The history of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, is the timeline ranging from the inception of the Quran during the lifetime of Muhammad (believed to have received the Quran through revelation between 610 and 632 CE), to the emergence, transmission, and canonization of its written copies. The history of the Quran is a major focus in the field of Quranic studies.
In Sunni tradition, it is believed that the first caliph Abu Bakr ordered Zayd ibn Thabit to compile the written Quran, relying upon both textual fragments and the memories of those who had memorized it during Muhammad's lifetime, with the rasm (undotted Arabic text) being officially canonized under the third caliph Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644–656 CE), leading the Quran as it exists today to be known as the Uthmanic codex. Some Shia Muslims believe that the fourth caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib was the first to compile the Quran shortly after Muhammad died. The canonization process is believed to have been highly conservative, although some amount of textual evolution is also indicated by the existence of codices like the Sanaa manuscript. Beyond this, a group of researchers explores the irregularities and repetitions in the Quranic text in a way that refutes the traditional claim that it was preserved by memorization alongside writing. According to them, an oral period shaped the Quran as a text and order, and mentioned repetitions and irregularities were remnants of this period.Bannister, "Retelling the Tale", 2014: p.1-4
Some Western scholars,Herbert Berg(2000), p.83 question the accuracy of the traditional accounts on whether the holy book existed in any form before the last decade of the seventh century (Patricia Crone and Michael Cook);Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and Gerd R. Puin as quoted in and/or argue it is a "cocktail of texts", some of which may have been existent a hundred years before Muhammad, that evolved (Gerd R. Puin),THE HISTORY OF THE QUR’ANIC TEXT FROM REVELATION TO COMPILATION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY WITH THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS by Muhammad Mustafa Al-A’zami, Leicester: UK, page 12; Al-A’zami quotes a letter that was published in the Yemeni newspaper ath-Thawra, 11 March 1999Querying the Koran , by Abul Taher, The Guardian, 8 August 2000 or was redacted (J. Wansbrough),Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978) by Wansbrough.http://www.derafsh-kaviyani.com/english/quran3.html (Discusses Wansbrough) to form the Quran.
Non-Muslim sources from the earliest period of Islam conclude that non-Muslims show no awareness, in their writings, of a unique Muslim scripture until the 8th century, meaning that the Quran was not available or finalized until around that time.
Michael Cook said that, in the Sanaa texts, there was no distinction between "say" and "he said." Later texts, however, standardized the "ql" (which can be read as "he said" or "say") in these texts to be read as "say" in many places.Cook, The Koran, 2000: p.120
Theories about the origin of the name Nine out of the ten imams of recitation have it read in their tradition with a hamza, as Qur'ān (قرآن), with only Ibn Kathir's tradition excluding the letter, reading it instead as Qurān (قران).
While there are various proposed etymologies, one is that the word 'Quran' (قرآن) comes from the Arabic verb qaraʾa (قرء, 'to read') in the verbal noun pattern fuʿlān (فعلان), thus resulting in the meaning 'reading' or 'reading book'.
Others are that it is a name given to the book by God, without any previous etymology, that the word comes from the verb qarana (قرن, 'to join, to yoke'), referring to the gathering together of revelation, and that it comes from qarāʾin (قرائن), the plural of a word variously translatable as 'evidence', 'yoke', 'union'.
Academic research
The origin of the Quran has been a subject of sustained academic research. Until around the 1970s, non-Muslim scholars assumed the traditional narrative of the origin story of the Quran.Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, 2012: p.45 In the 1970s, historians in the field of Islamic origins began to question Islamic "literary sources"tafsir (i.e. commentaries on the Quran), hadith, (i.e. the accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved of or did not), and sira, (i.e. the biography of the prophet)upon which the traditional account of the Quran were based. They employed a "source-critical" approach to this literature, including as evidence relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and contemporary non-Arabic literature,Neva & Koren, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies", 2000: p.420 that they argued provided "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck.Neva & Koren, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies", 2000: p.422-6 There have also been a number of proposals for refinement of the traditional view and even its fundamental re-evaluation.
