Articles by John Gilchrist
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JAM' AL-QUR'AN:
THE CODIFICATION OF THE QUR'AN TEXT
CONTENTS
Introduction 3
Sources and References 11
1. THE INITIAL COLLECTION OF THE QUR'AN TEXT.
The Qur'an's Development During Muhammad's Lifetime 17
The First Collection of the Qur'an Under Abu Bakr 21
Perspectives on the Initial Collection of the Qur'an 27
The Missing Verses Found with Abu Khuzaimah 31
2. THE UTHMANIC RECENSION OF THE QUR'AN.
Did Abu Bakr's Codex have Official Status? 39
Uthman's Order to Burn the Other Codices 42
The Revision of Zaid's Codex of the Qur'an 51
The Qur'an Text as Standardised by Uthman 55
3. THE CODICES OF IBN MAS'UD AND UBAYY IBN KA'B.
Abdullah ibn Mas'ud: An Authority on the Qur'an Text 60
Ibn Mas'ud's Reaction to Uthman's Decree 62
The Variant Readings in Ibn Mas'ud's Codex 67
Ubayy ibn Ka'b: Master of the Qur'an Reciters 72
4. THE MISSING PASSAGES OF THE QUR'AN.
The Mushaf: An Incomplete Record of the Qur'an Text 79
Al-Naskh wa Al-Mansukh: The Doctrine of Abrogation 82
The Missing Verse on the Insatiable Greed of Man 89
Umar and the Verses of Stoning for Adultery 91
5. SAB'AT-I-AHRUF: THE SEVEN DIFFERENT READINGS.
The Sab'at-i-Ahruf in the Hadith Literature 101
The Period of Ikhtiyar: The "Choice" of Readings 107
Ibn Mujahid's Final Definition of the Seven Ahruf 113
Reflections on the Unification of the Qur'an Text 115
6. THE COMPILATION OF THE QUR'AN IN PERSPECTIVE.
The Qur'an's Testimony to its own Compilation 123
A "Master Copy of the Qur'an" in the Masjid an-Nabi? 129
A review of the History of the Qur'an Text 134
7. THE EARLY SURVIVING QUR'AN MANUSCRIPTS.
The Initial Development of the Written Text 140
Kufic, Mashq, and the Other Early Qur'anic Scripts 143
A Study of the Topkapi and Samarqand Codices 146
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John Gilchrist
Jam' Al-Qur'an
The Codification of the Qur'an Text
A Comprehensive Study of the Original Collection of the
Qur'an Text and the Early Surviving Qur'an Manuscripts
1989
Publisher:
MERCSA
P.O. Box 342
Mondeor, 2110
Republic of South Africa
Reprinted in England by
T.M.F.M.T.
P.O.Box 986
Rowley Regis, Warley
West Midlands B65 9DU
UK
INTRODUCTION
For many centuries Muslims have been taught to believe that
the Qur'an has been preserved in its original Arabic text
right from the time of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, down
to this very day absolutely intact without changes,
deletions or additions of any kind and with no variance in
reading. At the same time they have also been taught that
this suggested textual perfection of the book proves that
the Qur'an must be the Word of God. No one but Allah, it is
claimed, could have preserved the text so well. This
sentiment has become so strongly established in the Muslim
world that one will rarely find a Muslim scholar making a
critical analysis of the early transmission of the text of
the Qur'an and, when such analyses do appear, they are
predictably unwelcome.
What happens, however, when an objective assessment is made
of the facts available to us in respect of the original
compilation of the Qur'an? When sentiment is gently put
aside in favour of a rational evaluation of the evidences a
very different conclusion must be reached. As this book will
show, in the only records available to us from within the
heritage of Islam itself, the Qur'an once contained a number
of verses and, at times, whole passages that are no longer
part of its text, in addition to an astonishingly large
number of different readings in the earliest collections of
the book made before the Caliph Uthman summarily consigned
all but one of the manuscripts then in existence to the
flames and destroyed them.
During 1981, in response to a Muslim publication challenging
the divine authenticity of the Bible, I published a booklet
titled The Textual History of the Qur'an and the Bible.
Whereas the bulk of the material in this publication was
devoted to a refutation of the arguments brought against the
Bible, a portion of it was given to an assessment of the
textual history of the Qur'an to show that the transmission
of the Qur'an text was no more accurate than that of the
Bible. During 1986 two articles appeared in Al-Balaagh, a
local Muslim newspaper, in response to this booklet: one
written by Dr. Kaukab Siddique, an American-based Muslim
scholar, and the other by the South African Muslim scholar
Abdus Samad Abdul Kader. I will refer in more detail to
these articles shortly.
In 1984, after more detailed research into the original
compilation of the Qur'an, I published another booklet
titled Evidences for the Collection of the Qur'an. This also
solicited a Muslim response in the form of a booklet
published in 1987 by the Mujlisul-Ulama of South Africa.
Unfortunately the author does not name himself in this
publication but I have been informed that it was written by
Maulana Desai of Port Elizabeth and will refer to it as his
work.
This book is being written basically as a restatement of the
evidences considered in my earlier publications and my
conclusions therefrom, together with an assessment of the
three responses from the Muslims already referred to and a
refutation of their arguments. One of the difficulties faced
by an author in a situation like this is the sensitiveness
surrounding the subject from the Muslim side. The popular
Muslim sentiment that the divine origin of the Qur'an is
proved by its absolutely perfect transmission leads,
perforce, to the fear that if it can be proved that the
Qur'an was not so transmitted. then its supposed divine
origin must immediately fall to the ground. As a result
Muslim writers cannot come to this subject in a spirit of
objectivity or purely factual enquiry. There is a
determination, a priori, to prove the popular sentiment: the
hypothesis that the text of the Qur'an has been perfectly
preserved. Emotions accordingly run high and it is not
surprising, therefore, to find all three writers unable to
regard me in a scholarly manner or treat my writings purely
at a factual level.
Dr. Kaukab Siddique, right at the beginning of his article
which he titles Quran is NOT Allah's Word says Christian lay
preacher (Al Balaagh, Vol. 11, No. 1, Feb./March 1986),
launches into a rhetorical assault by charging: "Mr.
Gilchrist tries to bring down the mighty edifice of the
Qur'an by using a polemic which is pitifully inadequate to
the task. The method he uses shows the poverty of his
arsenal, and the brazenness of his assault shows that he is
banking for survival on the possibility of a total lack of
knowledge among the Muslims", while the editor of the
magazine, in a heading to the article, describes me as "an
avowed enemy of Islam" who "hopes to dynamite the structure
of Islam".
