href="#fb3_img_img_aede6bf0-77e0-575e-b4f9-a9c610b7da82.jpg"/>n’s integrity and unity, the oldest complete and “official” copy of the Qur’n had to be destroyed.
What has been called the Qur’n’s “still-fluid pre-canonical text”23 did not instantly become solid with ’Uthmn’s codex, which remained capable of variation. It appears that the copies that ’Uthmn sent to cities such as Mecca, Damascus, Bara, and Kfa did not match each other perfectly, perhaps including copyists’ mistakes. ’Uthmn is reported to have allowed the imprecise copies, assuming that any mistakes would be corrected by knowledgeable Arabs.24 On top of these challenges, there was the problem of instability in Arabic writing. At the time, the Arabic script was not fully developed, lacking vowel marks or dots. The government’s Qur’n, therefore, provided only a bare consonantal skeleton, which allowed for multiple vocalizations and changes in meaning. Without voweling, the word mlk in the first sra could undergo a subtle shift in interpretation, recited as either malik (“king”) or mlik (“owner”). Without dots to properly distinguish the letters, the word fl (“elephant”) could be read in numerous ways, such as ql (“it is said”), qatala (“he killed”), or qabala (“he kissed”). While the variations themselves did not produce major controversies over meaning—at no point, for example, were there debates over 105:1’s mention of an elephant—the mere fact of difference nonetheless enabled competing schools to discredit each other through the charge of faulty readings.25 Roughly fifty years after the establishment of the ’Uthmnic codex, the Qur’n’s text would be further codified under the Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-ajjj ibn Ysuf al-Thaqaf (d. 713). Two centuries later, seven vocalizations of the Qur’n’s consonants would be established as acceptable, based on transmissions that traced back to seven well-known reciters from the cities that had received ’Uthmn’s codex. The era in which the Qur’n’s vowels and dots were secured was one in which numerous fields of knowledge underwent a “shift towards the consolidation, standardisation and canonisation of concepts and doctrines.”26
Prior to the advancements in Arabic writing, the textual copy (muaf) of the Qur’n would not have been useful as a source of information. It functioned more as a tool for those who already knew the words to refresh their memorization or teach others, or, as in the case of a caliphal codex, to establish the proper contents and their organization. With the orthographic reforms and fixing of the Qur’n’s vocalization, however, the revelation could speak to new audiences—and these audiences could assert their right to understand the material. The revealed text, which had previously been the territory of oral reciters (qurr’) who traced their knowledge to the Prophet, became accessible to a developing field of professional grammarians (nawiyyn). Efforts to understand the Qur’n encouraged the formation of grammatical schools, which in turn transformed the study of the Qur’n. The grammarians, boasting superior mastery of the Arabic language, competed with the reciters as privileged custodians of the revelation. Their battle for authority would be decided in part by the introduction of paper, which replaced inferior papyrus and amplified the presence of book media in Muslim debates; when the Qur’n became a book to be comprehended through the knowledge of other books and fields
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