Forgotten witness: evidence for the early codification of the Qur'an.

AuthorWhelan, Estelle
PositionKoran

In the last two decades a controversy has arisen over the period in which the text of Muslim scripture became codified. The traditional Islamic view can be summarized as follows.(1) Both Abu Bakr (A.H. 11-13/A.D. 632-34) and Umar (13-23/634-44) made efforts to gather together the scraps of revelation that had been written down by the faithful during the lifetime of the Prophet, on bones, on palm leaves, on potsherds, and on whatever other materials were at hand, as well as being preserved in "the breasts of men."(2) But it was the third caliph, Uthman (23-35/644-61), who first charged a small group of men at al-Madinah with codifying and standardizing the text. Alarmed by reported divergences in the recitation of the revelation, he commissioned one of the Prophet's former secretaries, Zayd b. Thabit, and several prominent members of Quraysh - Abd Allah b. al-Zubayr, Sa id b. al- As, and Abd al-Rahman b. al-Harith are those most often mentioned - to produce a standard copy of the text, based on the compilation in the keeping of Hafsah, daughter of Umar. If there was disagreement over language among members of the commission, it was to be resolved in accordance with the dialect spoken by Quraysh. Once the standard text had been established, several copies were made and sent to major cities in the Islamic domain, specifically Damascus, al-Basrah, al-Kufah, and perhaps others. Although there are variations in detail, for example, in the list of names of those who served on Uthman's commission and in the list of cities to which copies were sent, this basic outline is not in dispute within the Muslim world.

Oral recitation nevertheless remained the preferred mode of transmission, and, as time passed, variant versions of the text proliferated - the kind of organic change that is endemic to an oral tradition. In addition, because of the nature of the early Arabic script, in which short vowels were not indicated and consonants of similar form were only sometimes distinguished by pointing, writing, too, was subject to misunderstanding, copyist's error, and change over time. In the early tenth century, at Baghdad, Abu Bakr Ibn Mujahid (d. 324/936) succeeded in reducing the number of acceptable readings to the seven that were predominant in the main Muslim centers of the time: al-Madinah, Makkah, Damascus, al-Basrah, and al-Kufah. Some Qur an readers who persisted in deviating from these seven readings were subjected to draconian punishments. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, additional variant readings were readmitted, first "the three after the seven," then "the four after the ten." The modern Cairo edition, prepared at al-Azhar in the 1920s, is based on one of the seven readings permitted by Ibn Mujahid, that of Abu Bakr Asim (d. ca. 127/745) as transmitted by Hafs b. Sulayman (d. 180/796).

Early efforts by Muslim scholars to establish the sequence of the revelation, particularly the verses revealed at Makkah and those revealed at al-Madinah, were emulated by European scholars, who focused on similar problems, though often adopting somewhat different criteria for determining solutions.(3) Nevertheless, already in the early twentieth century Alphonse Mingana seriously challenged the entire historical framework outlined here.(4) Mingana, whose approach was patently tendentious,(5) argued that the Qur an had not been codified in book form until several decades later than was generally accepted, in the reign of the fifth Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik b. Marwan (65-86/685-705). In the 1970s John Wansbrough went much farther, concluding, on the basis of textual and linguistic analysis, that there is no evidence for a "canonical" version of the Qur anic text before the very end of the eighth century at the earliest.(6)

