In Search of the Original Koran: The True History of the Revealed Text (12 page)

How can we explain this astonishment of the first Muslims at the idea of gathering the revealed texts into a single volume? For this is an "astonishing" astonishment, if we consider that it is expressed by the greatest companion of the Prophet and a witness to the first ordering of the divine revelations. We-for whom it is so evident today that "the" Koran can be read at a single sitting, that it can be leafed through with a simple gesture-cannot even imagine that such a sacred text could once have been presented scattered into dozens of sheets without any organic link and without any prospect of unity. It is clear that this astonishment attests to the fact that among the first Muslims, the companions of the Prophet, a sort of revolution was taking place in the perception of the revealed texts, held until then as units autonomous in their meanings, now to propose to turn them suddenly into a new and unsuspected-of entity. Revelation had been plural, and now it was being proposed to construct from its elements something unprecedented: "a" Koran.

Our Koran in effect restores to us the scattered and plural structure of revelation, materialized in numerous written supports. In addressing Muhammad on the subject of revelation, Allah had been precise that the revelation contained seven parts: "We have given you the seven mathani [oft-repeated verses?] and the Glorious Qur'an" (15:87). It is difficult to determine the nature of these revealed units called mathani, but what is certain is that they introduce a plural structure of revealed themes. When the Koran speaks of revelations prior to the Koran, each one is also referred to in the plural. In verse 6:91, the Jews are reproached for hiding certain scrolls of parchment (garatis) among the ensemble of scrolls in which was kept the scripture (kitab) revealed to Moses. There is also a reference to suhuf (sheets) with regard to the Apocrypha attributed to Abraham and Moses: suhuf ibrahima wa musa (53:36; 87:19). The multiplicity of supports, here the suhuf, is reflected, so to speak, in the multiplicity of supports for the original heavenly one, also designated by suhuf. These are characterized as "venerated, exalted and purified in the hands of noble and innocent Scribes" (80:13-16). These same "purified suhuf " are supposed to contain "infallible scriptures (kutub gayyima)" (98:3).

We see that revelation is not presented as a unitary composition but always in the form of compilations, each containing multiple revelations, in conformity with their original celestial form. In these conditions, we can understand that an enterprise to collect the revealed texts into an ensemble obeying a certain nonrevealed order might have shocked some people and appeared as a veritable distortion of revelation-in short, a bid`a, an intervention foreign to divine will.

It is remarkable in this respect that the stories that have come down to us on the history of the collecting of the Koran give justifications for it that are purely accidental. When Umar suggested such an enterprise to Caliph Abu Bakr, it was after the battle against Musaylima. Thus this event is not continuous with the history of the text revealed in the time of the Prophet. According to this logic, if people who were the holders of the Koranic text had not died a violent death, there would not have been a project of collection. For, strictly speaking, it was not necessary to resort to a written collection in order to assure the conservation of revealed texts: it sufficed to constitute a corps of reciters of the Koran to palliate the risk of such a breakdown of transmission, accidental or not. And whatever the case, given the deficient character of Arabic writing at this time, a recourse to writing did not seem the most adequate and most effective solution, since, in any case, one would have need of a "reader" of this writing.

It is clear this logic that had presided over the initiative to collect all the revealed texts was not taking advantage of continuity with any past that it was seeking to culminate, quite simply because this past did not imply such a culmination. And the idea of a general and entire collection of all the revelations had no place in the representation that was made during Muhammad's lifetime of the textual composition of the revelation. It was presented in the form of a certain number of compilations that contained a greater or lesser number of revelations. This satisfied everybody and there was no theological or historical reason whatever to proceed with such a written collection.

The project of such a book, while harmonizing ever so slightly revelation in the plural, was certainly not among the scriptural habits of the epoch. One could not reproach Muhammad for not having been able to foresee such a book and not having made the necessary arrangements in order to leave us a complete copy, which might have avoided his successors having to take the initiative of proceeding to a collection, a task as heavy as it was risky. In these circumstances, do we have to believe (as does Blachere) in "this particularity of the Arab soul that, absorbed in what is immediate, never anticipates the future. Nobody thought of constituting the Koranic corpus because nobody felt the necessity of doing so during Muhammad's lifetime"?2 Or do we have to explain this deficiency by an imminent eschatological perspective that would have rendered such an enterprise useless, as Casanova has suggested?3 But this would be making the error of anachronism. The idea of "a book" did not germinate until quite late, and for reasons that no longer had any link whatsoever with the prophetic era.

Blachere is perfectly right to remark that AN Bakr's collection could not have served much purpose, since once the Koranic text was consigned to "sheets," nobody felt the need to consult it. Tradition tells us in effect that it was deposited with the caliph, and that at his death it passed to his successor, Umar, and then to his daughter Hafsa, widow of the Prophet.4 Thus the text does not seem to have had any great utility to the new Muslim community then being born, and in any case it was not of much help in remedying the problems of transmission that were believed to be detected after the death of certain reciters of the Koran.

This situation did not last long, since (still according to Tradition) the collection of the Koran was once again put on the agenda in the time of the third caliph, Uthman. The reason that motivated this resurgence of interest in shaping the Koran was this time of a technical nature. According to the predominant version of the facts, in the course of a military expedition in Armenia and Azerbaijan, there was an argument between Iraqi and Syrian soldiers over the way to recite the Koran, which brought their military leader to ask Caliph Uthman to unify the reading of the sacred text. So he ordered to be delivered to him the copy established by Abu Bakr that had remained in the hands of Hafsa, and he had it submitted to a commission for the purpose of making a certain number of copies to distribute to the different capitals of the Muslim Empire: Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and Mecca. Uthman also ordered the destruction of all the other existing copies, with the exception of that of Hafsa, whose copy was given back to her.

