Forgotten Witness: Evidence for the Early Codification of the Qurʾān

Three kinds of historical evidence are examined here that have not previously been seriously considered in relation to the question of codification. The Umayyad inscriptions from the Dome of the Rock have generally been ignored or dismissed because of apparent departures from the canonicaltext, as represented by the Cairo edition ; here they are analyzed for the evidence they nonetheless provide for the state of the Qur⊃ānic text toward the end of the first hijrī century. Equally informative are al-Walid's inscriptions at the Great Mosque of al-Madinah, datable about twenty years later ; they were described by eyewitnesses in the first half of the tenth century, when they were still partly visible. Finally, from scattered indications it is suggested that there was a group of professional Qur⊃ān copyists at al-Madinah at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century.