Historical evolution of the Qur’ānic text – from ‘Uṯmān to Ibn Muǧāhid and beyond

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to sum up efforts being made in the field of Qur’anic Studies to come up with a critical edition of the text of the Qur’an – the holy book Islam – basing on oldest, extant Quranic manuscripts and secondary literature, and this in order to enable text criticism based on source texts. The quest for authographic / interpretative text-forms of the Qur’anic revelations is an attempt to reach back as far as possible into the earliest history of Islam. The reconstruction of a critical text of the Qur’an, i.e. a (single or multiple) original version(s) of the text from which all subsequent manuscript versions and readings stem, is an ongoing quest for scholars of Quranic studies, in the Western and Eastern hemisphere. The Muslim tradition credits the compilation of a uniform consonantal skeleton of the Qur’an to caliph ‘Uṯmān (mid-7th century CE), whereas Western scholars also operate with dates ranging from late-7th to even mid-9th century. In this context the article touches also on the interrelationship of the oral and written traditions of the Qur’an, Ibn Muǧāhid’s arbitrary choice of the seven qirā’āt and finally the arrival at the modern popular (“standard”) version of the Qur’anic text.