This was because it was perceived that, in parallel with Hafsa's copy, a rather large number of other private collections had meanwhile been made: those belonging to the future caliph Umar, Salim ibn Ma`gil, who had outlived Muhammad by only a year; to Abdallah ibn Abbas, cousin of the Prophet; Oqba ibn lAmir, another companion of the Prophet, whose copy was still extant in the fourth century (H); Migdad ibn 'Amr, who died in the year 33 (H) with his recension known especially in Syria; Abu Musa al-Ashlari, who died in 52 with his recension known in Bassora; Caliph Ali, cousin of the Prophet, who died in 40 (several recensions circulated under his name, of which one was divided into the seven groups of surahs; at the time of Uthman, recensions attributed to Ali had authority in Damascus and seemed to have survived until the end of the fourth century); Ubayy ibn Kalb, who died in 23, was (like Ali), one of the Prophet's secretaries; Abdallah ibn Masud, who died in 30, a former shepherd and early convert and faithful companion to the Prophet, had a perfect oral knowledge of the Koran. His corpus did not contain the Fdtiha and the two last verses of the actual Koran.'

Unfortunately, toward the fourth century of the Hijra, no trace was left of any of these works. Only those of Abu Bakr, Ubayy, All, and Ibn Masud are known to us, and then only through certain details reported by authors from the first centuries of Islam. These descriptions bear on certain variants, but especially on the order of surahs, which were quite different from one corpus to another, even if they respected more or less strictly the decreasing order of length. Blachere has drawn up a comparative chart of the order adopted for certain surahs in the corpus of Ubayy, of Ibn Masud, and of our vulgate. The divergences among these works are rather significant as regards the order of surahs. Groups of surahs bearing the same mysterious letters are associated with each other in the vulgate, very little so in Ibn Mas`ud's, and not at all in Ubayy's.6

These divergences in the order of surahs, depending on which corpus was being used, show that the order of our vulgate is only one among others, and that it could only have triumphed for external reasons and in obscure circumstances. Still, the descriptions of the works that have come down lead us to think that the texts of surahs that are mentioned are almost identical, except for a few variants. There is cause to wonder about this uniformity and about the date when it was realized. For, apart from the first reason advanced by Tradition about Uthman's reform, specifically with regard to divergences in the recitation, there exists another explanation, whereby Uthman during a prayer is said to have asked his subjects to return to him the Koranic texts they possessed in order to put together a vulgate.' In other words, according to this account the surahs were not yet constituted and ratified in their content in Uthman's time, outside of the ones that had been widely known during Muhammad's lifetime.

Moreover, the motive attributed to Uthman's reform initiative-to compensate for the divergences in readings-does not correspond to the avenue that he took to achieve this. In effect, he constituted a com mission charged with executing copies on the basis of AN Bakr's recension, which were to be distributed to the four corners of the empire. This solution would be comprehensible if Arabic writings at the time of Uthman were not seriously deficient, especially from a vocal standpoint. In these conditions, everything leads us to believe that the thesis of a written Uthmanian recension designed to serve as a reference document was forged at a time when Arabic writing was vocalized, that is to say, starting with the reign of the Umeyyad caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705 CE).

Yet even here, the history of the reform of Arabic writing remains uncertain. The invention of vowels has been mistakenly attributed to the poet of Bassora, Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali (died in 69 H/688 CE). Another story tells us that a governor of Iraq, Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad (died in 67 H/686 CE), asked his scribes to introduce a sign for the long vowels, thereby permitting a distinction, for example, between q&la (he said) and qul! (say!). His successor, the famous al-Hajjaj, during the reign of Caliph Abd al-Malik is said to have ordered Nasr ibn ~Asim (died in 89 H/707 CE) to introduce vocalic and diacritical signs into the Koran. Another story attributes to Yahya ibn Ya`mur al- Laythi (died in 129 H/746 CE), celebrated reader of Bassora, the introduction of inflected vowel points during the era of al-Hajjaj.

On this subject, Blachere notes that the reform of Arabic writing took place without overall planning, and that "begun under Abd alMalik, it would develop over several generations and would not be completed until the end of the 3rd or 4th centuries. How far we are from that marvelous stroke of the wand that, according to certain Muslim informants, has the whole system spring from the brain of the poet AN al-Aswad al-Du'ali!"8 The reform took place in two stages. First, the three short vowels (a, i, u) were notated in the most ancient manuscripts by points in different colors or in different positions (above, below, or alongside consonants). Then later, diacritical signs were introduced to distinguish consonants with the same graphic, to mark doubled consonants, and lastly, to signpost recitation aloud.

This observation certainly pertains to the history of the shaping of Koranic texts, which could not have prevailed more than very gradually. Unfortunately, the paleographic data are of no help to us, for the Koranic manuscripts in our possession in only extremely rare cases go back beyond the second century of the Hijra. Grohmann notes (according to E. Herzfeld, cited in the Ephemerides Orientales 0. Harrassovitz of January 28, 1928) the existence, among the Persian collections, of a Koranic manuscript bearing the date 94 H/712 CE, which corresponds with the reign of Walid I (705-715 CE), successor to Abd al-Malik. Herzfeld also signals two other copies dated 102 and 107.9 If these mentions were authentic, we would have here the most ancient Koranic manuscripts that are dated. They might in fact correspond to manuscripts in "Hedjazian" writing in the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris (BNP no. 326). The manuscripts discovered in the Great Mosque of Sanaa in 1972 remain still more difficult to date, as admitted by Count von Bothmer, one of the specialists who has studied them. Only one fragment among the twelve thousand that were found bears a date: "Ramadan 357/August 968,"10 which is far from resolving the problem of dating the oldest fragments.