by

Sr. Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood

(Edited from an extract from her book ‘Islam’ - Hodder and Stoughton, new edition 2006. One of the best sellers in the well-known Teach Yourself series. (ISBN: 0340 928 131)

The Qur’an was revealed to the Prophet bit by bit over a period of some twenty-three years. Muslims believe that it is the Word of Allah, exactly as the Prophet received it, and in this sense it is different from any other of the world’s holy books, since they were all created by human authors many years after the deaths of the prophets involved, and were then edited and revised and added to by disciples. The Qur’an contains nothing but the direct revelations from Allah, through the angel Jibril, not one word of it being the creation of the Prophet . He was nothing more than the transmitter. (The Prophet’s own teachings and sayings run into many thousands and are known as hadiths.)

As each revelation was given, the verses were learnt by heart and jotted down on whatever materials came to hand – dried-out palm leaves, pieces of broken pottery, ribs and shoulder bones of sheep, bits of animal skin and flat stones

Example created by Sr. Ruqaiyyah (not an original)

A single verse is known as an ayah (plural ayat, meaning ‘signs’), and a chapter is a surah (a step up). There are 114 surahs of varying lengths (all except the ninth beginning with the words ‘In the Name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful’), and 6,616 ayat – a total of 78,000 words in Arabic.

The surahs are not in chronological order, however. It is generally accepted that the first words are in surah 96:1–5 and the final words are in surah 5. The order was also something revealed to the Prophet , who had to recite the whole collection revealed so far to the angel every Ramadan, and the entire text was checked with the angel twice, shortly before the Prophet died.

The first surah is called al-Fatihah (the Opening). Each surah is named after some striking incident or word in it, so some have strange names like al-Baqarah (the Cow) and al-Ankabut (the Spider). Others have names of Allah, for example, al-Nur (the Light), al-Rahman (the Merciful). The Cow is actually about religious duties, divorce laws and rules governing fair conduct of war.

Compiled as a book

Islam began at a time when books were the property of only the rich, and people had the habit of learning a great deal by heart. Anyone who knew the full text of the Qur’an was known as a hafiz (plural huffaz).

The Prophet , whose own dialect was Quraysh, had seen that people of other tribes had difficulty, and had obtained permission from Allah to allow the Qur’an to be recited in all the seven chief dialects of Arabia - Quraysh, Tayy, Hawazin, Yaman, Saqif, Huzail and Banu Tamim. He told Ibn Abbas that ‘Jibril taught me to recite Qur'an in one dialect, and when I recited it he taught me to recite it in another dialect, and so on until the number of dialects increased to seven.’ (Mishkit, book ii. ch. ii.)

After the Prophet’s death, Abu Bakr, requested the Prophet’s companion Zayd ibn Thabit to put together the first complete written version in one Book. Zayd had been the Prophet’s secretary from the age of twelve. He was reluctant to do something the Prophet had not authorized, but was eventually persuaded, and gathered the text ‘from the leaves of the date, and white stones, and the breasts of people that remembered it’.

He did not alter the messages in any way; no explanations or editorial comments were added. The pages of this text were kept by Abu Bakr, passed to Umar, and then to his daughter, Hafsah the Prophet’s widow, and were known as the mushaf of Hafsah.

However, Arabs continued to recite the Qur’an in their own dialects until the reign of Caliph Uthman, some twenty years after the Prophet’s death, when those differences of reading were prohibited.

Many of the original huffaz had been slain in battle, and Muslims were now beginning to write down verses in their dialects, and this brought with it a danger of personal inter­pretation, misinterpretation, and alternative versions (qira'ah). Uthman realized the danger of the Revelation being corrupted, since all translations and editions were dependent upon the skills of the translator or editor; so in 651 he ordered that all texts which individuals owned were either checked for full agreement against Hafsah’s text, or destroyed. It caused sadness – Ibn Mas’ud’s codex, for example, had been highly prized in Kufa – but the scholars all agreed to destroy it.

Uthman had six copies of this ‘standard’ text inscribed on the specially prepared skins of sacrificed goats. He kept one text for himself and sent the others to the chief Muslim centers – Makkah, Madinah, Kufa, Damascus, Cairo, and Sana’. Since then all texts have been identical, and handed down to us unaltered; and there is probably no other book in the world which has remained twelve centuries with so pure a text.

If non-Arabic-speaking Muslims wish to read the Qur’an translated into their own languages, it is best done with the original Arabic alongside. Muslim scholars all try to master Arabic, and those with no Arabic usually refer to several translations.

Calligraphy means ‘beautiful writing’. The early scribes concentrated on finding styles worthy of the words they were putting down.

The master writers believed that a person’s handwriting revealed their inner character and nature, so only a spiritually pure person should attempt the task.

The first hand-written Qur’ans had no artwork, because the scribes believed it was wrong to make representations of heavenly (or even human) beings; and they did not wish people to pay attention to the decoration rather than the content of the verses.

