Sketches from Eastern History. Theodor Noldeke
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for their safe preservation, did not enter his mind. A man destitute of literary culture has some difficulty in anticipating the fate of intellectual products. But now, after the death of the Prophet, most of the Arabs revolted against his successor, and had to be reduced to submission by force. Especially sanguinary was the contest against the prophet Maslama, an imitator of Mohammed, commonly known by the derisive diminutive Mosailima (i.e. “Little Maslama”). At that time (A.D. 633) many of the most devoted Moslems fell, the very men who knew most Koran pieces by heart. Omar then began to fear that the Koran might be entirely forgotten, and he induced the Caliph Abú Bekr to undertake the collection of all its parts. The Caliph laid the duty on Zaid, the son of Thábit, a native of Medina, then about twenty-two years of age, who had often acted as amanuensis to the Prophet, in whose service he is even said to have learned the Jewish letters. The account of this collection of the Koran has reached us in several substantially identical forms, and goes back to Zaid himself. According to it, he collected the revelations from copies written on flat stones, pieces of leather, ribs of palm-leaves (not palm-leaves themselves), and such-like material, but chiefly “from the breasts of men,” i.e. from their memory. From these he wrote a fair copy, which he gave to Abú Bekr, from whom it came to his successor Omar, who again bequeathed it to his daughter Hafsa, one of the widows of the Prophet. This redaction, commonly called al-sohof (“the leaves”), had from the first no canonical authority; and its internal arrangement can only be conjectured.
The Moslems were as far as ever from possessing a uniform text of the Koran. The bravest of their warriors sometimes knew deplorably little about it; distinction on that field they cheerfully accorded to pious men like Ibn Mas‘úd. It was inevitable, however, that discrepancies should emerge between the texts of professed scholars, and as these men in their several localities were authorities on the reading of the Koran, quarrels began to break out between the levies from different districts about the true form of the sacred book. During a campaign in A.H. 30 (A.D. 650-1), Hodhaifa, the victor in the great and decisive battle of Neháwand—which was to the empire of the Sásánians what Gaugamela was to that of the Achæmenidæ—perceived that such disputes might become dangerous, and therefore urged on the Caliph Othmán the necessity for a universally binding text. The matter was entrusted to Zaid, who had made the former collection, with three leading Koraishites. These brought together as many copies as they could lay their hands on, and prepared an edition which was to be canonical for all Moslems. To prevent any further disputes, they burned all the other codices except that of Hafsa, which, however, was soon afterwards destroyed by Marwán, the governor of Medina. The destruction of the earlier codices was an irreparable loss to criticism; but, for the essentially political object of putting an end to controversies by admitting only one form of the common book of religion and of law, this measure was necessary.
The result of these labours is in our hands; as to how they were conducted we have no trustworthy information, tradition being here too much under the influence of dogmatic presuppositions. The critical methods of a modern scientific commission will not be expected of an age when the highest literary education for an Arab consisted in ability to read and write. It now seems to me highly probable that this second redaction took this simple form: Zaid read off from the codex which he had previously written, and his associates, simultaneously or successively, wrote one copy each to his dictation. These, I suppose, were the three copies which, we are informed, were sent to the capitals Damascus, Basra, and Cufa, to be in the first instance standards for the soldiers of the respective provinces. A fourth copy would doubtless be retained at Medina. Be that as it may, it is impossible now to distinguish in the present form of the book what belongs to the first redaction from what is due to the second.
In the arrangement of the separate sections, a classification according to contents was impracticable because of the variety of subjects often dealt with in one súra. A chronological arrangement was out of the question, because the chronology of the older pieces must have been imperfectly known, and because in some cases passages of different dates had been joined together. Indeed, systematic principles of this kind were altogether disregarded at that period. The pieces were accordingly arranged in indiscriminate order, the only rule observed being to place the long súras first and the shorter towards the end, and even that was far from strictly adhered to. The short opening súra is so placed on account of its superiority to the rest, and two magical formulæ are kept for a sort of protection at the end; these are the only special traces of design. The combination of pieces of different origin may proceed partly from the possessors of the codices from which Zaid compiled his first complete copy, partly from Zaid himself. The individual súras are separated simply by the superscription, “In the name of God, the compassionate Compassioner,” which is wanting only in the ninth. The additional headings found in our texts (the name of the súra, the number of verses, etc.) were not in the original codices, and form no integral part of the Koran.
It is said that Othmán directed Zaid and his associates, in cases of disagreement, to follow the Koraish dialect; but, though well-attested, this account can scarcely be correct. The extremely primitive writing of those days was quite incapable of rendering such minute differences as can have existed between the pronunciation of Mecca and that of Medina.
Othmán’s Koran was not complete. Some passages are evidently fragmentary; and a few detached pieces are still extant which were originally parts of the Koran, although they have been omitted by Zaid. Amongst these are some which there is no reason to suppose Mohammed desired to suppress. Zaid may easily have overlooked a few stray fragments, but that he purposely omitted anything which he believed to belong to the Koran is very unlikely. It has been conjectured that in deference to his superiors he kept out of the book the names of Mohammed’s enemies, if they or their families came afterwards to be respected. But it must be remembered that it was never Mohammed’s practice to refer explicitly to contemporary persons and affairs in the Koran. Only a single friend, his adopted son Zaid (xxxiii. 37), and a single enemy, his uncle Abú Lahab (cxi.)—and these for very special reasons—are mentioned by name; and the name of the latter has been left in the Koran with a fearful curse annexed to it, although his son had embraced Islam before the death of Mohammed, and although his descendants belonged to the high nobility. So, on the other hand, there is no single verse or clause which can be plausibly made out to be an interpolation by Zaid at the instance of Abú Bekr, Omar, or Othmán. Slight clerical errors there may have been, but the Koran of Othmán contains none but genuine elements—though sometimes in very strange order.
It can still be pretty clearly shown in detail that the four codices of Othmán’s Koran deviated from one another in points of orthography, in the insertion or omission of a wa (“and”), and such-like minutiæ; but these variations nowhere affect the sense. All later manuscripts are derived from these four originals.
At the same time, the other forms of the Koran did not at once become extinct. In particular we have some information about the codex of Obay. If the list which gives the order of its súras is correct, it must have contained substantially the same materials as our text; in that case Obay must have used the original collection of Zaid. The same is true of the codex of Ibn Mas‘úd, of which we have also a catalogue. It appears that the principle of putting the longer súras before the shorter was more consistently carried out by him than by Zaid. He omits i. and the magical formulæ of cxiii. cxiv. Obay, on the other hand, had embodied two additional short prayers, whose authenticity I do not now venture to question, as I formerly did. One can easily understand that differences of opinion may have existed as to whether and how far formularies of this kind belonged to the Koran. Some of the divergent readings of both these texts have been preserved, as well as a considerable number of other ancient variants. Most of them are decidedly inferior to the received readings, but some are quite as good, and a few deserve preference.
The only man who appears to have seriously opposed the general introduction of Othmán’s text is Ibn Mas‘úd. He was one of the oldest disciples of the Prophet, and had often rendered him personal service; but he was a man of contracted views, although he is one of the pillars of Moslem theology. His opposition had no effect. Now when we consider that at that time there were many Moslems who had heard the Koran from the mouth of the Prophet, that other measures of the imbecile Othmán met with the most vehement resistance on the part of the bigoted champions of the faith, that these were still further incited against him by