Committee members: Bongmba, Elias; Cook, David B.; Rippin, Andrew; Sanders, Paula
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-339-15455-8
Ph.D.
Religious Studies
Rice University
2014
This dissertation examines intentional changes in ten early Qur'ans and a group of early Qur'an fragments. With some exceptions, scholars of the Qur'an's history have given priority to Muslim traditional accounts of its early transmission and establishment. These sources acknowledge a certain degree of flexibility in the text. Manuscripts have been accepted as proof of early origin but generally treated as a secondary witness to that origin. Divergence from today's standard has been variously credited to flexibility of readings (a'ruf), developing orthography of the Arabic language, downplayed as owing to inferior copies, or considered unimportant because secondary to a universally acknowledged and known oral tradition preserved in the hearts of the believers. However, the earliest Muslim historical traditions concerning Islam and Qur'anic origins were not first written until the second half of the 8th century AD. I methodologically assert priority of the manuscripts, the earliest extant dating to the latter years of the 7th century AD, as witness to the written Qur'an's early history. The manuscripts, I find, indicate that the text of the Qur'an was not immediately established in every detail, nor was oral tradition strong enough or unanimous enough to prevent written variants in the form of alternate spellings, alternate words or phrases, omissions, or inclusions that precipitated later revisions or standardization of the pages themselves but that in some cases remain.
Religion; Religious history; Middle Eastern history; Islamic Studies