The Burning of the Divergent Codices

The Moment After the Uniting

When, in the previous article, we paused at the official Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁, we placed the labor of Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, ʿAbdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁, Saʿid ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, and ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn al-Harith ﵁ exactly as the community’s tradition has placed it: a work carried out in Medina, by order of the Khalifah ﵁, on the basis of the leaves of Hafsah ﵂, with the Qurayshite dialect as the deciding factor in cases of doubt. It was a work that took the first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁ as its point of departure and developed it into an edition destined for the provinces. What was accomplished in this act was not the writing of a new book, but the binding of the community to a single written copy of the Book it already possessed.

But the work was not completed with the finishing of the official codex. It still required a second step, one that in the years that followed, and down to our own time, has received the most attention in the literature, and that the community remembers as the harder of the two steps. It was the step in which ʿUthman ﵁ ordered that all personal written copies of the Quran and all loose leaves that did not agree with the official Mushaf be burned. This was not out of any lack of respect for what they contained, nor out of any denial of what was recorded in their verses, but for one simple reason, one that in the words of Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman ﵁ had preceded it before ʿUthman ﵁: so long as multiple written variants remained in circulation, the strife he had heard in Armenia and Azerbaijan could arise again in every garrison, in every mosque, in every home.

The Warning of Hudhayfa ﵁, Placed Once More

Suyuti ﵀ does not name the alarm sounded by Hudhayfa ﵁ in the chapter on ʿUthman ﵁. On page 177 he contents himself with the brief statement of ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Mahdi, transmitted by Ibn ʿAsakir, that ʿUthman ﵁ had two qualities that Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ had not possessed: his self-restraint until the moment of his death, and his uniting of the people upon a single written copy. And on page 179, in the Firsts of ʿUthman ﵁, he adds that he was the first to unite the people upon one manner of recitation. But behind these two brief statements lies the broader tradition that Suyuti ﵀ recorded in his earlier chapters on Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁, and that the community has preserved as the unspoken background of the Uthmanic step.

Hudhayfa ﵁ was, as we have already mentioned in the previous article, the man who in his lifetime saw the fitnah before others saw it. He was the Sahabi ﵁ whom the Prophet ﷺ had entrusted during his life with the knowledge of the hypocrites, and whom ʿUmar ﵁ had for that reason often kept informed during his Khilafah. When in 25 AH he returned from the campaign to Armenia and Azerbaijan, he carried with him an observation he could not keep within his breast. In the tents of the soldiers he had heard how the fighters from Damascus and the fighters from Kufa began to accuse one another’s pronunciation of error. He had seen how one soldier said that his reading was that of Ibn Masʿud ﵁, and how another answered that his reading was that of Ubayy ibn Kaʿb ﵁, and how it went from words to shouting. He had feared what might follow, and he had traveled straight to Medina to lay the matter on the table.

These are the words attributed in the tradition to Hudhayfa ﵁, and preserved in history as the direct occasion for the Uthmanic step. ʿUthman ﵁ weighed the matter, he consulted the senior Sahaba ﵃ in Medina, he had the leaves of Hafsah ﵂ brought, and he appointed the committee of four men. And once the official Mushaf was completed, he took a second decision that resembled the first in its weight of principle, but that in its execution would be felt in every province and in every home.

The Order of ʿUthman ﵁

When the committee had completed its work and the official Mushaf lay in finished form before the Khalifah ﵁, ʿUthman ﵁ gave the order to have several copies made of it. He knew that a single written copy in Medina would not be enough to bind the community as a whole, he knew that every large province needed its own codex and its own reciter, and he knew, above all, that the unity of written authority would become reality only when the variants circulating in the provinces could no longer continue to exist alongside the official Mushaf.

One copy was kept in Medina, in the keeping of the Khalifah ﵁ himself, the so-called imam-mushaf. One copy was sent to Mecca, one to Basra, one to Kufa, and one to Damascus. In some traditions mention is also made of a copy sent to Bahrain or to the Yemen. With each copy a reciter was sent, a man who could convey, with his voice, the pronunciation recorded in the codex to the people of the province. Zayd ﵁ did not go; he remained in Medina. Others were sent to the provinces, and their names were preserved in the broader literature as the forefathers of the schools of qira’at.

Then ʿUthman ﵁ gave the second part of his instruction. In Medina, in Mecca, in Kufa, in Basra, in Damascus, and everywhere the community had settled, all personal written copies of the Quran and all loose leaves that did not agree with the official Mushaf were to be burned. No exceptions for the older written copies, no exceptions for the copies in the hands of prominent Sahaba ﵃, and no exceptions for the loose fragments the soldiers carried with them on the campaigns. One Mushaf for the provinces, and everything else away.