Mr. Abdus Samad Abdul Kader's article, in the very next
issue of the same magazine, was titled How the Qur'an was
Compiled (Al-Balaagh, Vol. 11, No. 2, May/June 1986). At the
end of the article he describes writers such as myself as
"frenetic foes of the Qur'an" who are motivated solely by
"jealousy, envy, enmity and venom".
Maulana Desai, in the Ulama publication titled The Quraan
Unimpeachable, likewise deems it necessary to revile me and
supplement his arguments with much rhetorical material and
numerous vilifications. He claims I have "set out to
denigrate the authenticity of the Qur'aan Majeed" instead of
adopting a more balanced approach which would have stated
simply that I had ventured to assess the facts about the
Qur'an's compilation. He goes on to speak of my "baseless
assumptions", says in one place "Gilchrist will curse
himself", and elsewhere charges that I suffer from "colossal
ignorance" and "bigotted thinking".
Such emotional outbursts betray the Muslims' fear of a
purely historical study of the Qur'an's compilation lest it
should disprove the supposition that it was both perfectly
collected and preserved. In this book I will confine myself
purely to a study of the extent to which the text of the
Qur'an has been accurately and/or completely transcribed.
The study is purely an assessment of the facts. The issue of
the alleged divine origin of the Qur'an must be determined
by a study of its teaching and contents, it cannot be
resolved through an analysis of the manner in which the text
was originally transmitted. Here the question is purely one
of analysing the extent to which the Qur'an was accurately
transcribed. If Muslim writers such as those I have
mentioned feel that such a study simultaneously undermines
their conviction that the Qur'an is the Word of God (Desai
often accuses me of seeking "to refute the authenticity of
the Qur'aan Shareef"), the problem is theirs for supposing
that a perfect compilation and transmission of the book
would prove its divine origin. I find no need to vilify
these authors in terms such as they use against me as I am
free to assess this subject unemotionally and do not have a
hypothesis or presupposition to maintain. Furthermore I also
have no doubt that, if a book never was the Word of God in
the first place, no amount of proof that it had been
perfectly transcribed would make it the Word of God.
That these authors are all trying to prove a supposition is
obvious from a study of their approach. Each one treats the
compilation of the Qur'an very differently from the others -
Siddique and Desai bluntly contradict each other on numerous
occasions - and yet each endeavours to come to the same
conclusion, namely the Qur'an's supposed textual perfection.
Such an anomaly can only be explained in one way - each one
is determined to end where he began, that is, the
preconceived hypothesis above-mentioned. It will be useful
to record briefly the approach each author takes.
1. Dr. Kaukab Siddique. Siddique takes the traditional
Muslim approach. "One Text - No Variants", a heading of one
section in his article, tells it all. The assumption is that
there has always been only one text of the Qur'an and that
nothing has ever been added to it or omitted from it, and
that there have never been any variant readings of any of
its verses.
The writer has to explain the evidences in the Hadith
records - the only early historical records of any kind in
the heritage of Islam describing how the Qur'an was compiled
- which show that the Caliph Uthman ordered all the Qur'an
manuscripts of his day other than the one in Hafsah's
possession to be burnt because there were differences in the
reading of the Qur'an in the various provinces. Siddique
claims that the differences were purely in the recitation of
the text - an argument used by many Muslims at this point.
In this book we shall see how inadequate and unconvincing
this argument is. Very little is said by Siddique, however,
of those records showing that the Qur'an, as it is today, is
somewhat incomplete.
2. Abdus Samad Abdul Kader. Abdul Kader is one of those
Muslim scholars who prefers to gloss over the awkward
evidences in the Hadith as if they simply did not exist.
There is no mention of them in his article. Instead he seeks
to prove that the Qur'an itself gives sufficient testimony
to its own compilation and the perfection thereof. I will
give separate attention to this argument at the end of the
main section of this book as it does not much affect the
general study.
3. Maulana Desai. Desai, despite his emotional outbursts
against me personally, nevertheless freely admits the
authenticity of virtually all the facts I have recorded. He
acknowledges that there were indeed textual differences in
the early codices of the Qur'an and that a number of
passages once forming part of the Qur'an are no longer
there. In respect of the different readings he leans
exclusively on one hadith which records Muhammad as saying
that the Qur'an originally came from Allah in seven
different forms and he claims that all these variants,
therefore, were actually authorised by Allah and make up the
seven different readings. He has no difficulty in conceding
that Uthman eliminated authentic copies of the Qur'an and
justifies his action as in the interests of obtaining
uniformity in reading. This line of reasoning exposes itself
to serious considerations as we shall see.
In respect of the missing passages, Desai acknowledges their
existence but claims they were lawfully abrogated by Allah
and correctly no longer form part of the Qur'an text. I have
little doubt that this argument will be unpalatable to
apologists like Siddique and Abdul Kader, as will his
admission of the existence of variant readings, yet here I
find myself inclined to commend the maulana as the only one
of the three authors who has the sincerity to admit the
authenticity of the records in the Hadith narrating how the
Qur'an was originally compiled. While I do not find his
arguments convincing, as I will show, I do find his frank
admissions of the facts most refreshing.
This book closes with a brief study of the earliest
manuscripts of the Qur'an which have survived to the present
day. One of the purposes of this study is to determine
whether any of the Qur'ans copied out by Uthman after the
destruction of the other codices still exists. Throughout
this book photographs of early Qur'an manuscripts have been
included and I have sought only to include those of the
greatest antiquity, mostly those which survive from the
second century of Islam before a refined form of Kufic
script came into general use among Qur'anic calligraphers
and duly became the standard form until replaced by the
Naskhi script.
I trust that this book will be a contribution towards a
genuine assessment of the early compilation of the Qur'an
from a study of the evidences at hand. I make no apology for
the extent to which it discounts the popular Muslim
sentiments I have mentioned and, in the hope that it will
not occasion responses of an emotional nature such as those
which came out in reply to my earlier publications, let me
say once again that my purpose is solely to arrive at a
proper and accurate factual conclusion regarding the
Qur'an's historical compilation and that I am not an "avowed
enemy of Islam" possessed with a frenzied desire to
denigrate the Qur'an or disprove its textual authenticity by
any means as some Muslim writers choose to assume.
John Gilchrist 29th January 1989
CHAPTER 1:
THE INITIAL COLLECTION OF THE QUR'AN TEXT
1. THE QUR'AN'S DEVELOPMENT DURING MUHAMMAD'S LIFETIME.
A study of the compilation of the Qur'an text must begin
with the character of the book itself as it was handed down
by Muhammad to his companions during his lifetime. It was
not delivered or, as Muslims believe, revealed all at once.
