Uthman’s standard codex of the Qur’an

The revelations proclaimed by Muhammad were memorised by his followers and written down piecemeal. Sunni tradition holds that after the battle of Yamama (633), in which many of those who knew the Qur’an by heart were killed, Abu Bakr had Zayd ibn Thabit, Muhammad’s scribe, gather the written fragments into sheets, which later passed to Hafsa, Umar’s daughter and Muhammad’s widow. As the conquests carried Islam into Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Iran, differences in recitation multiplied; according to tradition, the general Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman, alarmed by disputes among soldiers during a campaign in Azerbaijan, urged Uthman to establish a single text.

Uthman obtained Hafsa’s sheets and appointed Zayd with three prominent Meccans to copy them into several volumes in the dialect of Quraysh. One copy was kept in Medina and others were sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus and, by some accounts, Mecca, with orders to destroy all other copies. In Kufa, Ibn Mas'ud, a companion who had his own codex, is said to have refused, and his reading remained in use there for a long time; the codices attributed to Ibn Mas'ud and Ubayy ibn Ka'b differed from the Uthmanic text in the order of the suras and in some readings. The Uthmanic text contains all 114 suras in the order known today. The year of the commission was not recorded; it is usually put at about 650, some twenty years after Muhammad’s death.

The consonantal skeleton (rasm) was written without the vowel signs and most of the dots that now distinguish letters, so variant readings survived; in the 10th century the scholar Ibn Mujahid accepted seven canonical readings based on the Uthmanic text. In the 1970s scholars of the “revisionist” school argued that the Qur’an was canonised only in the late 7th century or later, but manuscript finds — the Birmingham leaves, radiocarbon-dated to between 568 and 645, and the Sanaa palimpsest, whose erased lower text is the only known early manuscript that does not follow the Uthmanic tradition — have led most scholars to accept the traditional mid-7th-century date.