Textual History of the Qur'an: Difference between revisions

Multiple sources report that the third caliph Uthman was concerned because there were clear differences in the recitation of the Qur'an among people of Sham and people of Iraq. The differences were so great Uthman and his companions feared future dispute about the true Qur'an and its contents. So Uthman asked Hafsa for her copy so that a committee could write a single version of the rasm (an early stage of Arabic orthography, which lacked diacritics such as short vowel signs and with scarce use of dotting to distinguish certain consonants). Uthman then sent out his official Quranic codex to a small number of important cities and ordered that all other copies and fragments be burned. This occured around 650 CE. During the prior 20 years since Muhammad's death, and for some time afterwards, thousands of variants read by the companions which often did not fit this rasm were in circulation, as documented in hadiths and works such as Ibn Abi Dawud's Kitab al Masahif.<ref>See Jeffery's famous compilation of readings attributed to the companions: Jeffery, Arthur, [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.76212 Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur'an. The old Codices], Leiden, Brill, 1937<BR>Also available [https://www.answering-islam.org/Books/Jeffery/Materials_pd/index.htm here]</ref>