It came piecemeal over a period of twenty-three years from
the time when Muhammad began to preach in Mecca in 610 AD
until his death at Medina in 632 AD. The Qur'an itself
declares that Allah said to Muhammad: "We have rehearsed it
to you in slow, well-arranged stages, gradually" (Surah
25.32).
Furthermore no chronological record of the sequence of
passages was kept by Muhammad himself or his companions so
that, as each of these began to be collected into an actual
surah (a "chapter"), no thought was given as to theme, order
of deliverance or chronological sequence. It is acknowledged
by all Muslim writers that most of the surahs, especially
the longer ones, are composite texts containing various
passages not necessarily linked to each other in the
sequence in which they were given. As time went on Muhammad
used to say "Put this passage in the surah in which
so-and-so is mentioned", or "Put it in such-and-such a
place" (as -Suyuti, Al Itqan fii Ulum al-Qur'an, p.141).
Thus passages were added to compilations of other passages
already collected together until each of these became a
distinct surah. There is evidence that a number of these
surahs already had their recognised titles during Muhammad's
lifetime, as from the following hadith:
The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) (in fact)
said: Anyone who recites the two verses at the end of Surah
al-Baqara at night, they would suffice for him. ... Abu
Darda reported that Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him)
said: If anyone learns by heart the first ten verses of the
Surah al-Kahf, he will be protected from the Dajal. (Sahih
Muslim, Vol. 2, p.386).
At the same time, however, there is also reason to believe
that there were other surahs to which titles were not
necessarily given by Muhammad, for example Suratul-Ikhlas
(Surah 112), for although Muhammad spoke at some length
about it and said its four verses were the equal of
one-third of the whole Qur'an, he did not mention it by name
(Sahih Muslim, Vol. 2, p.387).
As the Qur'an developed Muhammad's immediate companions took
portions of it down in writing and also committed its
passages to memory. It appears that the memorisation of the
text was the foremost method of recording its contents as
the very word al-Qur'an means "the Recitation" and, from the
very first word delivered to Muhammad when he is said to
have had his initial vision of the angel Jibriil on Mount
Hira, namely Iqra - "Recite!" (Surah 96.1), we can see that
the verbal recitation of its passages was very highly
esteemed and consistently practised. Nevertheless it is to
actual written records of its text that the Qur'an itself
bears witness in the following verse:
It is in honoured scripts (suhufin mukarramatin), exalted,
purified, by the hands of scribes noble and pious. Surah
80.13-16.
There is evidence, further, that even during Muhammad's
early days in Mecca portions of the Qur'an as then delivered
were being reduced to writing. When Umar was still a pagan
he one day struck his sister in her house in Mecca when he
heard her reading a portion of the Qur'an. Upon seeing blood
on her cheek, however, he relented and said "Give me this
sheet which I heard you reading just now so that I may see
just what it is which Muhammad has brought" (Ibn Ishaq,
Sirat Rasulullah, p.156) and, on reading the portion of
Surah 20 which she had been reading, he became a Muslim.
It nonetheless appears that right up to the end of
Muhammad's life the practice of memorisation predominated
over the reduction of the Qur'an to writing and was regarded
as more important. In the Hadith records we read that the
angel Jibril is said to have checked the recitation of the
Qur'an every Ramadan with Muhammad and, in his final year,
checked it with him twice:
Fatima said: "The Prophet (saw) told me secretly, 'Gabriel
used to recite the Qur'an to me and I to him once a year,
but this year he recited the whole Qur'an with me twice. I
don't think but that my death is approaching.'" (Sahih
al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.485).
Some of Muhammad's closest companions devoted themselves to
learning the text of the Qur'an off by heart. These included
the ansari Ubayy ibn Ka'b, Muadh ibn Jabal, Zaid ibn Thabit,
Abu Zaid and Abu ad-Darda (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, pp.
488-489). In addition to these Mujammi ibn Jariyah is said
to have collected all but a few surahs while Abdullah ibn
Mas'ud, one of the muhajirun who had been with Muhammad from
the beginning of his mission in Mecca, had secured more than
ninety of the one hundred and fourteen surahs by himself,
learning the remaining surahs from Mujammi (Ibn Sa'd, Kitab
aI-Tabaqat al-Kabir, Vol. 2, p.457).
Regarding the written materials there are no records as to
exactly how much of the Qur'an was reduced to writing during
the lifetime of Muhammad. There is certainly no evidence to
suggest that anyone had actually compiled the whole text of
the Qur'an into a single manuscript, whether directly under
Muhammad's express authority or otherwise, and from the
information we have about the collection of the Qur'an after
his death (which we shall shortly consider), we must rather
conclude that the Qur'an had never been codified or reduced
to writing in a single text.
Muhammad died suddenly in 632 AD after a short illness and,
with his death, the Qur'an automatically became complete.
There could be no further revelations once its chosen
recipient had departed. While he lived, however, there was
always the possibility that new passages could be added and
it hardly seemed appropriate, therefore, to contemplate
codifying the text into one harmonious whole. Thus it is not
surprising to find that the book was widely scattered in the
memories of men and on various different materials in
writing at the time of Muhammad's decease.
Furthermore we shall see that the Qur'an itself makes
allowance for the abrogation of its texts by Allah and,
during Muhammad's lifetime, the possibility of further
abrogations (in addition to a number of verses which had
already been withdrawn) would likewise preclude the
contemplation of a single text.
Still further, there appear to have been only a few disputes
among the sahaba (Muhammad's "companions", i.e., his
immediate followers) about the text of the Qur'an while
Muhammad lived, unlike those which arose soon after his
demise. All these factors explain the absence of an official
codified text at the time of his death. The possible
abrogation of existing passages, and the probable addition
of further ayat (the Qur'an nowhere declares its own
completeness or that no further revelations could be
expected) prevented any attempt to achieve the result
desired very soon thereafter by his closest companions. It
also appears that new Qur'anic passages were coming with
increasing frequency to Muhammad just before that fateful
day, making the collection of the Qur'an into a single text
at any time all the more improbable.
Narrated Anas bin Malik: Allah sent down his Divine
Inspiration to His Apostle (saw) continuously and abundantly
during the period preceding his death till He took him unto
Him. That was the period of the greatest part of revelation,
and Allah's Apostle (saw) died after that. (Sahih
al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.474).
