The Suhuf of Hafsa ﵂: A Chain of Preservation

What the Suhuf Were, and Who Held Them

In the account of the tawatur, which we followed earlier, we saw why the text of the Quran never rested on a single manuscript. We saw that every verse reached the umma along countless independent, parallel channels at once, written on the parchments and preserved in the breasts of the huffaz, and that it was precisely that manifold, mutually confirming transmission that gave the text its unshakability, and not any single document. We saw how even the closing verses of Surah Bara’a, which stood on one single parchment, were accepted only when the collective memory of Zayd ﵁ and the huffaz present confirmed the written version word for word: one leaf, carried by many memories, tawatur in miniature. That certainty therefore stood firm already before a single stack of leaves was ever put away.

At the end of that process, somewhere in 12 AH or early 13 AH, there lay a bundle of loose parchments of unequal size in the house of the Caliph. It was a complete written Quran, with each verse in its proper place within the surah to which it belonged, with double witness for each fragment, with the full legal ratification of the caliphate. It was not yet a mushaf in the sense we give that word today. It was suhuf, a plural, loosely bound, on materials of varying dimensions. The content was definitive; the physical form was not yet uniform.

What follows in this article is not the story of the content, for that was already established in Zayd’s ﵁ collection of the first Suhuf under Abu Bakr ﵁ and already tested against its heavenly origin in the Year of the Mu’arada, but the story of the physical preservation: the chain of hands through which the official archive of the Quran passed in the three decades after Abu Bakr’s ﵁ death, until it was finally destroyed. These are three links of preservation, followed by a final act, and in each of those links lies an answer to a doubt that has been raised about the Quran in later centuries.

For anyone who wishes to take the textual history of the Quran seriously cannot confine himself to the question of how it was gathered; he must also know how it was preserved. A text that is assembled with care but then disappears into a hidden archive opens the door to doubt, while a text that passes through known hands, is transmitted openly, and can be followed by the umma at every point of transition closes that same doubt. What Hafsa bint Umar ﵂ preserved in her house was therefore no hidden manuscript, but the most openly registered document in early Islamic history.

We begin where Zayd’s ﵁ collection of the first Suhuf under Abu Bakr ﵁ ended, and we follow the chain from link to link.

Link 1: Abu Bakr ﵁ Hands Over to Umar ﵁

In the year 13 AH, Abu Bakr ﵁ lay on his deathbed. The man who had accompanied the Prophet ﷺ in the cave of Thawr, who had led the umma through the years of apostasy, who had had Yamamah recaptured and the Quran collected, felt that his work was complete. He appointed Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ as his successor, and he entrusted two things to him. The caliphate, and the suhuf.

The handover was not a ceremonial act. It was practical. The bundle of parchments that had lain in the state archive of Abu Bakr ﵁ passed along in the transition from the first to the second Caliph, just as the seal and the responsibility of authority passed along. No one in Medina could at any moment cast doubt on where the suhuf were. They were there under Abu Bakr ﵁; they were there under Umar ﵁; they had not for a single second known an uncertain holder.

What Umar ﵁ did with them in the ten years of his caliphate is, in the sources, telling through its silence. We do not hear that he had them copied anew. We do not hear that he had them read aloud in public. We do not hear that he ever had to open them for arbitration in a dispute. Under his rule the umma expanded to Damascus, Hims, Jerusalem, Ctesiphon, Basra, Kufa and the Egyptian frontier. He sent at least ten Companions ﵃ to Basra to teach the Quran, he sent ibn Mas’ud ﵁ to Kufa, he sent Mu’adh ﵁, Ubadah ﵁ and Abu ad-Darda ﵁ to Syria and Palestine.

In each of those new centres the Quran was recited as it had been taught, from the memory of a Companion ﵁ who had stood in the direct presence of the Prophet ﷺ. The suhuf in the caliphal archive needed to play no role in that transmission. They lay there as a reference, not as a working book. The wahy-scribes of the Prophet ﷺ were still largely alive. The huffaz numbered in the thousands. The suhuf were the legal anchoring behind a living, oral text carried in thousands of breasts.

And precisely here lies an element that is often passed over in later debates. The suhuf were not the Quran. They were the official written registration of the Quran. The Quran itself lived in every mosque from Medina to Hims to Basra. The suhuf were what in a later terminology would be called the notarial copy, the document one could fall back upon in case of doubt, not the source from which the text was daily brought forth.