The reasoning behind this order was, in the logic of a community that was expanding, clear. The Prophet ﷺ had recited the Quran in the seven ahruf, because the tribes of Arabia spoke in different dialects and not all of them could immediately follow the Qurayshite pronunciation. The seven ahruf had been a relief for the community in the time of revelation. But in 30 AH the community was no longer a collection of Arab tribes in Mecca and Medina, but a community that stretched from Ifriqiya to Khurasan, with soldiers from Iraq beside soldiers from Egypt, with reciters from the school of Ibn Masʿud ﵁ in Kufa beside reciters from the school of Ubayy ﵁ in Damascus. The seven ahruf, in their full breadth of written variants, were no longer a relief in this new situation; they had become an occasion for strife. A single written text that chose the dialect of the Quraysh as its standard, and within which the permitted pronunciations that the orthography of the codex could bear remained alive, was the deliverance for which Hudhayfa ﵁ had asked.

The Reaction of Ibn Masʿud ﵁ in Kufa

The part of the tradition upon which history has commented most concerns the first reaction of ʿAbdullah ibn Masʿud ﵁ in Kufa. He was one of the senior Sahaba ﵃, one of the six to whose judgment the Prophet ﷺ had referred often during his life. He was the man who had memorized the Quran in its entirety early, he had been the teacher of a school of reciters in Kufa that extended from his students into the second and third generation, and he had in Kufa his own written Mushaf, which he had kept over the course of his life, containing some of the permitted pronunciations he had learned directly from the Prophet ﷺ.

When the official Mushaf arrived in Kufa, and with it the order to burn all divergent codices, the first reaction of Ibn Masʿud ﵁ was a reaction of protest. In the traditions included in the broader literature, it is related that he told his students he did not wish to hand over his own Mushaf. He brought forward the direct impulse of his early instruction, he pointed out that he had learned from the Prophet ﷺ himself, and he set the youth of Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ against his own precedence in the community. It was a reaction that was understandable in its emotional intensity, and that the community has understood in its personal background.

But in the same traditions it is also reported that Ibn Masʿud ﵁ in the end submitted to the decision of the Khalifah ﵁. He was too much a Sahabi ﵁ of the kind who regarded obedience to the Khalifah ﵁ as a religious obligation to persist in his protest once it became clear that the decision would not be withdrawn. In his oral teaching he continued to pass on some of the pronunciations he had learned from the Prophet ﷺ; these live on in the qira’at literature as the traditions of Ibn Masʿud ﵁. But in written form the official Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ became the norm in Kufa as well, and by the second and third generation there was no longer, in any province, a written copy in circulation that diverged from the official codex.

Suyuti ﵀ does not mention this episode in detail in his chapter on ʿUthman ﵁. He confines himself to the brief statement on page 177 and the brief statement on page 179. But he presupposes the broader literature, and in the traditions he consistently treats as authoritative in his work, the first reaction of Ibn Masʿud ﵁ and his later assent are described at length.

The Testimony of ʿAli ﵁

A second testimony preserved in the community as one of the weightiest confirmations of the Uthmanic work is that of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁. He had been present at the deliberations in Medina, he had known the instructions of ʿUthman ﵁, he had seen the committee at work, and he had held the official Mushaf in his hands. And when, after the murder of ʿUthman ﵁, people spoke among themselves in the years of the fitnah, and when some had criticized the work of ʿUthman ﵁ upon the Mushaf and the accompanying burning of variants, ʿAli ﵁ addressed them with the words preserved by the transmitters.

These words of ʿAli ﵁ have been placed in the community as the definitive keystone of the discussion. Not because the Khalifah ﵁ needed confirmation in his authority, for he was Khalifah ﵁ and he had the power to act in this matter, but because in the years of strife that would follow, the voice of ʿAli ﵁ was recognized by all parties, and his assent to the work of ʿUthman ﵁ and to the accompanying burning of variants rendered the official Mushaf unassailable throughout the whole ummah. When ʿAli ﵁, with all his nearness to the Prophet ﷺ and with all his knowledge of the revelation, testified that he would have done the same, then there was for the community no longer any ground to doubt the wisdom of the Uthmanic decision.

What the Burning Was Not

It is important, in the modern age, in which the history of the Mushaf is sometimes approached through the lens of a misunderstood philology, to state clearly what the burning of the divergent codices was not. It was not the destruction of revelation, it was not the erasure of what the Prophet ﷺ had transmitted to the community, and it was not an authoritarian act by which a single holder of power imposed his own reading as the correct one. It was, on the contrary, the application of the principle that the unity of written authority was the first condition for the unity of the community, and that the seven ahruf, in their written variants, no longer had in the time of expansion the same usefulness they had had in the time of revelation.