At the end of the first phase of the Qur'an, therefore, we
find that its contents were widely distributed in the
memories of men and were written down piecemeal on various
materials, but that no single text had been prescribed or
codified for the Muslim community. As-Suyuti states that the
Qur'an, as sent down from Allah in separate stages, had been
completely written down and carefully preserved, but that it
had not been assembled into one single location during the
lifetime of Muhammad (as-Suyuti, Al-Itqan fii Ulum
al-Qur'an, p.96). All of it was said to have been available
in principle - Muhammad's companions had absorbed it to one
extent or another in their memories and it had been written
down on separate materials - while the final order of the
various verses and chapters is also presumed to have been
defined by Muhammad while he was still alive.
2. THE FIRST COLLECTION OF THE QUR'AN UNDER ABU BAKR.
If Muhammad had in fact bequeathed a complete, codified text
of the Qur'an as is claimed by some Muslim writers (e.g.
Abdul Kader - cf. Chapter 6), there would have been no need
for a collection or recension of the text after his death.
Yet, once the primary recipient of the Qur'an had passed
away, it was only logical that a collection should be made
of the whole Qur'an into a single text.
The widely accepted traditional account of the initial
compilation of the Qur'an ascribes the work to Zaid ibn
Thabit, one of the four companions of Muhammad said to have
known the text in its entirety. As we shall see, there is
abundant evidence that other companions also began to
transcribe their own codices of the Qur'an independently of
Zaid shortly after Muhammad's death, but the most
significant undertaking was that of Zaid as it was done
under the authority of Abu Bakr, the first Caliph of Islam,
and it is to this compilation that the Hadith literature
gives the most attention. It also became the standard text
of the Qur'an during the caliphate of Uthman.
Upon Muhammad's death a number of tribes in the outer parts
of the Arabian peninsula reneged from the faith they had
recently adopted, whereupon Abu Bakr sent a large number of
the early Muslims to subdue the revolt forcibly. This
resulted in the Battle of Yamama and a number of Muhammad's
close companions, who had received the Qur'an directly from
him, were killed. What followed is described in this
well-known hadith:
Narrated Zaid bin Thabit: Abu Bakr as-Siddiq sent for me
when the people of Yamama had been killed. Then Abu Bakr
said (to me): "You are a wise young man and we do not have
any suspicion about you, and you used to write the Divine
Inspiration for Allah's Apostle (saw). So you should search
for (the fragmentary scripts of) the Qur'an and collect it
(in one book)". By Allah! If they had ordered me to shift
one of the mountains, it would not have been heavier for me
than this ordering me to collect the Qur'an. Then I said to
Abu Bakr, "How will you do something which Allah's Apostle
(saw) did not do?" Abu Bakr replied "By Allah, it is a good
project". (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.477).
Zaid eventually expressed approval of the idea in principle
after Umar and Abu Bakr had both pressed the need upon him
and agreed to set about collecting the text of the Qur'an
into one book. One thing is quite clear from the narrative -
the collection of the Qur'an is said quite expressly to to
have been something which Allah's Apostle did not do.
Zaid's hesitation about the task, partly occasioned by
Muhammad's own disinterest in codifying the text into a
single unit and partly by the enormity of it, shows that it
was not going to be an easy undertaking. If he was a perfect
hafiz of the Qur'an and knew the whole text off by heart,
nothing excepted, and if a number of the other companions
were also endowed with such outstanding powers of
memorisation, the collection would have been quite simple.
He needed only to write it down out of his own memory and
have the others check it. Desai and others claim that all
the huffaz of the Qur'an among Muhammad's companions all
knew the Qur'an in its entirety to perfection, to the last
word and letter, and Desai himself goes so far as to suggest
that the power of thus retaining the Qur'an in the memory of
those who learnt it by heart was no less than supernaturally
acquired:
The faculty of memory which was divinely bestowed to the
Arabs, was so profound that they were able to memorize
thousands of verses of poetry with relative ease. Thorough
use was thus made of the faculty of memory in the
preservation of the Qur'aan. (Desai, The Quraan
Unimpeachable, p.25).
He goes on to describe the memorising of the Qur'an as "this
divine agency of Hifz" (p.26). If we are to take this
assumption to its logical conclusion, we must conclude that
the collection of the Qur'an would have been the easiest of
tasks. If Zaid and the other qurra (memorisers) each knew,
by divine assistance and purpose, the whole Qur'an to the
last letter without any error or omission - this is the
Muslim hypothesis - we would hardly have found him
responding to the appeal to collect the Qur'an as he did.
Instead of immediately turning to his memory alone he made
an extensive search for the text from a variety of sources:
So I started looking for the Qur'an and collecting it from
(what was written on) palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones,
and also from the men who knew it by heart, till I found the
last verse of Surat at-Tauba (repentance) with Abi Khuzaima
al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than
him. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.478).
We saw earlier that the Qur'an, at the death of Muhammad,
was scattered in the memories of men and on various written
materials. It was to these that the young companion of
Muhammad duly turned when preparing to codify the text into
a single book. The two primary materials, amongst the others
mentioned, were ar-riqa'a - "the parchments" - and sudur
ar-rijal - "the breasts of men" (as-Suyuti, Al-ltqan fii
Ulum al-Qur'an, p.137). He looked not only to human memory
but also to written materials, consulting as many of the
latter as he could find no matter what their origin (i.e.,
white stones, etc.). It was to many companions that he
turned and to all kinds of material upon which fragments of
the Qur'an had been written.
His was not the action of a man believing he had been
divinely endowed with an infallible memory upon which he
could exclusively rely but rather of a careful scribe who
was going to collect the Qur'an from all the possible
sources where it was known to be, from scraps, fragments and
portions. This was the action of a man conscious of the wide
dispersal of the text who would assemble as much of it as he
could to produce as complete and authentic a text as was
humanly possible.
The earliest traditions of Islam make it quite clear that
the search was widespread, though one finds later writers
claiming that all the written materials Zaid is said to have
relied on - the shoulder-blades of animals, parchments,
pieces of leather, etc. - were all found stored in
Muhammad's own household and that they were bound together
to ensure their preservation. Al-Harith al-Muhasabi, in his
book Kitab Fahm as-Sunan, said that Muhammad used to order
that the Qur'an be transcribed and that, whereas it was
indeed in different materials, when Abu Bakr ordered it to
be collected into one text, these materials "were found in
the house of the messenger of Allah (saw) in which the
Qur'an was spread out" (as-Suyuti, Al-ltqan fii Ulum
al-Qur'an, p.137). They were thereafter gathered together
and bound so that nothing could be lost.
The earliest records of Hadith literature, however, make it
quite plain that Zaid conducted a wide search for the
parchments and other materials upon which portions of the
Qur'an had been inscribed. Desai also argues for a more
limited field of research on the part of Zaid to collect the
Qur'an, stating that Zaid was the only companion to be with
Muhammad on the last occasion when Jibril went over the
Qur'an with him (The Quraan Unimpeachable, p.18) and that he
only looked for those pieces of leather and other materials
already mentioned upon which the Qur'an had been written
under "the direct supervision of Rasulullah (saw)" (p.27).
