On the Historicity of ʿUthmān’s Canonization of the Qur’an, Part 1: The State of the Field

Abstract The identity of the early Muslim ruler or statesman who canonized the underlying consonantal text ( rasm ) of the Qur’an has been heavily debated in Western scholarship for more than a century. On the one hand, most Western scholars–past and present–have accepted the Islamic historical tradition’s unanimous identification of the early Arab Muslim ruler ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān (r. 24–35/644–656) as the Qur’an’s canonizer. On the other hand, a persistent revisionist minority have instead sided with certain Christian sources in identifying the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (r. 65–86/685–705) and his infamous governor al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf (d. 95/714) as the true canonizers and even collectors or composers of the Qur’an. Some Western scholars have also argued for various medial positions: that al-Ḥajjāj redacted and re-canonized ʿUthmān’s canonical text; and/or that al-Ḥajjāj merely corrected some scribal errors therein; and/or that al-Ḥajjāj merely added diacritical markings thereto. The present article–the first in a tripartite series–contends that the available evidence strongly supports and confirms the ʿUthmānic hypothesis, on the one hand; and strongly contradicts and falsifies all versions of the Ḥajjājian hypothesis, on the other.