page_title: Quran
section_title: Compilation
hierarchical_section_title: Quran / History / Compilation
caption_attribution_description: العربية: مخطوطة القرآن بجامعة برمنغهام فارسی: بخشی از یک نسخه باستانی قرآن که گفته می شود به عصر پیامبر اسلام بر میگردد. این نسخه در ردیف قدیمی ترین نسخ قرآن قرار گرفته است و در دانشگاه بیرمنگام یاقت شده است English: Seventh-century Quran manuscript held by the University of Birmingham. Folio 2 recto (left) and folio 1 verso (right) Français&#160;: Manuscrit du coran de l'Université de Birmingham Bahasa Indonesia: Manuskrip Alquran Birmingham اردو: مخطوطہ قرآن جامعہ برمنگھم 中文: 伯明翰古蘭經手稿
context_page_description: The Quran, also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is widely regarded as the finest work in classical Arabic literature. It is organized in 114 chapters
context_section_description: Following Muhammad's death in 632, a number of his companions who knew the Quran by heart were killed in the Battle of Yamama by Musaylimah. The first caliph, Abu Bakr (d. 634), subsequently decided to collect the book in one volume so that it could be preserved. Zayd ibn Thabit (d. 655) was the person to collect the Quran since "he used to write the Divine Inspiration for Allah's Apostle". Thus, a group of scribes, most importantly Zayd, collected the verses and produced a hand-written manuscript of the complete book. The manuscript according to Zayd remained with Abu Bakr until he died. Zayd's reaction to the task and the difficulties in collecting the Quranic material from parchments, palm-leaf stalks, thin stones (collectively known as suhuf) and from men who knew it by heart is recorded in earlier narratives. After Abu Bakr, in 644, Hafsa bint Umar, Muhammad's widow, was entrusted with the manuscript until the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, has requested the standard copy from Hafsa bint Umar in about 650.
  In about 650, the third Caliph Uthman ibn Affan (d. 656) began noticing slight differences in pronunciation of the Quran as Islam expanded beyond the Arabian Peninsula into Persia, the Levant, and North Africa. In order to preserve the sanctity of the text, he ordered a committee headed by Zayd to use Abu Bakr's copy and prepare a standard copy of the Quran.  Thus, within 20 years of Muhammad's death, the Quran was committed to written form.  That text became the model from which copies were made and promulgated throughout the urban centers of the Muslim world, and other versions are believed to have been destroyed. The present form of the Quran text is accepted by Muslim scholars to be the original version compiled by Abu Bakr.
  According to Shia, Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661) compiled a complete version of the Quran shortly after Muhammad's death. The order of this text differed from that gathered later during Uthman's era in that this version had been collected in chronological order. Despite this, he made no objection against the standardized Quran and accepted the Quran in circulation. Other personal copies of the Quran might have existed including Ibn Mas'ud's and Ubay ibn Ka'b's codex, none of which exist today.
  
  The Quran most likely existed in scattered written form during Muhammad's lifetime. Several sources indicate that during Muhammad's lifetime a large number of his companions had memorized the revelations. Early commentaries and Islamic historical sources support the above-mentioned understanding of the Quran's early development. The Quran in its present form is generally considered by academic scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad because the search for variants has not yielded any differences of great significance. University of Chicago professor Fred Donner states that:
  [T]here was a very early attempt to establish a uniform consonantal text of the Qurʾān from what was probably a wider and more varied group of related texts in early transmission.… After the creation of this standardized canonical text, earlier authoritative texts were suppressed, and all extant manuscripts—despite their numerous variants—seem to date to a time after this standard consonantal text was established.
  Although most variant readings of the text of the Quran have ceased to be transmitted, some still are. There has been no critical text produced on which a scholarly reconstruction of the Quranic text could be based. Historically, controversy over the Quran's content has rarely become an issue, although debates continue on the subject.
  In 1972, in a mosque in the city of Sana'a, Yemen, manuscripts were discovered that were later proved to be the most ancient Quranic text known to exist at the time. The Sana'a manuscripts contain palimpsests, a manuscript page from which the text has been washed off to make the parchment reusable again—a practice which was common in ancient times due to scarcity of writing material. However, the faint washed-off underlying text (scriptio inferior) is still barely visible and believe
caption: Birmingham Quran manuscript, dated among the oldest in the world
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