He states that although there were other texts of the Qur'an
available, these had not been written down under Muhammad's
supervision but by his companions relying on their memories.
No evidences or documentation of any kind is given by Desai
to show his sources for all these claims, in particular to
prove that they are based on the earliest records available.
In fact we have already. seen that, in respect of Muhammad's
last recitation of the Qur'an with Jibril, the fact that it
was recited twice by him was a secret divulged only to his
daughter Fatima (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.485). This
would hardly have been a secret if Zaid had been present on
that occasion.
Likewise the earliest records of the collection of the
Qur'an under Abu Bakr make no distinction between portions
of the Qur'an written directly under Muhammad's supervision
and those that were not, nor do they suggest that Zaid
relied on the former alone. As we in due course shall see,
this is a relatively modern interpretation of the research
done by him to maintain the hypothesis that the Qur'an was
perfectly compiled, but one without foundation in the
earliest records.
There are traditions that show that, upon receiving a
portion of the Qur'an, Muhammad would command his scribes
(of whom Zaid was one) to write it down (Sahih al-Bukhari,
Vol. 6, p.481), but there is nothing in the very earliest
works to support the idea that the whole Qur'an, as written
under Muhammad's supervision, was already assembled in his
own home.
There are a number of traditions in the Kitab al-Masahif of
Ibn Abi Dawud which suggest that Abu Bakr was the first to
undertake an actual codification of the text, each of which
reads very similarly to the others and follows this form:
It is reported ... from Ali who said: "May the mercy of
Allah be upon Abu Bakr, the foremost of men to be rewarded
with the collection of the manuscripts, for he was the first
to collect (the text) between (two) covers". (Ibn Abi Dawud,
Kitab al-Masahif, p.5).
Even here, however, we find clear evidence that there were
others who preceded him in collecting the Qur'an texts into
a single written codex:
It is reported ... from Ibn Buraidah who said: "The first of
those to collect the Qur'an into a mushaf (codex) was Salim,
the freed slave of Abu Hudhaifah". (as-Suyuti, Al-Itqan fii
Ulum al-Qur'an, p.135).
This Salim is one of only four men whom Muhammad recommended
from whom the Qur'an should be learnt (Sahih al-Bukhari,
Vol. 5, p.96) and he was one of the qurra (reciters) killed
at the Battle of Yamama. As it was only after this battle
that Abu Bakr set out to collect the Qur'an into a single
text as well, it goes without saying that Salim's
codification of the text must have preceded his through Zaid
ibn Thabit.
3. PERSPECTIVES ON THE INITIAL COLLECTION OF THE QUR'AN.
At this stage we have a clear trend emerging. Official
tradition focuses on the collection of the Qur'an by Abu
Bakr as the first, foremost and, at times, only compilation
of the text made upon Muhammad's death. Later writers have
endeavoured to strengthen this view by suggesting that Zaid
was the only man qualified for the task, that the whole
Qur'an, no matter in what form, was found in Muhammad's
apartments, and that it was to written portions inscribed
under Muhammad's supervision alone that the redactor turned
to compile his codex. Contemporary Muslim opinion goes even
further to claim that the Qur'an, as thus compiled, is an
exact record with not so much as a dot, letter or word added
or lost - of the script as it was delivered to Muhammad.
On the other hand an objective analysis of the initial
collection of the Qur'an, based on a rational assessment of
the evidences without regard to sentiment or presupposition,
can only go so far as to conclude that the text as compiled
by Zaid, which later became the model for Uthman's
standardised text, was simply the final product of an honest
attempt to collect the Qur'an insofar as the redactor was
able to do so from a wide variety of materials and sources
upon which he was obliged to rely.
It is the very character of these sources that we should at
this stage assess and reconsider. Zaid relied on the
memories of men and various written materials. No matter how
much those early companions sought to memorise the text
perfectly, human memory is a fallible source, and, to the
extent that a book the length of the Qur'an had been
committed to memory, we should expect to find a number of
variant readings in the text. As we shall shortly see, this
anticipation proves to be well-founded.
The reliance on a host of portions of the Qur'an scattered
among a number of companions must also lead to certain
logical expectations. There exists a clear possibility that
portions of the text may have been lost - the loose
distribution of the whole text in many fragments and
portions as opposed to a carefully maintained single text is
adequate ground to make such an assumption and, as we shall
see, the expectation again proves to be well-founded when
the evidences are considered and assessed.
A typical example worth quoting at this point is found in
the following hadith which plainly states that portions of
the Qur'an were irretrievably lost in the Battle of Yamama
when many of the companions of Muhammad who had memorised
the text had perished:
Many (of the passages) of the Qur'an that were sent down
were known by those who died on the day of Yamama ... but
they were not known (by those who) survived them, nor were
they written down, nor had Abu Bakr, Umar or Uthman (by that
time) collected the Qur'an, nor were they found with even
one (person) after them. (Ibn Abi Dawud, Kitab al-Masahif,
p.23).
The negative impact of this passage can hardly be missed:
lam ya'alam - "not known", lam yuktab - "not written down",
lam yuwjad - "not found", a threefold emphasis on the fact
that these portions of the Qur'an which had gone down with
the qurra who had died at Yamama had been lost forever and
could not be recovered.
The very fact of such a wide distribution of the Qur'an
texts, however, appears to negate the possibility that
anyone could have added anything to the text after
Muhammad's death. Not being collected into a single text but
spread among many companions, there exists a strong
possibility that some of the text may have been lost, but at
the same time there appears to be no such possibility that
it could have been interpolated in any way. The retention of
so much of the Qur'an in the memories of Muhammad's
companions is a sure guarantee that no one could have added
to it in any way and gained acceptance for his innovations.
Lastly, in considering the sources, we should not be
surprised to find that other codices of the Qur'an text were
being compiled in addition to that being executed by Zaid.
Once again we look to the evidence that a number of
companions had an extensive knowledge of the Qur'an and it
is only to be expected that these would soon seek to
preserve, in single codices, what was at that time still
fresh in their memories and loosely transcribed on a
selection of different materials. Once again we shall find
our expectations fulfilled and will discover that the
evidences strongly support the conclusions one would draw
naturally about the compilation of a book such as the Qur'an
rather than the hypothesis that the book was divinely
preserved, to the last dot and letter, without loss or
variation.
