The Composition Of The Revealed Text (2)

THE COMPOSITION OF

THE REVEALED TEXT

Hardly had a year elapsed after the death of the Prophet, when an urgent need to reassemble those dispersed documents in one collection easy to handle and to consult, was present. This task required that the verses of every surah follow each other according to the order already fixed in the memories. The idea was suggested by Omar to the first Caliph after the battle of Yamama in which hundreds of Muslims were killed including seventy of “the porters of the Qur’an”. Omar's aim was not only to safeguard the whole of the written the Qur’an against any dangers but also to approve the unified form of that document by the authority of the existing “porters of the Qur’an” and by all the companions who knew to recite each part of it.

This task was entrusted to Zaid ibn Thabit. Abu Bakr said to him: “You are an intelligent man; we do not have any suspicion against your probity and you wrote the revelation under the dictation of the Prophet. Under-take the gathering of the Qur’an”. [1] Moreover, Zaid had attended the last review with the Prophet. A rule for work was laid down: that nothing written would be admitted unless it was certified by two witnesses that it was written not from the memory but under the dictation of the Prophet himself and that it was part of the revelation in its final state.

After the work was completed in due form with all these precautions, Zaid gave it to Abu Bakr who kept it throughout the period of his Caliphate. Before his death, Abu Bakr confided it to Omar who put it, at the last moment in the safekeeping of his daughter, Hafsa, one of the Prophet's wives.

This first official collection (which is much like a file gathering arranged but not bound papers) was distinguished from the other manuscripts, complete or incomplete existing with the individuals, by a sort of absolute rigorism and by excluding anything that was not a part of the very text of the last collation. Whatever is the great value of such document and whatever was the care of its assembling and its precious safeguard by the two first Caliphs, it did not acquire its universal authority until the day of its publication. The occasion of that publication presented itself only during the Caliphate of Othman, the third Caliph, after the battles of Armenia and Azerbaijan.