Toward the end of the year 23 AH, the position of that written registration changed. Umar ﵁ was stabbed during the morning prayer in the mosque by Abu Lu’lu’ah, according to Azami a Christian slave from Persia, and died a few days later of his wounds. On his deathbed he refused to appoint a successor; the classical sources record that he left the decision to a small council of prominent Companions ﵃, which after his death would come to Uthman ﵁. But for the suhuf he could not appoint a committee. The official archive of the Quran had to lie, in the days until there would be a new Caliph, in the hands of someone whose right to that guardianship stood above every doubt.

He chose his daughter.

Link 2: Umar ﵁ Entrusts the Suhuf to Hafsa ﵂

The choice of Hafsa bint Umar ﵂ is often disposed of in a single line in modern handbooks. Umar gave the suhuf to his daughter, the widow of the Prophet ﷺ. But whoever frames the choice in this way misses its real logic.

Hafsa ﵂ was not an obvious choice because she was the daughter of the Caliph. She was the right choice because in her person three qualities came together that were not to be found so combined elsewhere in Medina.

First, she was a widow of the Prophet ﷺ. After the death of Khadijah ﵂ in Mecca she was one of the women who in Medina formed part of the innermost household of the Messenger ﷺ. She belonged to the Mothers of the Believers, a group whose authority in the umma was undisputed. Her house stood, like that of the other widows, against the outer wall of the mosque, in the cluster of chambers that the Prophet ﷺ had built for his families. The archive of the Quran thereby came to lie not in an administrative building, not with a governor, not with an official who could be replaced through political shifts. It came to lie in the house of a woman whose bond with the revelation had been direct, in the same line of trust that the Prophet ﷺ himself had established with her.

Second, she was a hafiza. She knew the Quran by heart. The classical traditions reckon her among the huffaza of the first generation, alongside her fellow Mother of the Believers Aisha bint Abu Bakr ﵂. This meant that the archive in her house was guarded by the same person who carried it in her breast. Should a question arise about a verse in the suhuf, should a parchment at the edge of her keeping be damaged, should a curious visitor wish to make a check, the guardian herself could provide the comparison. Between the written archive and the living memory there lay no intermediary.

Third, and this was in seventh-century Hijaz a rarity that should not be underestimated, she could read and write. A classical tradition, recorded by among others Abu Dawud, in which the Prophet ﷺ asks Shifa bint Abdullah al-Adawiyya ﵂ to teach Hafsa ﵂ to write as she had taught her the incantation against ants, testifies to her literacy. A literate guardian could not only guard the parchments; she could open them, read them through, and check the text word for word against what she herself knew. The preservation was thereby not the preservation of a closed chest. It was a preservation with insight into what the chest contained.

On top of this came her lineage. She was the daughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, born into a family in which Islam had been lived from the early Meccan years onward. She was the sister of Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁, one of the most cited transmitters of hadith in the first generation. Her upbringing was spiritually, intellectually and legally shaped by a father who in the caliphal office drew no distinction between himself and the humblest citizen. What Umar ﵁ entrusted to his daughter was not a family possession. It was a state document for which he knew himself personally answerable on the Day of Judgement. He placed it in her hand only because he was convinced that she could bear the standard.

At Umar’s ﵁ deathbed the suhuf were handed over. We do not know what words were exchanged, and the sources add no sentiment where there is none. What we do know is what happened. The bundle of parchments that in 13 AH had passed from Abu Bakr ﵁ to Umar ﵁ passed, toward the end of 23 AH, from Umar ﵁ to Hafsa ﵂. And from that moment on the official written archive of the Quran lay no longer in a state building, but in a dwelling house. In that dwelling house it would rest, until the day when Uthman ﵁ asked for it, in silence for about two years.

