Sacred Texts

There are several quite distinct senses in which one might speak of the history and prehistory of the text. For the believer, the Koran's prehistory is its preexistence in the heavenly realm: as God's speech, as part of the umm al-kitab, or "source of the scripture" (43:4) written on the heavenly lauh mahfuz ("Preserved Tablet") (85:22). From the Preserved Tablet it descended as a whole to the lowest heaven on the Night of Destiny (97:1), whence it was transmitted to the Prophet as need and occasion required.

Non-Muslim scholarship, on the other hand, sifts the Koran in search of textual and conceptual parallels with the Bible, the Talmud, Christian apocrypha, and ancient near-eastern religions, hoping to discover there the prehistory of the text now known. However, this search for dependence has yielded little evidence to show that the Koran has relied on those texts, except to presuppose the broad lines of their narratives as background for its own teaching. For the believer, these echoes and similarities pose no difficulty, since the Koran makes no claim to novelty in its content, but rather asserts proudly the divine origin it shares with those earlier scriptures.

Historical setting.

Another sense in which one might speak of the history of the text is in the attempt to determine the precise historical context that the text is addressing or, one might say, within which it is a player. Since the Koran itself has no narrative structure, and its chapters (suras) and verses (ayat, sing, aa) contain little or no indication of their historical context, various attempts have been made by Muslims and others to establish a chronological order for the revelations, and a context for each verse or group of verses. The basic division is between the revelations that took place in Mecca and those after the Emigration (hijra) to Medina. The Meccan verses are in their turn often divided into three subperiods. All this activity is at best speculative, though there does seem to be gradual development in style and thought that could be taken to mirror the changing circumstances of the Prophet's career. As the Koran came to be used as a source for the elaboration of law, it became increasingly important to establish context and chronology.

Most non-Muslim scholarship accepts along with Muslims that the Koran, whatever prehistory it might have, dates as a textual corpus to the time of Muhammad in Mecca and Medina. However, the years since the mid-1970s have seen a revisionist movement among historians of early Islam who take a radically critical approach to the historical evidence. These scholars, following the lead of John Wansbrough, suggest a later and more gradual process of canonization, taking place once the Arab conquerors had moved out of the Hejaz region of Arabia and encountered the sectarian milieu of Jewish and Christian Syria and Mesopotamia. Such a situation seems to them a much more probable setting for the Koran's particular range of concerns and styles. There is still considerable controversy over this question.

The written text.

The history of the written text is also approached in various ways. Most Muslims would believe that the text currently available in print is precisely what was taught to the Prophet by Gabriel. Unexpectedly, perhaps, it is Muslim tradition itself rather than non-Muslim scholarship that throws most doubt on this simple approach. The tradition preserves accounts that assure the community that every word of the Koran was transcribed on whatever materials were to hand at the time of its revelation. However, it also contains accounts of disagreements about the content and pronunciation of the text even during the lifetime of the Prophet.

The official transcript of the text under the caliph 'Uthman (r. 644–656) seems to have been based on oral testimony. Even so it did not succeed in putting an end to variants, and the Koran has continued to be recited within a certain range of variation that came eventually to be agreed upon as canonically legitimate. The variant oral traditions themselves for the most part represent divergent ways of voweling and so of pronouncing the original transcription, which contained only an incomplete consonantal skeleton. The script used in 'Uthman's transcription did not even distinguish all the consonants; one particular shape, for example, was used to represent five different consonants, a vowel, and a diphthong. Over the first three or four Islamic centuries a more complete script was gradually developed and came to be accepted.

No doubt the publication of the Egyptian standard edition has created the impression of uniformity and unanimity in the transmission of the text. Its wide circulation may indeed contribute to a real uniformity. However, ancient Koran manuscripts and fragments found in Yemen some years ago reveal that even the main written tradition took some centuries to achieve complete uniformity.