The Qurʾān was preserved by two things bound together, not by one: mass oral transmission through unbroken chains, and a written record that began in the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ. Most of the confusion comes from looking at one of these alone, and so measuring the Qurʾān against books that came down in writing only.

This article sets out the two, then looks at what the earliest manuscripts say, and then at what Western scholars have raised against the text.

Oral Transmission and the Chain

The preservation of the Qurʾān was never the memorising of individuals passing it one to another; it was mass transmission: in every generation a body of people carried it from a body of people too large to have agreed upon a lie. This alone sets it apart from what came down on the report of single narrators.

That transmission has remained unbroken to this day: a student recites the whole of the Qurʾān to his teacher, hearing it and reciting it back, and the teacher licenses him with a connected chain. The text is not taken up from a printed copy; it passes from one breast to another, and the written copy stands witness over it.

On this footing, were every written copy to be lost, the text would remain preserved in the breasts of those who have memorised it — and in every generation they number in the thousands. This is not conceivable for a book that came down in writing alone.

What the Earliest Manuscripts Say

The writing down began in the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ on whatever came to hand — palm stalks and thin stones — then it was gathered in the time of Abū Bakr, and copies were made and sent to the great cities in the time of ʿUthmān.

Portions of those earliest copies survive in museums, among them the leaves at the University of Birmingham, those in the National Library in Paris, and the Sanaa manuscripts. The parchment has been examined by radiocarbon dating, and the dates come out within the first century of the Hijra.

What they contain agrees with the copy in circulation today in the order of the chapters and the verses and in their wording. Such differences as are noticed in them go back to the script of the earliest copies — which had neither dots nor vowel marks — and not to any difference in the text as recited.

What Has Been Raised against the Text, and the Answer

Some Western scholars have applied to the Qurʾān the methods of textual criticism developed for the study of the New Testament. Those methods rest on one premise: that the text came down by copying, so that the copies are compared in order to recover the original.

The difficulty is that this premise does not hold for the Qurʾān, since it did not come down by copying alone. For Muslims the written copy is a witness to what is memorised, not its source, and the recitation is taken from a teacher, not from a page.

From this the differences raised about the earliest manuscripts are understood: they are differences of script, not of what is recited. The earliest copies were written without dots or vowel marks precisely so as to bear all the established readings; so what looks to an observer like a difference in a word is in truth one line of writing carrying two established readings at once.

Closing

Each of the two witnesses to the other: the oral transmission preserves what is recited, and the manuscripts testify that what was written has not changed. Were either to stand alone, room for doubt would remain; it is in their coming together that the proof lies.