does not name this alarm bell explicitly in the chapter on ʿUthman ﵁. He gives the outcome, on page 177, in the short sentence about the two qualities that Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ did not have. But he presupposes the narration that in the broader sources, which Suyuti ﵀ in his work consistently treats as authoritative, is given at length. Hudhayfa ﵁ arrived in Medina, he went directly to the Caliph ﵁, and he placed the matter on the table.

These are the words attributed in the tradition to Hudhayfa ﵁, and they form the occasion for the decision that ʿUthman ﵁ then took. ʿUthman ﵁ had weighed the matter in the same way in which he weighed other matters: not in haste, not one-sidedly, with a council of the senior Sahaba ﵃ in Medina, with the leaves of Hafsah ﵂ at his disposal, and with the knowledge that the first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁ had not been intended for the provinces, and that a second collection, this time for the provinces, was a work that no one before him had taken upon himself.

The commission and the mandate

ʿUthman ﵁ sent a messenger to Hafsah ﵂ in her house in Medina. He asked her to place the leaves she had inherited from her father in his keeping, with the assurance that they would return to her hands after the work. Hafsah ﵂ had the leaves brought. ʿUthman ﵁ assembled a commission. For this commission he chose not one man, but four, and in his choice lay a carefulness that history has since acknowledged.

The first choice was Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁. He was the man who had carried out the first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁. He had been the scribe of the revelation for the Prophet ﷺ. He was the man whom, in a separate narration that Suyuti ﵀ includes in his chapter on ʿUmar ﵁ on page 134, ʿUmar ﵁ described as the most expert among you in the laws of inheritance. He was of the Ansar, he was of Medina, he was of the Khazraj, and his choice made visible that the work stood in continuity with the first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁.

The three other members were of the Quraysh, and their choice was deliberate. ʿAbdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁ was the son of az-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁, the nephew of Khadijah ﵂, the man whose father belonged to the ten to whom the Prophet ﷺ had promised Paradise. Saʿid ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ was of the Banu Umayyah, he was a cousin of ʿUthman ﵁ himself, he was known for the purity of his Arabic recitation, and he would later become governor of Kufa. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn al-Harith ibn Hisham ﵁ was of the Banu Makhzum, a branch of the Quraysh that in the Meccan years had formed the harshest opposition to the Prophet ﷺ but that after the opening of Mecca had produced some of the most steadfast Sahaba ﵃. Three Qurashi, three different branches, three different political backgrounds, and all brought together for one reason: the Qur’an had been revealed in the Qurashi dialect, and when the commission and Zayd ﵁ differed over a recitation, then the judgement of the Qurashi members would be decisive.

ʿUthman ﵁ gave the commission the mandate. The leaves of Hafsah ﵂ would form the basis. Written copies that circulated in other hands would be consulted on points where doubt arose. The criterion for inclusion was not one witness, but two. And when Zayd ﵁ and the three Qurashi disagreed over a recitation, the Qurashi recitation would take precedence, for, as ʿUthman ﵁ gave as his instruction, the Qur’an was sent down in their dialect. The work took place in Medina, it lasted several months, and the result was an authoritative edition of the Qur’an, written in a form that within the seven ahruf chose the dialect of the Quraysh as its standard, and that was intended to serve the provinces as one text across the whole ummah.

The official codex and the distribution

What came forth from the hands of Zayd ﵁ and the three Qurashi was a Mushaf. No draft, no preliminary work, but a finished text that was checked by ʿUthman ﵁ personally. He had several copies made of it, according to the narrations that Suyuti ﵀ presupposes in the broader literature. One copy was kept in Medina, in the keeping of the Caliph ﵁ himself. One copy was sent to Mecca. One copy was sent to Basra. One copy was sent to Kufa. One copy was sent to Damascus. And in some narrations mention is also made of a copy to Bahrain or to the Yemen.

With each copy a reciter was sent along, a man who could convey by his voice to the population of the province the recitation that had been set down in this codex. For a written text alone cannot fix all the nuances of pronunciation and pausing, and the Prophet ﷺ had never transmitted the Qur’an by writing alone; he had transmitted it by oral recitation and by writing together. ʿUthman ﵁ knew this, and he gave each codex a living mouth. Zayd ﵁ went to Medina, others were sent to the provinces, and the names of these reciters have been preserved in the broader literature, for they became in the years that followed the forefathers of the schools of qira’at that have been handed down to our own time.

The burning of the variant leaves

The part of the work that has become most discussed in history was the instruction that ʿUthman ﵁ gave to the provinces and to the townspeople of Medina after the official codex had been distributed. He ordered that all personal written copies and all loose fragments that did not accord with the official codex should be burned. Not out of a lack of respect for what stood in them, and not out of a denial of the seven ahruf, but for one simple reason: as long as several written variants remained in circulation, the dispute that Hudhayfa ﵁ had heard in Armenia could arise anew in every garrison. One Mushaf for the provinces, one written authority, and within it, in the living recitation, room for the permitted readings that fit within the orthography of the codex.

ʿAbdullah ibn Masʿud ﵁ had his own Mushaf in Kufa, and in a first reaction he expressed his displeasure at the instruction. But in the narrations recorded in the literature it is also reported that he ultimately submitted to the decision of the Caliph ﵁, and that he encouraged his students to follow the official Mushaf for the written form, even though in his oral teaching he continued to pass on some of the readings he had learned from the Prophet ﷺ.

Suyuti ﵀ does not name this episode in detail. He gives the outcome on page 179, in his enumeration of the Firsts of ʿUthman ﵁:

Five words in the English of the Clarke translation, and in those five words the whole decision. He was the first to unite people on one manner of recitation. Suyuti ﵀ gives it to us in this concise form. The consequences of that decision extend from the third decade of the Hijra to the third millennium after Christ. Every printed Qur’an that today is opened in a mosque, in a house, in a student at al-Azhar or in a memoriser in Bukhara goes back in the last instance to the codex that Zayd ﵁, ʿAbdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁, Saʿid ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ and ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn al-Harith ﵁ drew up in Medina by the order of ʿUthman ﵁.