Wansbrough argued that the nature of the text itself presupposes "an organic development from originally independent traditions during a long period of transmission . . . juxtaposition of independent pericopes to some extent unified by means of a limited number of rhetorical conventions."(7) In support of his conclusion he noted that Muslim traditions about early revelation, indeed about the life of the Prophet and early Muslim history as a whole, are known only from later Islamic literature; Qur anic exegesis, for example, first evolved in the late eighth and ninth centuries.(8) Nor can most early Muslim traditions be confirmed in contemporary non-Muslim sources. Wansbrough's entire analysis was based on the assumption that the "canonization" of the Qur anic text and its role in the development of the Muslim community followed a trajectory similar to that of Hebrew scripture. For example, in connection with "exegetical" (Wansbrough's characterization of much of the content of the Sirah of Ibn Ishaq, ca. 85-150/704-67, edited by Ibn Hisham, d. 218/833) reports of material that also appears in the "canon," he declared: "For Hebrew scripture the priority in time of such reports over the actual reproduction in literary form of prophetical utterances has been established. To postulate a similar, if not identical, process for Muslim scripture seems to me not unjustified, though in this particular instance complicated by the redaction history of the Sira itself." He also cited "the likelihood of a Rabbinic model for the account of an authoritative text produced in committee, namely the Jamnia tradition on the canonization of Hebrew scripture."(9) The vastly different historical contexts in which these supposedly parallel processes took place were not explicitly recognized or taken into account in Wansbrough's literary analysis. In fact the results of this analysis were frequently cited as grounds for rejecting the supposed historical evidence presented in such texts as the Sirah. By means of this reasoning Wansbrough arrived at the conclusion that "concern with the text of scripture did not precede by much the appearance of the masoretic [exegetical] literature as it has in fact been preserved": that is, in his view the Qur anic text assumed its canonical form more or less simultaneously with the appearance of commentaries on it (tafsir).(10) He took as confirmation of this view Joseph Schacht's conclusion that the Qur anic text did not serve as a basis for Muslim law before the ninth century.(11)

Particularly crucial to Wansbrough's argument is the term "canonical," for which he assumes a high standard of precision. It is clear that even in the Muslim tradition the fact was acknowledged that readings of the Qur an continually diverged from a supposed original; it is clear also that steps had repeatedly to be taken to impose or protect a unitary text of revelation - in the time of Uthman, again in the time of Ibn Mujahid, and even as recently as the 1920s, when scholars at al-Azhar prepared the currently most widely used edition. This edition is nonetheless not treated as uniquely "canonical" in parts of India and North Africa, where versions that differ in titles of the surahs, divisions between ayat, and occasionally vocalizations are in use; furthermore, it is clear from surviving manuscripts that such variants have persisted through the history of Islam.(12) Wansbrough's difficulty appears to be that these divergences are not substantive but rather involve details that he perceives as formalistic, perhaps even trivial.(13) Yet there is abundant evidence from the relatively well-documented period of the ninth and tenth centuries that such divergences were not perceived as trivial within Islam itself.

Perhaps the most valuable results of Wansbrough's study for the historian are his analyses of aspects of the text that, though already familiar, had not previously been so carefully delineated or explored in all their implications. One of these aspects is the polemical character of much of the Qur an, which, as Wansbrough convincingly demonstrates, was focused on Jewish scripture and tradition, implying an important Jewish opposition as one of the motivations behind the "canonization" of Islamic scripture. A second is the nature of the text itself, a series of "independent pericopes" placed side by side but expressed in a unified language and style.

The essential challenge to historians of the early Islamic period is to reconcile these undeniably useful observations with historical evidence that Wansbrough has not admitted into his analysis. Because of the relentless opacity of his own writing style it is tempting to ignore this challenge, but the implications of his argument are too far-reaching to permit such self-indulgence. It is important to recognize that his analysis was guided predominantly by generalizations drawn from the history of the biblical text, which were then applied to Muslim scripture. Most formidable is the conclusion, not stated explicitly but inescapable from Wansbrough's analysis, that the entire Muslim tradition about the early history of the text of the Qur an is a pious forgery, a forgery so immediately effective and so all-pervasive in its acceptance that no trace of independent contemporary evidence has survived to betray it. An important related issue involves the dating of early manuscripts of the Qur an. If Wansbrough is correct that approximately a century and a half elapsed before Muslim scripture was established in "canonical" form, then none of the surviving manuscripts can be attributed to the Umayyad or even the very early Abbasid period; particularly, one controversial manuscript discovered in San a in the 1970s, no. 20-33.1, for which a date around the turn of the eighth century has been proposed.(14) would have to have been copied at a much later period.

The purpose of the present study is to call attention to some types of evidence that Wansbrough did not take into account and that seem to contradict the historical conclusions that he has drawn from his essentially ahistorical analysis.

QUR ANIC INSCRIPTIONS

Primary documents for the condition of the Qur...

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