the time, nor could such a copy be made while the Holy Prophet was alive, and still receiving revelations. But the whole of the Holy Qur’ān in one arrangement was safely preserved in the memories of reciters (qurrā’). It happened, however, that many of the reciters fell in the famous battle of Yamāma, in the caliphate of Abū Bakr,13 and it was then that ‘Umar14 urged upon him the necessity of compiling a standard written copy, so that no portion of the Holy Qur’ān should be lost even if all the reciters were to die. And this copy was compiled, not from the hundreds of copies that had been made by individual Companions for their own use but from the manuscripts written under the direction of the Holy Prophet himself, and the arrangement adopted was that of the oral recitation as followed in his time. Thus a standard written copy was prepared, which was entrusted to the care of Ḥafṣah, wife of the Holy Prophet.15 But still no arrangement had been made for securing the accuracy of the numerous copies that were in circulation. This was done by ‘Uthman16 who ordered several copies to be made of the copy prepared in the time of the first Caliph, and these were then sent to the different Islāmic centres so that all copies made by individuals should be compared with the standard copy at each centre.

Standardization of the Holy Qur’ān

Thus Abū Bakr ordered a standard copy to be prepared from the manuscripts written in the presence of the Holy Prophet, following the order of chapters which was followed by the reciters under the directions of the Holy Prophet, and ‘Uthmān ordered copies to be made from this standard copy. If there was any variation from that standard copy, it went no further than this that where the Quraish17 wrote a word in one way and Zaid wrote it in another way, ‘Uthmān’s order was to write it in the manner of the Quraish. This was because Zaid was a Madinite while his colleagues were Quraish.18

As to what these differences were, some light is thrown on the point by Tirmidhī, one of the collectors of Ḥadīth, making the following addition to this report: “And they differed on that occasion as to tābūt and tābūh. The Quraish members said that it was tābūt and Zaid said that it was tābūh. The difference was reported to ‘Uthmān