Link 3: Uthman ﵁ Borrows the Suhuf

Between 23 AH and 25 AH there were, as far as the sources allow us to see, no incidents around the suhuf in Hafsa’s ﵂ house. The umma under Uthman ibn Affan ﵁, chosen by the succession council that Umar ﵁ had appointed, expanded its conquests to the Azerbaijani and Armenian frontier. On that frontier, in a joining of garrisons from different cities, there happened what will be told hereafter in the account of the alarm-cry of Hudayfah ﵁ and Uthman’s ﵁ standardisation. Hudayfah ibn al-Yaman ﵁ saw how soldiers from Damascus and soldiers from Kufa corrected each other’s recitation, for they had learned the Quran in different modes of recitation. It was not a matter of different texts, but of the seven ahruf, the dialectal readings permitted by the Prophet ﷺ himself that were discussed in the Year of the Mu’arada; what was new was that believers who did not know the one mode began to distrust the other. Hudayfah ﵁ returned to Medina, before the dust of his mount had settled, and stepped into the house of the Caliph with an alarm that brooked no delay.

Uthman ﵁ gathered the umma together, laid out the problem, and made a proposal that was unanimously accepted. Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁ has preserved it in the tradition: I see that we bring the people together upon a single Mushaf with a single reading, so that there is no division, no discord. The aim was not the correction of a corrupted text, for the text was the same in every city; the aim was to bring the recitation back to one sanctioned standard, so that the diversity of permitted readings would no longer lead to mutual distrust. As to what the basis of that single Mushaf would be, there was only one rational answer. The official, two-witness-bound, caliphally ratified written registration that lay in the house of Hafsa ﵂.

Uthman ﵁ sent a message. Its words were recorded by al-Bukhari in his Sahih, in the section Fada’il al-Qur’an, and they form one of the few verbatim exchanges we possess from this entire compilation period. The exchange between the Caliph and the Mother of the Believers was not invented by a later historian. The tradition that Azami cites here goes back to al-Bara’ ibn Azib ﵁, a Companion ﵁ who had followed the process from close by, and its core is confirmed multiply in independent isnad chains.

At this short exchange we pause. Not because it is dramatic, for in its wording it is expressly not dramatic. We pause because so much of what has been said in later centuries about the Uthmanic standardisation is set right in these four sentences.

Uthman ﵁ asks; he does not take. The Caliph of the umma, who rules over Damascus, Basra, Kufa, Egypt and the Armenian frontier, asks the Mother of the Believers to lend him the document of which he is the representative and she the guardian. He states the reason for his request, for perfect copies, and he promises to return it, and he does so in the plural, we will return them to you, in which the caliphal office takes on its legal character. This is no private request between father-in-law and son-in-law, but a formal borrowing between the head of the umma and the guardian of the state archive.

Hafsa ﵂ does not send at once. She does not say as you wish or it is your right. She sets a condition. I will send them when you swear to return them. Hafsa ﵂, with the scriptural certainty of a literate woman who holds the document in her hands, exercises the guardian’s function as a notary would. The archive does not leave her keeping without a documented guarantee of return. And the Caliph, with all his office, swears the oath. Only then are the suhuf placed from Hafsa’s ﵂ hand into the hand of Uthman ﵁.

What will hereafter, in the committee of Uthman ﵁, be followed in detail is the work of the committee of twelve, Quraishites and Ansar, with Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ once more at the head and with Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁, Sa’id ibn al-As ﵁, Abdur-Rahman ibn al-Harith ibn Hisham ﵁ and eight others. They would not collect the Quran anew, for the Quran had already been collected; they would use the existing suhuf as the principal source for an independently verified Mushaf, and alongside that make use of parchments which they gathered from the Companions ﵃ in order to test each individual inscription anew against the strictest norm.

What counts for the story of Hafsa ﵂ in this phase is the following. When the committee had finished its work and the new Uthmanic Mushaf had been written out on uniform parchments, it was not merely checked internally among the members. It was compared once again with the suhuf. Zayd ﵁ himself told of this final collation in a tradition that al-Bukhari included in his Sahih.

While I was revising the Uthmanic Mushaf, I missed a verse from Surah al-Ahzab that I had heard the Messenger of Allah ﷻ recite. We searched for it and found it with Khuzaima ibn Thabit al-Ansari ﵁, with no one else. We inserted it in its proper place within the surah. Then Uthman ﵁ sent to Hafsa ﵂ to borrow the Suhuf for comparison. In the comparison I found not a single discrepancy. I returned the Suhuf to Uthman ﵁, and with a mind at ease he ordered that the people should write out the Mushafs.

