The First Collection of the Qur'an

A plain Madinian chamber of mud-brick walls and a flat roof of palm-trunk beams over a packed-earth floor, no glazed tile, no carved stone, no columned hall. This is the modest building stock of the Hijazi oasis in the first generation after the Hijra, not a later Damascene or Iraqi institution.

The room's protagonists are the writing materials, not figures: pieces of tanned leather (adim), parchment strips (riqaq), bleached papyrus, thin flat stones (likhaf), shoulder-blade bones (aktaf) and the broad bases of palm-leaf ribs ('usub), the very substrates on which the revelation had been written down piecemeal in the Prophet's lifetime, now being gathered onto uniform sheets.

Reed pens, horn inkwells, and dishes of soot-and-gum ink lie at a low writing-board where loose fragments are being copied out onto fresh leaves and squared up into ordered sheets (suhuf). A plain wooden chest stands ready to receive and keep them.

The Arabic on the leaves is the early Hijazi hand: angular, without the dots that distinguish letters of shared skeleton, without short-vowel marks, end-of-verse rosettes, chapter headings, or any illumination. There is no bound codex here, only flat, stacked sheets, because this stage produced suhuf, not yet a sewn mushaf.

Two written copies of any passage are being required before it is entered, the method the sources ascribe to the collector, who accepted what was both memorised and attested in writing. Men come and go bringing their written fragments to be checked against the memorisers' recitation.

Set a little apart and guarded is the finished stack of sheets, the single authoritative suhuf that, the tradition records, was kept by Abu Bakr (RA), then by 'Umar (RA), and after him by his daughter Hafsa (RA), to become two decades later the base text for the standardised mushaf.

Through a high window the crowns of date palms and a corner of the low mosque wall place the room in the oasis-city of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), Madinah, the Rashidun capital, in the months following the battle of Yamama in the twelfth year after the Hijra.

Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab Fada'il al-Qur'an (9th c.): The foundational account, narrated by Zayd ibn Thabit (RA): 'Umar's (RA) alarm after Yamama, Abu Bakr's (RA) commission, the method of collection from written fragments and the memorisers, and the keeping of the suhuf by Abu Bakr, then 'Umar, then Hafsa (RA). The primary text-critical anchor.

Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, al-Itqan fi 'Ulum al-Qur'an (15th c.): The classical synthesis of the Qur'anic sciences. Used for the conventional sequence (piecemeal writing under the Prophet, the Abu Bakr collection, the 'Uthmanic standardisation) and the names of the early writing substrates.

Ibn Kathir, Fada'il al-Qur'an / al-Bidaya wa al-Nihaya (14th c.): Sunni synthesis. Confirms the dating to the aftermath of Yamama in 12 AH and the role of Zayd ibn Thabit (RA) under Abu Bakr (RA).