href="#fb3_img_img_aede6bf0-77e0-575e-b4f9-a9c610b7da82.jpg"/>n as a chaos that must be brought to order by human effort.
In Zayd’s narration of the endeavor, he relates, “So I searched for the Qur’n, and collected it from palm leaves, stones and the breasts of men.” This project resulted in a written copy of the Qur’n, which the Companions called a maaf (reportedly after the Ethiopian word for book), produced not for public use but for archival preservation. Discussing the etymology of the Greek root for archive, Jacques Derrida notes that it was the holders of political power who, as makers of the law, became archons; they protected official documents in their private residences, placing the archive under a kind of “house arrest.”17 As caliph, Ab Bakr retained possession of the new Qur’nic archive. After Ab Bakr’s death, it was kept by his political successor, ‘Umar; with ‘Umar’s death, the archive went into the hands of ‘Umar’s daughter, Hafsa, who was also a widow of the Prophet and regarded as an authoritative scholar of the Qur’n.18 During the third caliphate, the regime of ’Uthmn, a second “official” collection of the Qur’n would be established, this time to achieve standardization of the public Qur’n. ’Uthmn was driven to this project after controversies over proper readings spread among the adherents of conflicting versions (as many as fifteen different collections in the possession of individual Companions and thirteen among the Followers19) and also among troops during distant campaigns. For his codification enterprise, ’Uthmn is said to have borrowed the Ab Bakr archive from Hafsa. However, the ambition was not merely to reproduce Hafsa’s document exactly as it appeared, as ’Uthmn assembled a team of experts to examine and confirm the text. He appointed Zayd ibn Thbit as overseer and also recruited three Meccans to assist the process—one because he was an expert in the Arabic language, the other two because they were from Muammad’s tribe, the Quraysh—and reportedly asked that if the three ever contested Zayd’s opinion regarding a verse, that they should write the verse in the “original” Quraysh dialect.20 In a further innovation, ’Uthmn ordered that copies of the state-supported Qur’n be sent to major cities, and that competing local versions be destroyed. Some of these versions reportedly differed from ’Uthmn’s codex in the inclusion or exclusion of particular verses or entire sras. Similar to the way in which reports of Muammad’s statements would be authenticated, these rival collections of the Qur’n were associated with the prestige of specific Companions. In Kfa, where the Companion Ibn Mas’d’s collection had been established as the official version, there was brief resistance to ’Uthmn’s state codex. What we can gather from the accounts of these variants, explains Estelle Whelan, is that early Muslims were willing to base their arguments against each other “on the premise that the Qur’n had not been given definitive form by the Prophet to whom it had been revealed.”21 There is also a report that after Ab Bakr’s collection was returned to Hafsa, the governor of Medina demanded that she hand it over to him for destruction; even if her archive had provided the foundation for ’Uthmn’s project, it was not equal to the finished, official codex, and the governor feared that it would undermine the new caliphal archive. Hafsa refused; but after her death, the governor seized her collection and ordered that the pages be torn up.22 This could illustrate a point about
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