Not a single discrepancy. These are four words that carry a heavy weight in this whole textual history, for the Uthmanic Mushaf, assembled by a committee that had verified independently from primary sources, on comparison with the Suhuf from Hafsa’s ﵂ house matched not approximately and not in essence but literally. The two archives, separated in time by thirteen years and in method by a second independent collation, were one and the same text.

This fact, reported by Zayd ﵁ himself at the moment he had established it, is what makes the whole line of the textual history stable. A sceptic who in later centuries would wish to maintain that the Uthmanic standardisation was a redaction, a revision, a political rearrangement of the text, must first explain how the outcome of that so-called redaction could be word for word identical to the archive that thirteen years earlier had been established under Abu Bakr ﵁. The content was fixed, and it was fixed from the moment that Zayd ﵁ first brought it together into a single whole in 12 AH.

And then Uthman ﵁ did what he had sworn. He returned the suhuf.

Hafsa ﵂ received her archive, undamaged, with the official confirmation that the Uthmanic Mushaf which the umma would use as its reference matched, in every word, what had lain in her house. The chain was, at that moment in 25 AH, complete: from Abu Bakr ﵁ by way of Umar ﵁ to Hafsa ﵂, borrowed by Uthman ﵁, and back again to Hafsa ﵂. Four hands, one text, nothing altered.

The Openness of the Transmission

Before we go on to the final link, we pause at something that is often passed over in modern discussions about the Quran, but that is the hallmark of this whole chain of preservation.

Nothing of what has been told here happened in secret. Abu Bakr’s ﵁ handover to Umar ﵁ took place in the presence of the entire household of the first Caliph. Umar’s ﵁ handover to Hafsa ﵂ took place at a time when the Companions ﵃ stood around his deathbed, and the fact of that handover was recorded in the same isnad tradition in which his refusal to appoint a successor was recorded. Uthman’s ﵁ message to Hafsa ﵂ was not sent in a note; it was issued in public and recorded in the public hadith transmission, with the verb ardasala, he sent, and with the name of the messenger in one of the variants. Hafsa’s ﵂ oath-condition was, likewise in public, set down in the Mushafs of as-Sahih. The comparison by Zayd ﵁ took place in the mosque, in the presence of the committee and of listeners who left their accounts behind. The return was witnessed by the same witnesses.

No link in this chain lay in a hidden room. No act was kept outside the public registration of the umma. Whoever would wish to claim that the Uthmanic Mushaf was a secret revision of a secret archive must first explain why every single moment in the process, from Abu Bakr’s ﵁ deathbed to Hafsa’s ﵂ oath-condition to Zayd’s ﵁ four-word report, was passed on in independent chains of transmission and included in the standard hadith literature.

This public character is what makes the chain so weighty. A hidden archive can be manipulated by a single hand without anyone noticing. A public archive, which lies in the house of a woman whose house borders the mosque and whose brother Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁ is one of the most sought-after transmitters of his time, lies under permanent scrutiny. What happened to the suhuf happened in full sight of the umma. And the umma recorded it, link by link.

The Destruction by Marwan ibn al-Hakam

Hafsa ﵂ died several decades after the Uthmanic standardisation; the classical sources usually date her death to 41 or 45 AH. In the years between 25 AH and her death the Uthmanic Mushafs had been sent out to Medina, Mecca, Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and, in the fuller traditions, also to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrayn and al-Jazirah. Each of those centres had received a dispatched reciter, an authorised Companion ﵁ who taught the pronunciation of the Uthmanic text to the local community: Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ for Medina, Abdullah ibn as-Sa’ib ﵁ for Mecca, and others for Syria, Basra and Kufa.

The suhuf in Hafsa’s ﵂ house had, in the decades since the standardisation, no active function any longer. They were no longer the source from which copies were made, for each centre already possessed a uniform expanded Mushaf with the same text. They were no longer the arbitration reference, for disputes were henceforth settled on the basis of the Uthmanic codex present in every large mosque. What they were was the original written registration of Abu Bakr’s ﵁ time, in old parchments of unequal dimensions, carefully preserved by a woman who had protected the document with her life.

After her death the guardianship passed to her heirs. Among them her brother Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁ was the most prominent. But the political authority over Medina lay in those years with Marwan ibn al-Hakam, governor of the city under caliph Mu’awiya ﵁. And it was Marwan ibn al-Hakam who shortly after Hafsa’s ﵂ death had the suhuf collected and destroyed.