The variants that were burned were not erased in their oral form. The reciters who brought the official Mushaf to the provinces carried at the same time, in their voices, the permitted pronunciations that fit within the orthography of the codex. What in the years that followed would be developed into the seven canonical qira’at of Ibn Mujahid ﵀, and what in the subsequent centuries would be completed into the ten qira’at of Ibn al-Jazari ﵀, was not a loss of what was recorded in the Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁, but an unfolding of it within the boundaries the official codex had set. The Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ added nothing to the Quran and took nothing away from it; it rendered the Quran, in its written form, unchangeable for the whole ummah.

ʿUthman ﵁ himself, as the tradition indicates, laid emphasis in his instructions at the burning upon the reverence with which the divergent leaves were to be handled. They were not thrown away; they were burned. And they were burned because burning was, in Arab custom, the honorable manner of disposing of written copies of sacred texts, in a way that did not expose them to the profanation of refuse or trampling. They were leaves upon which the name of Allah ﷻ and the verses of His Book were written, and they deserved the treatment that accorded with that name.

The Later Reception in the Tradition

In the generations that followed, the community received the Uthmanic step with growing appreciation. What in 30 AH had been a contested decision, one that in Kufa and in other places had at first met resistance, came in the centuries that followed to be seen as one of the works for which ʿUthman ﵁ deserved particular praise. The scholars of the first generations, of the Tabiʿun and their students, recognized the official Mushaf without exception as the written form of the Quran. The scholars of hadith, the scholars of fiqh, the scholars of tafsir, all based their work upon the Mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up the reception of the community in his concise style. On page 177 he speaks not as an analyst of textual history, but as a historian of the Khilafah, and he passes on the brief statement of ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Mahdi through Ibn ʿAsakir: of the two qualities that Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ did not have, the second was his uniting of the people upon a single written copy. On page 179 he places this act in the list of Firsts of ʿUthman ﵁: he was the first to unite the people upon one manner of recitation. In these two brief statements lies the recognition of the community, and in their brevity lies the matter-of-factness with which the community has regarded this appreciation from the second generation onward.

The Question of the Modern Age

In the modern age a science of its own kind has arisen around the Uthmanic step, one concerned with the manuscripts, the paleography, the orthographic peculiarities of the old codices, and the relationship between the official Mushaf and the qira’at literature. For those who wish to follow this broader scholarly history, in its connection with the old manuscripts in Sana’a, in the Topkapi in Istanbul, in Tashkent, and in the British and Egyptian libraries, we refer to the theme “The History of the Islamic Sciences → The Compilation of the Quran”.

What this article has offered is the political and spiritual moment in its historical weight. A Khalifah ﵁ who answered the alarm of a Sahabi ﵁ from the northern front by first appointing a committee of four men, and then by taking the hardest of his decisions: the burning of the existing variants in the provinces, in order to secure the unity of written authority of the Quran for the generations to come. A Sahabi ﵁ in Kufa, Ibn Masʿud ﵁, who at first resisted, and who in the end submitted to the decision. A cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, ʿAli ﵁, who testified that he would have done the same. A community that, in the generations that followed, received the decision with growing appreciation.

The Strictly-Suyuti Close

Suyuti ﵀ does not mention the burning of the variants at length. He gives on page 177 one brief statement about the two qualities that Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ did not have, and on page 179 one brief statement about the Firsts of ʿUthman ﵁. In this brevity lies his reliability: he adds nothing, he exaggerates nothing, and he does not place the Uthmanic step in a legendary light. He names it, and he leaves it to the broader tradition to preserve the details.

What we have done in this article is to place, alongside his brief statements, the broader traditions that Suyuti ﵀ presupposes in his work. We have repeated the words of Hudhayfa ﵁, because without his alarm the Uthmanic step is not intelligible. We have named the first reaction of Ibn Masʿud ﵁ in Kufa, and his later assent. We have transmitted the testimony of ʿAli ﵁, because it has been placed in the community as the keystone of the discussion. And we have explained what the burning was and was not, because in the modern age this act is sometimes spoken of through a false lens.

One Mushaf for the provinces. One written authority. Within it, in the living recitation, room for the permitted pronunciations that fit within the orthography of the codex. That is the inheritance ʿUthman ﵁ left to the community, and that returns in every printed Quran opened today in a mosque, in a home, or in a student.

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.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (translated by Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, London 1995):
  • Pp. 64–65 (first collection under Abu Bakr ﵁; Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁; leaves with Hafsah ﵂)
  • P. 177 (the two qualities that Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ did not have, tradition of ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Mahdi through Ibn ʿAsakir)
  • P. 179 (Firsts of ʿUthman ﵁: the first to unite the people upon one manner of recitation)