Textual History of the Qur'an: Difference between revisions

A widely transmitted hadith reports that the third caliph Uthman was concerned because there were clear differences in the recitation of the Qur'an among the people of the Sham (modern day Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) and the 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, often called the Qur'anic consonantal text (QCT), which entirely lacked short vowel signs and other diacritics, only optionally marked word-internal long ā with an alif for most words, and only to a very limited used dotting to distinguish homographic 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 occurred 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 name="Jeffery">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>

All but one of the early Quran manuscripts discovered so far have been of the Uthmanic text type (the exception being the lower text of the [[Sana'a Manuscript|Ṣan'ā' 1 manuscript]], which is a palimpsest (codex which was washed and written over) found in Sana'a, Yemen, and which contains variant words and phrases not found in any of the accepted readings of the Qur'an.<ref>"The text does not belong to the 'Uṯmānic textual tradition, making this the only known manuscript of a non-'Uṯmānic text type." Behnam Sadeghi and Uwe Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’ān of the Prophet,” Arabica 57, no. 4 (2010): 343–436. p.343</ref>). However, these manuscripts are not identical. Every early manuscript falls into a small number of regional families (identified by variants in their rasm, or consonantal text), and each moreover contains non-canonical variants in dotting and lettering that can sometimes be traced back to those reported of the Companions.<ref name="Morteza Karimi-Nia">Morteza Karimi-Nia of the Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation, Tehran, says in a paper on the Codex Mashhad manuscript:

The rasm is only part of the story of the textual transmission of the Qur'an. In the earliest Quran manuscripts (and, we can assume, in the fragments originally collected by Zayd), homographic Arabic consonants were only dotted to a limited or sparse extent to distinguish them, which Adam Bursi has found was the typical scribal practice at that time even for Arabic poetry.<ref>Bursi, Adam. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5913/jiqsa.3.2018.a005 Connecting the Dots: Diacritics, Scribal Culture, and the Qurʾān in the First/Seventh Century] Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association, vol. 3, International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2018, pp. 111–157, https://doi.org/10.5913/jiqsa.3.2018.a005.</ref> They also had no marks for short vowels or other diacritics, and marking word-internal long ā with alif was optional for most words. When vocalised manuscripts with vowels and other diacritics start to appear, many (mostly non-canonical) readings are found to be imposed upon the rasm.<ref>See for example comments by leading manuscript expert and linguist Dr. Marijn van Putten [https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1282206245026504704 here] ([https://web.archive.org/web/20200712065515/https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1282206245026504704 archive]), [https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1294253564378976259 here] ([https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1294253564378976259 archive]) and [https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1212824936768778245 here] ([https://web.archive.org/web/20210816162500/https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1212824936768778245 archive])</ref>

As mentioned above, numerous possible oral readings of the Qur'an can be and were imposed upon the Uthmanic rasm (an early stage of Arabic orthography, which entirely lacked short vowel signs and other diacritics, only optionally marked word-internal long ā with an alif for most words, and only to a very limited extent included dotting to distinguish certain consonants). Today we have seven or ten canonical qira'at, which are slightly different early oral recitations or readings of the Qur'an by famous readers. There were once many more qira'at, from which twenty-five were described by Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim ibn Sallam two centuries after Muhammad's death, and restricted to seven after three centuries following a work by Abu Bakr ibn Mujahid (d.936 CE). A further three qira'at were added to the canon many centuries later by Ibn al-Jazari (d.1429 CE) - those of Abu Jafar, Ya'qub and Khalaf. These three had been popular since the time of the seven<ref>Various sized selections of qira'at were published over the centuries. Ibn Mihran (d. 991) was the first to choose the same set of ten. See Christopher Melchert (2008) [https://www.jstor.org/stable/25728289 The Relation of the Ten Readings to One Another] Journal of Qur'anic Studies Vol.10 (2) pp.73-87</ref>, and provide additional variants.<ref>See for example 19:25, 82:9, and 21:104 on [https://corpuscoranicum.org/en/verse-navigator/sura/19/verse/25/variants]</ref> Some scholars regarded them as having a somewhat less reliable transmission status than the seven.<ref>Ahmad 'Ali al Imam (1998), "Variant Readings of the Quran: A critical study of their historical and linguistic origins", Institute of Islamic Thought: Virginia, USA, pp.126-133</ref> Ibn al Jazari lamented that the masses only accepted the seven readings chosen by Ibn Mujahid.<ref>Shady Hekmat Nasser, [https://books.google.com/books?id=Kx7i2Y56WuYC&pg=PA57&dq=aasim+qira%27ah&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=aasim%20qira'ah&f=false ''The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the  Qur'an: The Problem of Tawaatur and the Emergence of Shawaadhdh''], p. 64. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2012.</ref>