What he did is rendered in direct wording by the sources, in particular Ibn Abi Dawud in al-Masahif and as-Suyuti in al-Itqan. He received the suhuf, and he had them destroyed.

The motive that the traditions ascribe to him is unambiguous. Marwan ibn al-Hakam feared that the suhuf, as an older written version of the Quran, might create the impression in the umma that they contained divergences from the standardised Uthmanic Mushaf. That could, in later years, lead to precisely the kind of division that Uthman ﵁ had wished to prevent with his standardisation. As long as Hafsa ﵂ lived, her person was the guarantee that the archive remained in its proper place and was not interpreted by the wrong hands. With her death that personal guarantee lapsed. Marwan ibn al-Hakam chose the definitive solution: destruction.

Before we go on, this act compels us to some sharp distinctions.

What Marwan ibn al-Hakam destroyed was not the Quran. The Quran lay at that moment in Mecca, in Medina, in Damascus, in Kufa, in Basra, in every mosque of the expanded umma, in a text that had been found by Zayd ﵁ himself, thirteen years after the assembly of the suhuf, in a verbatim collation, to be identical to the suhuf. The text was entirely safe. What he destroyed was an older written registration of that same text, which by its physical age and its divergent format might create confusion in the community about the relation between the original and the standardised copy.

What he destroyed was not a secret document. The fact of its destruction, with his name, with his office, with his motive, is recorded in the hadith literature. A secret destruction would have left no report behind. This report is there, signed by transmitters whose chains can be traced, and it bears his name as the chain of preservation before him bears those of Abu Bakr ﵁, Umar ﵁ and Hafsa ﵂. What he did, he did in a political position in which he knew that it would be noticed and passed on.

And what he did is also not recorded by the sources without criticism. Various scholars in later centuries have criticised Marwan’s action in this specific case, not because they held that he had corrupted the Quran, for that he demonstrably had not, but because the original written registration from Abu Bakr’s ﵁ time, in its oldest physical form, was a priceless memorial that the umma could have preserved by other means. We render this element without taking sides. The facts of the destruction are recorded; the assessment of it diverges in the literature. What we register here is that a politically important act at the centre of the umma was carried out in full light and is documented in full light.

What the Chain Means for Textual Certainty

We summarise what the three links of preservation, followed by the eventual destruction, mean for the textual history of the Quran.

In the first place, the chain shows that the official written archive of the Quran never disappeared into an uncertain period. Between 12 AH, the year in which Zayd ﵁ concluded the work, and 25 AH, the year in which the Uthmanic Mushaf was issued, every year of preservation is documented. Under Abu Bakr ﵁, under Umar ﵁, under Hafsa ﵂. No gap. No intervening period in which the text was entrusted to uncontrolled hands. No anonymous guardian. An unbroken chain of three named persons, each with a biography written out by the hadith literature.

In the second place, the borrowing by Uthman ﵁ shows that the standardisation was no redaction. When a committee would wish to revise a text in order to suppress divergent readings or to affirm political preferences, it would not build in an external collation against the oldest archive. Uthman ﵁ did precisely that. He had the Uthmanic Mushaf, assembled by his own committee of twelve, laid at the end of the process against the Abu Bakr Suhuf that came from Hafsa’s ﵂ house. Zayd’s ﵁ four-word report says it without circumlocution. I found not a single discrepancy. The so-called redaction could be established nowhere, because it had not taken place.

In the third place, the chain weakens a persistent modern argument. Sceptics of the twentieth century have at times claimed that the Uthmanic Mushaf was a political construction that rendered the Abu Bakr Suhuf superfluous and that later, in the absence of a verifiable original, could be accepted untested. The chain of preservation refutes this literally. The original was not only present at the moment of the Uthmanic standardisation; it was the source against which that standardisation was verified. And the verification showed no divergence. The Mushaf in our hands today descends from an Uthmanic codex that in 25 AH matched, word for word, an Abu Bakr Suhuf established in 12 AH under a two-witness protocol that was told in detail in Zayd’s ﵁ collection of the first Suhuf under Abu Bakr ﵁.