The testimony of ʿAli ﵁

One of the narrations frequently cited in the literature, and that Suyuti ﵀ consistently treats as authoritative in his work, concerns the words that ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ later spoke about the Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁. ʿAli ﵁ was himself one of the senior Sahaba ﵃ whose opinion was sought in every great matter. He had been present at the deliberations, he had known the instructions of ʿUthman ﵁, and when, after the murder of ʿUthman ﵁ in the years of the fitnah, people spoke among themselves, ʿAli ﵁ heard that some had criticised the work of ʿUthman ﵁ on the Mushaf. He addressed them with the words that have been preserved by the narrators.

This testimony of ʿAli ﵁ has been preserved in the community as one of the weightiest confirmations. Not because the action of ʿUthman ﵁ needed confirmation in itself, for he was Caliph ﵁ and he had the authority to act in this matter, but because in the years of dispute that would follow, the voice of ʿAli ﵁ was acknowledged by all parties, and his agreement with the work of ʿUthman ﵁ made the official Mushaf uncontested in the whole ummah.

What Suyuti ﵀ sums up in a single page

It is worth placing together what Suyuti ﵀ writes in his work about this whole history, because the breadth of his citations stands in proportion to the breadth of the work they describe. On pages 64–65 he gives the first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁: the dialogue with ʿUmar ﵁, the charge to Zayd ﵁, the search for the Qur’an in fragments and in the breasts, the two verses found solely with Khuzaymah ﵁, the passing of the leaves to Hafsah ﵂. On page 177 he gives the Uthmanic step, in one concise narration of ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Mahdi through Ibn ʿAsakir, that one of Uthman’s distinguishing qualities was the uniting of the people upon a single mushaf. On page 179 he gives the same again, this time as one of the Firsts: the first to unite people on one manner of recitation. Three references, no more, in the whole Tarikh al-Khulafa. And yet these three references are sufficient to confirm the place of the work in the history of the community.

Suyuti ﵀ does not write at length, because the details he does not name were already known in the broader literature in his time. He writes the history of the Khilafah, and he refers to the history of the Qur’an for whoever wishes to look it up in works of its own. It is precisely in this restraint that his reliability counts for us as weightier. He adds nothing, he exaggerates nothing, he does not place the Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ in a legendary light. He names it, he designates it as a quality that the two preceding Caliphs ﵃ did not have, and he leaves it to the broader tradition to preserve the details.

The question of legitimacy and the unity of the ummah

An element that recurs in every consideration of this history, and that is sometimes approached in modern times through a wrong lens, is the question of whether ʿUthman ﵁ changed anything of the Qur’an through his work on the Mushaf. The answer of the tradition is clear, and it is implicitly confirmed by Suyuti ﵀ through his choice of narrations: he changed nothing of the Qur’an. He brought the Qur’an, as it had been transmitted by the Prophet ﷺ, together in one written edition. The seven ahruf, which in the time of the Prophet ﷺ had been permitted as an alleviation for the community, because the tribes of Arabia spoke in different dialects and not all could immediately follow the Qurashi recitation, were in the time of ʿUthman ﵁ no longer needed in their full breadth. The community had spread outward, and the need to be able to recite the text simply within one’s own tribe had passed into the need to be able to recite the text identically in every province. The Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ is precisely that: one written text for the whole ummah, within which the permitted readings that the written form could bear remained, and from which the readings borne only by a few individuals were omitted in the written form.

ʿUthman ﵁ acted in this as Caliph ﵁. He consulted the senior Sahaba ﵃. He appointed a commission consisting of the most competent men of his time. He took the first collection of Abu Bakr ﵁ as a basis. And he distributed the official outcome among the ummah in the knowledge that unity of Book was the first condition for unity of community.

The history after ʿUthman ﵁

What the official Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ brought about, the community has not needed to revise in the fifteen centuries that have since passed. The codices that he sent to Mecca, Medina, Basra, Kufa and Damascus formed the archetype copies from which all later copies were made. Two of these archetype copies, or what has remained of them, are today preserved in museums: a mushaf in the Topkapi in Istanbul, another in Tashkent. Other fragments have been lost in the course of the centuries, others have been preserved in the archives of mosques in the old Muslim world. The scholarship built up around these manuscripts and their textual history is a scholarship in itself.

For whoever wishes to follow the broader scholarly history of the textual transmission, the manuscript tradition and the modern palaeographic studies, see the theme “The History of the Islamic Sciences → The Compilation of the Qur’an”.

The strictly-Suyuti conclusion

What was offered in this article is the political moment in its historical weight. A Caliph ﵁ who answered the alarm bell of a Sahabi ﵁ from the northern front by appointing a commission of four men. A commission that took the first collection of his predecessor Abu Bakr ﵁ as a basis and worked it out into an edition intended for the provinces. A distribution that gave each province its own codex and its own reciter. A burning of variants that safeguarded the unity of written authority. Suyuti ﵀ sums it up on page 177 in eleven words, and on page 179 in ten. We have in this article placed the broader narrations that he presupposes in his work beside the short sentences that he included in the chapter of ʿUthman ﵁. And by this we have, we hope, done justice to the historical stature of a deed that in its brevity in Suyuti ﵀ tells how self-evident the community later regarded it, and in its consequences for history tells how great it was in reality.

In the next article we return to the sea front, to the Lycian coast, to the battle of the masts where the first great naval victory of the ummah against the Byzantine empire was won.