Some sections of the Quran, proven by archaeological evidence to have been written after the period in which it is said to have been revealed (anachronism), should point to a later writing date and possibly a nearby geographical location for those sections. Sources based on some archaeological data give the construction date of Masjid al-Haram, an architectural work mentioned 16 times in the Quran, as 78 AH an additional finding that sheds light on the evolutionary history of the Quranic texts mentioned, which is known to continue even during the time of Hajjaj,John Wansbrough argued that ḥadīth literature is exegetical in origin, i.e., the bulk of the tradition literature is closely tied to the interpretation of the Qur'an, which he believed did not take its final form/canonised until the late eighth / early ninth century.https://www.islamic-awareness.org/history/islam/inscriptions/earlysaw in a similar situation that can be seen with al-Aksa, though different suggestions have been put forward to explain. These structures, expected to be somewhere near Muhammad, which were placed in cities like Mecca and Jerusalem, which are thousands of kilometers apart today, with interpretations based on narrations and miracles, were only a night walk away according to the outward and literal meaning of the verse.
A similar situation can be put forward for change of the Qibla (Quran 2:144) and Mecca which casts doubt on its centrality within Islam, was not recorded as a pilgrimage center in any historical source before 741 (here the author places the region as "midway between Ur and Harran") rather than the Hejaz, and lacks pre-Islamic archaeological data.The ancient history of the holy city of Mecca (Makkah) has been wiped out, and Makkah has been attacked as a city without a pre-Islamic history, due to the lack of archaeological evidence. See here.
Early canonization hypothesis
Historians like Emran El-Badawi and Fred Donner, have written rejoinders to arguments from the revisionist school and in favor of a canonization date in the time of Uthman. Although few, some seventh-century material evidence exists for the Quran, primarily from coins and commemorative inscriptions dating to the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (685–705) especially containing the Basmala, the Shahada, and Surat al-Ikhlas (Q 112). Inscriptions like these at the Dome of the Rock were particularly intended to declare the primacy of the new religion of Islam over Christianity. Fred Donner has also argued in favor an early date for the collection of the Quran on the basis of its absence of anachronisms from later periods.Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, Donner, Darwin Press, 1998, p. 60, .
It is typically accepted nowadays, including among skeptical scholars like Patricia Crone and Stephen Shoemaker, that the majority of the Quran at the least goes back in some fashion to Muhammad. Skeptical scholars, nonetheless, point out that the earliest account of Muhammad's life by Ibn Ishaq was written about a century after Muhammad died and all later narratives by Islamic biographers contain far more details and embellishments about events which are entirely lacking in Ibn Ishaq's text.Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, pp. 203-30, where she argues that much of the classical Muslim understanding of the Koran rests on the work of storytellers and that this work is of very dubious historical value. These storytellers contributed to the tradition on the rise of Islam, and this is evident in the steady growth of information: "If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next storyteller would know the date of this raid, while the third would know everything that an audience might wish to hear about it." 53 Then, comparing the accounts of the raid of Kharrar by Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi, Crone shows that al-Waqidi, influenced by and in the manner of the storytellers, "will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend color to the event, as well as reasons why, as was usually the case, no fighting took place."
Late canonization hypothesis
The rise of the revisionist school of Islamic studies in the 1970s offered a new challenge to the conventional dating of the canonization of the Quran to the mid-7th century based on some hadith literature reporting that the task of canonization had been completed by the end of the reign of Uthman;Berg (2000): p. 495 by placing it in the late-7th century. Another characteristic of this hypothesis was that it largely refuted the traditionally held belief that the Quran was linked to Muhammad (or that it was the product of a series of revelations sent down to Muhammad).
The first to dispute the traditional date of canonization was John Wansbrough, who instead projected the event two centuries after the time of Muhammad. In 1999, Cook and Crone argued that "there is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century." Crone, however, abandoned her earlier views, stating that it is "difficult to doubt" that Muhammad uttered "all or most" of the Quran and that this is with "reasonable assurance". Stephen Shoemaker continues to hold that the Quran did not reach its final compilation until the reign of Abd al-Malik (685-705 CE); References to the Quran (or "Islam" as a new religion) are absent from seventh-century Christian literature describing the early conquerors coming out of Arabia and their beliefs.Saadi, "Nascent Islam in the Seventh Century Syriac Sources", 2008: p.219-220 For example, when the Emir of the immigrants and Patriarch of the local Christians did have a religious colloquium there was much discussion of the scriptures but no mention of the Quran, which some have taken as an indication that the Quran had not been put into circulation. The Christians reported the Emir was accompanied by "learned Jews", that the immigrants "accepted the Torah just as the Jews and Samaritans", though none of the sources described the immigrants as Jews. According to their views, which were also reached through other (such as linguistic analyses) studies in this field, the geography in which the Quran was written was not the Hijaz region, but much further north, in a region pointing to the Jordan-Syria geography that was historically referred to as Arabia.
Traditional history of the Quran