In the fourth place, the chain brings us back to a promise that stands in the Quran itself, revealed in a phase in which no one could suspect that the text would one day pass through so many hands and remain undamaged in doing so.

The promise stands in the Meccan phase, years before any suhuf existed. It is fulfilled by a chain of people whose names we know, in acts we can follow, in a document preserved by three named persons. What Allah ﷻ pledged as preservation received its historical working-out in the house of a woman who had known the Prophet ﷺ, who carried his message in her breast, and who exacted an oath before she let the archive out of her hand.

In the fifth place, the chain sets us before a distinction that is not always made clearly in modern textual criticism. A text can be conveyed through history in various ways. Some sacred scriptures have a long anonymous transmission, with fragments passed down over centuries by unknown copyists and set down in an authoritative form only late. For the Quran that transmission is not anonymous. The names are there. The hands are there. The documents are there, until after Hafsa’s ﵂ death they are destroyed by a governor in an act that is likewise recorded with name and motive. We know where the text lay, who carried it, and when it changed guardianship. The distance between the origin and the present is spanned with names, not with silence.

In the sixth place, the chain is an argument against the notion that the umma withheld or falsified its own memory of these events. A community that would wish to conceal the details of its textual history would not have recorded Marwan ibn al-Hakam’s destruction. It would have kept silent, as the fabricators of legends always keep silent about inconvenient facts. But the tradition does not keep silent. It reports the act, it reports the motive, and it reports the criticism that later scholars levelled at that act. A falsified history would have made Marwan ibn al-Hakam into an unremarked guardian. The real history makes him into a governor whose action is comprehensible for legitimate reasons and can be regretted for museal reasons. Both judgements live in the literature. Neither is hidden.

What the chain as a whole shows is, finally, a property upon which the umma has built its textual certainty. The Quran was not preserved because it lay in a safe vault, for vaults know no security over the long term. It was preserved because it lived in many layers at once. In the breasts of thousands of huffaz. In the Uthmanic Mushafs sent out to every large city. In the original archive with Hafsa ﵂. In the living reciter traditions of Zayd ﵁, ibn Mas’ud ﵁, Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁, Abu ad-Darda ﵁ and Abu Musa al-Ash’ari ﵁. When one layer was taken away, the others still lay there, none of them any more vulnerable to the removal than they had been before the removal. Marwan ibn al-Hakam could destroy the Abu Bakr Suhuf without a single letter of the Quran being lost by it, because he was not dealing with the Quran but with a separate physical registration of a text that was present in full form in hundreds of other places. What protects the Quran protects it not merely as a bundle of parchments. It protects it as a reality carried in the umma on several levels at once.

Looking Ahead to Hudayfah’s ﵁ Alarm-Cry

We have in this article followed the three links that brought the Suhuf from the end of Abu Bakr’s ﵁ caliphate into Hafsa’s ﵂ house, and we have seen the borrowing by Uthman ﵁ as the hinge on which the caliphal archive was turned into a standardised Mushaf. What follows hereafter, in the account of the alarm-cry of Hudayfah ﵁ and Uthman’s ﵁ standardisation, lies chronologically at the very heart of this story. It is the event that provoked the borrowing.

We return in that account to the Armenian frontier in 25 AH, to the garrison of Hudayfah ibn al-Yaman ﵁, to the soldiers from Damascus and Kufa who corrected each other in prayer, and to the haste with which Hudayfah ﵁ returned to Medina. His entrance into the house of Uthman ﵁, his alarm-cry, and the decision that Uthman ﵁ took in the hours thereafter are the occasion for precisely the message we have seen here, send us the Suhuf. Without Hudayfah’s ﵁ ride to Medina the bundle would have remained lying in Hafsa’s ﵂ house, unopened, for an indefinite time. With that ride came the borrowing, came the committee of twelve, and came the Mushaf that the umma has recited in its prayer ever since.

We enter that account with the knowledge we have built up in this article. We know where the Suhuf lie. We know who preserves them. We know which oath the Caliph will have to swear before the archive comes out of her hand. And we know that at the end of the work, years later, a man named Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, the same man who in his collection of the first Suhuf under Abu Bakr ﵁ had brought them together into a single whole, will after the verification say, in a single sentence of four words, what carries the whole textual history of the Quran to this day. I found not a single discrepancy.