The possibility that part of the text may have been lost is
strengthened by evidences in the Hadith literature which
show that even Muhammad himself occasionally forgot portions
of the Qur'an. One of these traditions reads as follows and
is taken from one of the earliest works of Hadith:
Aishah said: A man got up (for prayer) at night, he read the
Qur'an and raised his voice in reading. When morning came,
the Apostle of Allah (saw) said: May Allah have mercy on
so-and-so! Last night he reminded me a number of verses I
was about to forget. (Sunan Abu Dawud, Vol. 3, p.1114).
The translator has a footnote to this tradition, stating
that Muhammad had not forgotten these verses of his own
accord but had been made to forget them by Allah as a
teaching for the Muslims. Whatever the purpose or cause, it
is quite clear that Muhammad had occasion to forget passages
that had been, as he proclaimed, revealed to him. The
suggestion that Muhammad's oversight of such texts was not
of his own doing but brought about through Allah's decree is
based on the following text of the Qur'an:
None of our revelations (ayat) do We abrogate or cause to be
forgotten (nunsihaa) but We substitute something similar or
better. Knowest thou not that Allah has power over all
things? Surah 2.106
The word ayat is the word consistently used in the Qur'an
for its own texts and the word nunsihaa comes from the root
word nasiya which, wherever it appears in the Qur'an (as it
does some forty-five times in its various forms), always
carries the meaning "to forget".
Let us conclude this section. Zaid, quite obviously one of
the companions of Muhammad who had an outstanding knowledge
of the Qur'an, set about collecting its text so as to
produce as genuine and authentic a codex as he possibly
could. His integrity in this undertaking is not to be
questioned and we may accordingly deduce from all the
evidences he consulted that the single Qur'an text he
finally presented to Abu Bakr was a basically authentic
record of the verses and suras as they were preserved in the
memories of the reciters and in writing upon various
materials.
The evidences, however, do not support the modern hypothesis
that the Qur'an, as it is today, is an exact replica of the
original, nothing lost or varied. There is no evidence of
any interpolation in the text and such a suggestion
(occasionally made by Western writers) can be easily
discounted, but there are ample evidences to indicate that
the Qur'an was incomplete when it was transcribed into a
single text (as we have already seen) and that many of its
passages and verses were transmitted in different forms. In
the course of this book we shall give more detailed
consideration to these evidences and their implications.
4. THE MISSING VERSES FOUND WITH ABU KHUZAIMAH.
Before closing our study on the collection of the Qur'an
during the caliphate of Abu Bakr it is important to study
the brief mention made by Zaid of the two verses which he
said he found only with Abu Khuzaimah al-Ansari. The full
text of the hadith on this subject reads as follows:
I found the last verse of Surat at-Tauba (Repentance) with
Abi Khuzaima al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody
other than him. The verse is: 'Verily there has come to you
an Apostle from amongst yourselves. It grieves him that you
should receive any injury or difficulty ... (till the end of
Bara'a)'. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p.478).
Insofar as the text speaks for itself without further
enquiry, we can see quite plainly that, in his search for
the Qur'an, Zaid was dependent on one source alone for the
last two verses of Surat at-Tauba. At face value this
evidence suggests that no one else knew these verses and
that, had they not been found with Abu Khuzaimah, they would
have been omitted from the Qur'an text. The incident
suggests immediately that, far from there being numerous
huffaz who knew the whole Qur'an off by heart to the last
letter, it was, in fact, so widely spread that some passages
were only known to a few of the companions - in this case,
only one.
This ex facie interpretation of the narrative naturally
undermines the popular sentiment among Muslims of later
generations that the Qur'an was preserved intact because its
contents were all known perfectly by all the sahaba of
Muhammad who had undertaken to memorise it. A more
convenient explanation for the hadith had to be found and we
find it expressed in the following quotation from Desai's
booklet:
The meaning of the above statement of Hadhrat Zaid should
now be very clear that among those who had written the
verses under the direct command and supervision of
Rasulullah (sallallahu alayhi wasallam), Khuzaimah was the
only person from whom he (Zaid) found the last two verses of
Surah Baraa-ah written. (Desai, The Quraan Unimpeachable,
p.20).
Although the hadith as recorded by al-Bukhari makes no
mention of this, Desai claims that the statement that Abu
Khuzaima alone had the last two verses of Surat at-Tauba
(Bara'a) means that he was in fact the only one who had them
in writing under Muhammad's direct supervision. He goes on
to say:
It was known beyond the slightest shadow of doubt that these
two verses were part of the Qur'aan. Hundreds of Sahaabah
knew the verses from memory. Furthermore, those Sahaabah who
had in their possession the complete recording of the
Qur'aan in writing also had these particular verses in their
written records. But, as far as having written them under
the direct supervision of Rasulullah (sallallahu alayhi
wasallam) was concerned, only Abu Khuzaimah (radhiallahu
anhu) had these verses. (Desai, The Quraan Unimpeachable,
p.21).
The maulana gives no evidences whatsoever in support of
these statements. Nowhere in the earliest records of the
Hadith literature is there any suggestion that hundreds of
Muhammad's companions knew these verses and that others had
them in writing, and that what Zaid intended to say was that
Abu Khuzaima alone had them in writing directly from
Muhammad. Desai's omission of any documentation for his
statement is, in the circumstances, most significant.
Siddique, in his article in Al-Balaagh (p.2), also claims
that when Zaid said "I could not find a verse" he actually
meant he could not find it in writing. As said before, there
is nothing in the hadith text itself to yield such an
interpretation. From what source, then, do these learned
authors obtain this view? It is derived from the following
extract which is taken from the Fath al-Baari fii Sharh
al-Bukhari of Ahmad ibn Ali ibn Muhammad al-Asqalani ibn
Hajar, the translation appearing in Burton's The Collection
of the Qur'an on pages 127 and 128:
It does not follow from Zaid's saying that he had failed to
find the aya from surat al Tawba in the possession of anyone
else, that at that time it was not mutawatira among those
who had learnt their Qur'an from the Companions, but had not
heard it direct from the Prophet. What Zaid was seeking was
the evidence of those who had their Qur'an texts direct from
the Prophet. ... The correct interpretation of Zaid's remark
that he had failed to find the aya with anyone else is that
he had failed to find it in writing, not that he had failed
to find those who bore it in their memories. (Fath al-Baari,
Vol. 9, p.12).