Later, the wealthy sultans commissioned lavish and colourful Qur’ans resplendent in gold, green, red and blue. A superb Qur'an in gold script on blue vellum survives almost intact from Kairouan in Tunisia where it was originally inscribed in the late ninth or early tenth century. The bulk of it is preserved in the National Library of Tunisia in the city (a number of leaves removed from it are to be found in other public libraries and private collections).

The earliest scripts used in Arabic calligraphy in the Hijaz are the al-Ma’il (or ‘slanting’) and the Mashq (or ‘extended’). The most famous scripts are Kufic (from the Islamic centre at Kufah) and Naskhi (or ‘inscriptional’). Eighth century Kufic has formal, simple lines easily drawn on parchment or inscribed on stone, but so angular and ornamented that only a practised eye can read it. The more cursive Naskhi style is easier to understand, and was more easily done with pen on paper. It largely displaced the Kufic script and became the standard for most Qur’ans from the 11^{th century onwards, and is the script used in virtually all printed Qur’ans today.}

^{References in Muslim records on the fate of early codices are sketchy, incomplete and sometimes contradictory. Hafsah’s mushaf Hafsah - hand-written by Zayd – which she had guarded stoutly, was sent after her death by Umar’s son to Marwan ibn Hakam, the Governor of Madinah, and he destroyed it.}

^{Leaves of the actual mushaf of Uthman, both the one he used himself (or was even written by himself) and the special copies prepared under his official supervision, still exist. Of the six special copies, it is known that the one sent by Uthman to Makkah was destroyed by fire, and those commissioned for Madinah and Kufa were also lost irretrievably. The copy destined for Damascus was said to have survived and been preserved at Malatya, but this is now assumed lost also unless it is to be identified with the Samarqand Codex.}

^{The Samarqand codex, written on deerskin, was believed to have been taken by Caliph Ali to Kufa, in modern Iraq. Seven hundred years later, when the Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane laid waste to the region, he found the Qur’an and took it to his capital, Samarqand. It was there from c1485-1868 CE, and then removed to St.Petersburg/Leningrad), where 50 facsimilies were prepared at the instigation of Czar Nicholas the Second in 1905, and the original sent to Uzbekistan. It is now kept in the Soviet State Library at Tashkent. It is incomplete, with only about one-third (some 250) of the original pages surviving, written in a bold Hejazi script, similar to Kufic script. It has 8 to 12 lines of script to the page. Many pages are mutilated.}

^{Some regard the pages as so dissimilar in style and writing that they feel it must have been worked on by several different scribes, or it could be a composite text However, the use of several scribes does not really undermine the authenticity of these texts, since it is quite possible that Uthman would have indeed employed a set of them to get the job done and the recension into circulation as expeditiously as possible.}

^{The other is an old manuscript kept on public display in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. This, unlike the Tashkent leaves, has 18 lines to the page.}

^{Critics often point out that although these are among the oldest known Qur’an manuscripts, there are many references to claims made in different parts of the Muslim world to possess not only one of Uthman’s copies, but even his own copy stained with the blood of his assassination. In fact, the Tashkent (Samarqand) text does appear to have the bloodstain, on Surah 2.137.}

^{The Qur'anic manuscript at the al-Hussein mosque in Cairo, written in large Arabic script with similarity to the Madinan script, is probably the most complete, the stack of leaves standing a staggering 50 centimeters high.}

The Cairo Qur’an.

After Uthman sent it to Egypt it remained in the possession of each successive Egyptian ruler until some 500 years ago when it was moved to the Amr Ibn al-As Mosque in Old Cairo, then to the Salah Tala'i Mosque and finally to al-Hussein Mosque where it has been ever since. Dr. Souad Maher, the former dean of Cairo University archeology department, renowned for being the first female to attain a doctorate in Islamic history in the Arab world, has long been involved in the renovations of the relics in the mosque and during the 1960s she verified the authenticity of the text, using the carbon-testing method to determine that it dated back to the time of the Prophet.

The dig at the Great Mosque in Sana', Yemen, found a large number of manuscripts of the Qur'an dating from first century of the hijrah. The Great Mosque in Sana' was built in 6 AH, and enlarged by Islamic rulers from time to time. In 1965 CE it was damaged by heavy rains and during the repairs survey the workers discovered a large vault full of parchment and paper manuscripts of both the Qur'an and non-Qur'anic material. One text, written in large un-vowelled Kufic script, is reputed to have the handwriting of Ali, Zayd ibn Thabit and Salman Al-Farsi.

A good example of a complete Qur’an in Naskh is that of Ibn al-Bawwab of Baghdad in 1001 CE, which is in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, Ireland.

Modern technology has now taken over the task of the copyist; the Tashkent Qur’an has recently been photocopied.

UNESCO, an arm of the United Nations, has compiled a CD containing some of the dated Sana' manuscripts as a part of the ‘Memory of the World’ programme. In this CD there are more than 40 Qur'anic manuscripts which are dated from 1st century of the hijrah.