Origin and Development of the Quran (Part 3)

c) Standardization of the Quran by Uthman Ibn Affan

By the time of the caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan, there was need for the standardization of the Qur'an. First, large numbers of Muslims who had memorized the Qur'an were dying. Secondly, the expansion of Islam brought into its fold many new converts. These converts spoke a variety of languages, and the original Arabic (in which the Qur'an was written) began to corrupt.

Uthman is said to have commissioned a committee (including Zayd and several prominent members of Quraysh) to produce a standard copy of the text. Some accounts say that this compilation was based on the text kept by Hafsa. Other stories say that Uthman made his compilation independently, Hafsa's text was brought forward, and the two texts were found to coincide perfectly.

Until this time there was only one written text of the Qur'an. According to Islamic accounts, this text was faithful to its original version while there are some scholars who think that there are some slight variations which are made. This became known as al-mushaf al-Uthmani or the "Uthmanic codex". He ordered the destruction of all alternative copies.

When the compilation was finished, sometime between 650 and 656 CE, Uthman sent copies of it to the different centres of the expanding Islamic empire. From then on, thousands of Muslim scribes began copying the Qur'an.

It is an increasing claim made by some Muslim and non-Muslim scholars that early Uthmanic texts of the Quran differed in terms of punctuation from the version traditionally read today. It is believed that early versions of the text did not contain diacritics, markers for short vowels, and dots that are used to distinguish similarly written Arabic letters such as r[ر] & z[ز] or t[ت] & ṭ[ث] or f[ف] & q[ق]. One claim is that dots were introduced into the writing system sometime about half a century after the standardization of the Uthmanic text around 700 A.D.

Uthmanic Manuscript

As for the copies that were destroyed, Islamic traditions say that Abdallah Ibn Masud, Ubay Ibn Ka'b, and Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, had preserved versions that differed in some ways from the Uthmanic text. Muslim scholars record certain of the differences between the versions; those recorded consist almost entirely of orthographical and lexical variants, or different verse counts. All three (Ibn Masud, Ubay Ibn Ka'b, and Ali) are recorded as having accepted the Uthmanic text as authoritative.

Uthman's version was written in an older Arabic script that left out most vowel markings; thus the script could be interpreted and read in various ways. This basic Uthmanic script is called the rasm; it is the basis of several traditions of oral recitation, differing in minor points. The Quran is always written in the Uthmanic Rasm (Rasm al Uthman). In order to fix these oral recitations and prevent any mistakes, scribes and scholars began annotating the Uthmanic rasm with various diacritical marks indicating how the word was to be pronounced.

It is believed that this process of annotation began around 700 CE, soon after Uthman's compilation, and finished by approximately 900 CE. The Quran text most widely used today is based on the Rasm Uthmani (Uthmanic way of writing the Quran) and in the Hafs tradition of recitation, as approved by Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1922.