The source from which Desai and Siddique derive their
opinions is not from the earliest records of the compilation
of the Qur'an but a much later commentary on the Sahih
al-Bukhari done by the famous Muslim author al-Asqalani ibn
Hajar who was born in 773 A.H. (1372 A.D.) and died in 852
A.H. The earliest source for the interpretation that Zaid
was looking for the verses only in authorised written
sources thus dates no less than eight centuries after
Muhammad's death by which time, as is the case to this day,
it had become fashionable to hold the view that the Qur'an
had been widely known to perfection by all the companions of
Muhammad who had memorised it. It is, therefore, a
convenient interpretation read into the text of the hadith
to sustain a more recent supposition. There is nothing in
the text of the hadith itself, however, to support this
interpretation. The extract continues with some very
interesting comments:
Besides, it is probable that when Zaid found it with Abu
Khuzaima the other companions recalled having heard it. Zaid
himself certainly recalled that he had heard it. (Fath
al-Baari, op.cit.).
While Desai boldly states that it was known "beyond the
slightest shadow of doubt" that the last two verses of Surat
at-Tauba were part of the Qur'an and that they were known by
"hundreds of Sahaabah" in their memories and by others who
had recorded them in writing, his source only goes so far as
to suggest that it is "probable" that when Zaid produced
them from Abu Khuzaima, the other companions recalled having
heard them. A cautious suggestion that the others may have
recalled having heard the verses has been transformed by
Desai into a bold declaration that they were known by
hundreds of them without the aid of recollection "beyond the
slightest shadow of doubt".
Here is clear evidence that modern Muslim writers are out to
establish a cherished hypothesis - the unquestionable
perfection of the Qur'an text - instead of objectively
assessing the factual evidences as they stand. Desai's
source is only a comparatively recent work of interpretation
and yet, even here, he cannot resist the temptation to
expand it into wholesale allegations of fact.
Ibn Hajar goes on, on the same page, to say "al-Da'udi
commented that Abu Khuzaima was not the sole witness. Zaid
knew the verse. It was thus attested by two men", an
indication that it was believed by other Muslim scholars
that Zaid's statement was not to be manipulated into a claim
that the verses were not found in writing but should rather
be given its obvious meaning, namely, that no one else knew
these verses at all.
What makes the convenient claims of Ibn Hajar, as repeated
by Desai and Siddique, even less acceptable is the fact that
there is a record in one of the very earliest works of
tradition showing in greater detail what Zaid's statement
really meant. The narrative reads:
Khuzaimah ibn Thabit said: "I see you have overlooked (two)
verses and have not written them". They said "And which are
they?" He replied "I had it directly (tilqiyya -
'automatically, spontaneously') from the messenger of Allah
(saw) (Surah 9, ayah 128): 'There has come to you a
messenger from yourselves. It grieves him that you should
perish, he is very concerned about you : to the believers he
is kind and merciful', to the end of the surah". Uthman said
"I bear witness that these verses are from Allah". (Ibn Abi
Dawud, Kitab al-Masahif, p.11).
This narrative implies that the incident took place during
Uthman's reign and not at the time of the collection of the
Qur'an under Abu Bakr, but it is clearly the same event that
is under consideration. (Siddique in fact states that the
records showing that Zaid also missed a verse at the time of
the recension of the Qur'an under Uthman actually apply to
the last two verses of Surat at-Tauba. We shall say more on
this when discussing Uthman's recension shortly).
The significant feature of this narrative is that Zaid and
the others are said to have missed these verses completely
when transcribing the Qur'an. In fact the statement that
Zaid only found them with Abu Khuzaima is hare stated to
mean that it was only on the latter's initiative that the
verses were recorded at all. He found it necessary to draw
the compiler's attention to them - it was not Zaid's search
for two verses he already knew that occasioned their
inclusion. In fact the text goes on to say that Abu Khuzaima
was asked where they should be inserted in the Qur'an and he
suggested they be added to the last part of the Qur'an to be
revealed, namely the close of Surat at-Tauba (Bara'a in the
text).
When one considers this tradition with the relevant hadith
in the Sahih al-Bukhari, certain facts cannot be avoided.
The verses were missed completely, they were only recalled
and thereafter included upon Abu Khuzaimah's initiative, and
it was left to him to advise where they should be included.
It is only by taking the word tilqiyya ("directly") to mean
that he was the only companion who had these verses in
writing under Muhammad's supervision that Muslim writers
have been able to sustain the hypothesis that the verses
were known to many of Muhammad's companions. It is surely
quite obvious, however, that the word tilqiyya was used by
Abu Khuzaima purely in the sense that he had the verses
first-hand from Muhammad, thereby justifying their
inclusion. What he was really saying was that he had not
learnt them from a secondary source but from Muhammad
himself and, therefore, they had to be included in the
Qur'an. There is no warrant for the interpretation that he
alone had them in writing under Muhammad's authority.
This convenient interpretation, in any event, goes right
against the contents and implications of the narratives. If
the verses had been well-known, Zaid would hardly have
overlooked them. It was precisely because they were not
known or remembered that Abu Khuzaima was obliged to point
out the oversight. One cannot help asking these modern
Muslim authors, on the basis of their own interpretation,
whether Zaid would have included these verses in his
redaction of the Qur'an if they had not been found "in
writing under Muhammad's supervision" even though they were
supposedly known in the memories of hundreds of the sahaba
and were recorded In writing from other sources.
Our study shows that the collection of the Qur'an by Zaid
under Abu Bakr was a gathering together of the texts of the
Qur'an from widely divergent sources and materials where the
Qur'an was scattered, so divergent that at the Battle of
Yamama some passages were irretrievably lost and, in another
case, only one of Muhammad's companions was aware of the
text. "I searched for the Qur'an", Zaid declared, indicating
that he did not expect to find all the texts of the book in
the memory of any one man or on written materials in any one
place.
The Qur'an thus compiled was the product of a widespread
search for what was known in the memories of many men and
had been inscribed upon various materials. This type of
source-material hardly supports the notion and claim that
the Qur'an, as eventually collected, was perfect to the last
dot and letter. The Muslim hypothesis is the product of
wishful sentiment, it is not based on an objective and
realistic assessment of the facts contained in the earliest
historical records of the initial collection of the Qur'an.
SOURCES AND REFERENCES
This book is dependent on a variety of works and it would
appear appropriate to categorise them according to their
particular relevance to the subject at hand, whether primary
or secondary, and whether historical or of contemporary
origin. Apart from the Qur'an itself, which gives some
evidence as to the manner in which it was being assembled
during the lifetime of Muhammad, the immediate historical
sources for the collection of its text thereafter are found
in the early Sirat and Hadith literature. Thereafter other
works from later periods, compiled by prominent Muslim
historians, give further perspectives on the compilation of
the Qur'an text. The sources consulted are:
1. Sirat Literature.
The very earliest works recording details of the Qur'an's
compilation are found in the following three biographies
which are known as the Sirat literature:
Muhammad ibn Ishaq. Sirat Rasul Allah. (translated into
English by A. Guillaume), Oxford University Press, Karachi,
Pakistan. 1978 (1955).