The reading of Ibn Amir, which is one of those qira'at containing ḥāmiya instead of ḥamiʾa, is still used in some parts of Yemen, and used to be more widespread.<ref>Leemhuis, F. 2006, 'From Palm Leaves to the Internet' in McAuliffe J. D. (ed.) ''The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.150 [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=F2oLiXT_66EC&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150#v=onepage&q&f=false Google books preview]</ref>. In written form this difference is not just a matter of vowel marks. Even the consonantal text with dots is different, though in the original Uthmanic orthography they may have looked the same due to the limited use of consonantal dotting and alif to mark word-internal long ā at that time. A scan of a printed Qur'an containing the mushaf of Hisham's transmission from Ibn Amir's reading can even be read online and it can be seen that حَامِيَة (warm) is used in verse 18:86<ref>[http://read.kitabklasik.net/2010/12/mushaf-al-quran-al-karim-riwayat-hisyam.html kitabklasik.net] Click one of the links labelled download to view in pdf format and see page 307 of the 630 page pdf</ref>.

|As with most of these examples, the rasm (early stage of Arabic orthography in use at the time of Uthman) is the same in both versions (عِندَ vs عِبَٰدُ), in this case allowing two completely different root words to be read since most early manuscripts barely employed consonantal dotting, entirely lacked short vowels, and marking word-internal long ā with an ʾalif was mostly optional at that time.

In terms of the material evidence, virtually all known manuscripts are of the Uthmanic text type, the oldest of which lack diacritics and therefore limits the ability to identify variants. Early vocalised manuscripts with diacritics tend to mainly involve canonical variants (albeit the reading as a whole is rarely recognisable as belonging to any known reader). However, as noted above, the Sanaa 1 palimpsest is known for having dozens of non-Uthmanic variants similar to those reported of the companions. In addition, a PhD thesis by leading Quranic manuscript expert, Alba Fedeli, describes a few of the very early Mingana collection manuscripts (including the famous Birmingham fragment, which is now known to be actually part of a larger manuscript). This was notable in that most of the recognisable qira'at variants therein complied with the Uthmanic rasm standard, but were mostly not canonical, matching instead variants reported of companions or (more commonly) early non-canonical reciters.<ref>Alba Fedeli (2014). [https://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/5864/1/Fedeli15PhD.pdf EARLY QUR’ĀNIC MANUSCRIPTS, THEIR TEXT, AND THE ALPHONSE MINGANA PAPERS HELD IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM] (PDF) (Ph.D.). Birmingham University. <BR>See the Qira'at sections for the three manuscripts on pp. 170-172, 227-235 and 308-309. These are identifiable mostly from variant consonantal dottings and long vowels, which were considered to comply with the Uthmanic rasm at that time. Short vowels marks were not yet in use at the time of these manuscripts.</ref>

The Uthmanic codex was written in a rasm, which is a "defective" Arabic script, meaning that marking word-internal long ā with an ʾalif was optional for most words, it had no markings for short vowels, and only a limited amount of dotting to distinguish the many different but identically written consonantal letters.