Muhammad ibn Sa'd. Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir. (translated
into English by S. Moinul Haq), 2 volumes, Pakistan
Historical Society, Karachi, Pakistan. 1972.
Muhammad ibn Umar al-Waqidi. Kitab al-Maghazi. 3 volumes,
Oxford University Press, London, England. 1966.
2. Hadith Literature.
The second collection of traditions and historical records
of Muhammad's life and the compilation of the Qur'an is
known as the Hadith literature, and among Muslim historians
these are regarded as the most reliable and second only to
the Qur'an in authority. The following works have been
consulted:
Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari.
(translated by Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan), 9 volumes, Kazi
Publications, Chicago, United States of America. 1979
(1976).
Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Sahih Muslim. (translated by Abdul
Hamid Siddique), 4 volumes, Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Lahore,
Pakistan. 1972.
Sulaiman Abu Dawud. Sunan Abu Dawud. (translated from Kitab
as-Sunan by Prof. Ahmad Hasan), 3 volumes, Sh. Muhammad
Ashraf, Lahore, Pakistan. 1984.
Abu Isa Muhammad at-Tirmithi. Al-Jami as-Sahih. (edited by
A.M. Sakir), 5 volumes, Beirut, Lebanon, n.d. (Cairo, 1938).
Malik ibn Anas. Muwatta Imam Malik. (translated from Kitab
al-Muwatta by Prof. Muhammad Rahimuddin), Sh. Muhammad
Ashraf, Lahore, Pakistan. 1980.
Abu Bakr Ahmad al-Baihaqi. As-Sunan al-Kubra. 10 volumes,
Beirut, Lebanon, n.d. (Hyderabad, 1926-1936).
3. Tafsir Literature.
In the period succeeding the above-mentioned initial records
a number of Tafsir works, being commentaries on the Qur'an,
were written by prominent Muslim historians. The most famous
was the Jami al-Bayan fii Tafsir al Qur'aan by Abu Jafar
Muhammad at-Tabari. It is referred to only through
references obtained from modern works.
Although at-Tabari's work was intended to be predominantly
an exegesis of the Qur'an, there is much material dealing
with the early compilation of the text itself. Many of the
other commentaries did the same.
Two further records directly consulted in the preparation of
this book which are not in the Tafsir mould but which deal
considerably with the collection of the Qur'an text are:
Abdallah ibn Sulaiman ibn al-Ash'ath Abu Bakr ibn Abi Dawud.
Kitab al-Masahif. E.J. Brill, Leiden, Holland. 1937.
Jalaluddin al-Khudairi ash-Shafi'i as-Suyuti. Al-Itqan fii
Ulum al-Qur'an. Biblio Verlag, Osnabrueck, Germany. 1980.
(Reprint of the Calcutta edition of 1852-1854). 2 volumes.
The only manuscript of Ibn Abi Dawud's Kitab al-Masahif
known to have survived now lies in the Zahiriya Library at
Damascus. From this two further manuscripts were copied from
one of which Arthur Jeffery was able to reprint the full
text in his Materials for the History of the Text of the
Qur'an (see infra) and it is this text which is referred to
in this book.
4. Contemporary Books on the Qur'an.
A number of modern writings have given attention to the
collection of the Qur'an of which the following deal
exclusively, or at least considerably, with the subject at
hand:
Beeston, A.F.L. & others. Arabic Literature to the End of
the Umayyad Period. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
England. 1983.
Burton, J. The Collection of the Qur'an. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, England. 1977.
Jeffery, A. Materials for the History of the Text of the
Qur'an. AMS Press, New York, United States of America. 1975.
(E.J. Brill, 1937).
Jeffery, A. The Qur'an as Scripture. Books for Libraries,
New York, USA. 1980 (1952).
Nvldeke, T. Geschichte des Qorans. Georg Olms Verlag,
Hildesheim, Germany. 1981 (1909).
Von Denffer, A. 'Ulum al-Qur'an: An Introduction to the
Sciences of the Qur'an. The Islamic Foundation, Leicester,
England. 1983.
Watt, W.M. Bell's Introduction to the Qur'an. Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh, Scotland. 1970.
The Geschichte des Qorans was originally published in three
volumes and it is only the second and third volumes which
are relevant to the actual collection of the Qur'an text.
The second volume, titled Die Sammlung des Qorans and
written by Noeldeke and Schwally, deals with the collection
itself while the third volume, titled Die Geschichte des
Korantexts, written by Bergstrasser and Pretzl, deals with
the written text of the Qur'an and its variant readings.
Both volumes consider at some length the famous codices of
Abdullah ibn Mas'ud and Ubayy ibn Ka'b which were destroyed
by order of the Caliph Uthman because they varied
considerably with the text which he standardised as the
textus receptus of the Qur'an which is that which has come
down through the history of Islam to the present day.
5. Articles on the Compilation of the Qur'an.
The following articles have also been consulted from The
Muslim World, published by the Hartford Seminary Foundation
in the United States of America. The references here are all
to the reprint volumes done by the Kraus Reprint
Corporation, New York, in 1966. The articles dealing with
the compilation of the Qur'an and the early Qur'an
manuscripts are:
Caetani, L. Uthman and the Recension of the Koran. Volume 5,
p.380. (1915).
Jeffery, A. Abu Ubaid on Verses Missing from the Qur'an.
Volume 28, p.61. (1938).
Jeffery, A. Progress in the Study of the Qur'an Text. Volume
25. p.4. (1935).
Margoliouth, D.S. Textual Variations of the Koran. Volume
15, p.334. (1925).
Mendelsohn, I. The Columbia University Copy of the Samarqand
Kufic Qur'an. Volume 30, p.375. (1940).
Mingana, A. The Transmission of the Koran. Volume 7, p.223.
(1917).
In addition to these works reference will constantly be made
to the following works published in South Africa and which
are referred to in the Introduction:
Abdul Kader, A.S. How the Quran was Compiled. Al-Balaagh,
Vol. 11, No.2, Johannesburg, South Africa, May/June 1986.
Desai, Maulana. The Quraan Unimpeachable. Mujlisul Ulama of
South Africa, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. May 1987.
Siddique, Dr. Kaukab. Quran is NOT Allah's Word says
Christian Lay Preacher. Al-Balaagh, Vol. 11, No. 1,
Johannesburg, South Africa. February/March 1986.
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Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 01:46:13 -0500
From: "Peter" <avalon@centrin.net.id>
Reply-To: diskusi-sara@mbe.ece.wisc.edu
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