The Year of the Mu’arada

A Recurring Visit in Ramadan

In the previous article we followed the writing hand of the young Islamic state: the chancery of the Prophet ﷺ, with its dozens of scribes, its seal, and its dated diplomatic letters, preserved down to our own time as tangible, documentary evidence that the early community did not merely recite but also wrote. We saw how those sealed state letters refuted at the root the thesis of a writingless, purely oral early Islam, and how the written transmission of the revelation rested on that same administrative ground. But whether a text is preserved in the breast or on parchment, it calls for a touchstone, something that measures it anew against its heavenly origin each time.

That touchstone existed, and it deserves its own story. For the whole transmission of the revelation, everything that had been written down, recited, memorized and preserved, had a heart: a recurring act that tested all of it against its heavenly origin time and again. That act was called mu’arada, and it took place in Ramadan.

The scene is so intimate that a hasty reader passes over it. A house in Medina, an evening after sunset, two figures together in a room. No crowd, no assembled Companions ﵃, no public ceremony. The Prophet ﷺ sits, and Jibril ﵇ sits, and together they recite the Quran revealed until then. Sometimes Jibril ﵇ recites while the Prophet ﷺ listens. Sometimes it is the reverse. The next evening they resume where they had stopped. So it goes on the whole month through.

Ibn 'Abbas ﵁ tells it in sober terms: the Prophet ﷺ met Jibril ﵇ every night in Ramadan, and together they went over the Quran, until the end of the month. No dramatic scene. No flash of light. A recurring visit, yearly, thirty nights long. That the Angel came in Ramadan was no coincidence. The month of the first revelation was also the month of the yearly testing. The circle closed itself each year anew around the root.

The mosque of Medina therefore knew that rhythm from within. When Ramadan drew near, the Prophet’s ﷺ tempo changed. He withdrew more often into i’tikaf, he stayed longer hours in the mosque, and he limited his sleep. The Companions ﵃ knew that something happened in his nights that did not happen in all the other months, and they knew enough not to ask about it immodestly. The information that reaches us about the mu’arada does not come from an address in which the Prophet ﷺ solemnly explained it to his community. It comes from scattered remarks that were later conveyed, in the generation of the second and third transmission, by those closest to him. The family knew it. A handful of intimates knew it. The rest heard it in fragments.

This was, for anyone who views it from a distance, a remarkable protocol. A yearly calibration of the received text against its source, gone through in full between the human messenger and the heavenly one, is a thing that one rarely finds named so sharply in the recorded history of sacred texts. What was accepted in the umma as a familiar custom therefore, on closer consideration, deserves more attention than it usually receives.

And that yearly protocol had a name. A name that is more than a label. A name that holds the essence of what happened in a single word.

The Word Mu’arada

Mu’arada comes from mufa’ala, an Arabic grammatical pattern that denotes reciprocal action. Two parties who do the same thing to the same object, by turns. It is the same pattern as muqatala, mutual fighting, or mukataba, mutual correspondence. The word itself already carries the structure within it: not one speaker and one listener, but two partners who act by turns.

What does that mean concretely? It means that Jibril ﵇ did not come merely to confirm the Quran in a one-way traffic from heaven to earth. It also means that the Prophet ﷺ did not function merely as a receiver. Both recited. Both listened. Both checked. The Angel heard back from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ what he had earlier brought from God’s presence, and the Prophet ﷺ heard back from the mouth of the Angel what he had received in his breast over the course of the year.

This is something other than dictation. This is something other than inspection. This is a joint recitation in which the text, line by line, surah by surah, moved back and forth between two reliable bearers. Whoever does justice to the Arabic word sees that mu’arada was not merely a check, but a form of common possession. The text was not merely sent and received. It was, once a year, recited together.

For the believer there is still something more present in this. For the Quran itself names the owner of the text, and that owner is not man. When, in the Meccan period, the Prophet ﷺ was so eager to memorize the descending verses that he set his tongue in motion before the revelation was complete, a verse came down that calmly counseled him:

The words are theologically weighty, and commentaries such as that of at-Tabari point to a meaning that is exceptionally important in our context. Jam’ahu means both memorization and collection, both the bringing together in the heart and the bringing together in a book. The collection of the text is not a human undertaking that believers must accomplish afterward. Allah ﷻ Himself takes that task upon Himself. It is upon Us that the jam’ rests, not upon you.

Whoever reads these verses with the mu’arada in mind suddenly sees where that yearly review fits in the larger plan. The Author Himself says: I collect it. I recite it. I clarify it. And once a year His messenger descends to confirm that tangibly with the Prophet ﷺ. The yearly mu’arada is, seen thus, the visible embodiment of a promise that is openly stated in Surah Al-Qiyama. The calibration against the source, which Allah ﷻ has promised, takes place every Ramadan in a house in Medina.

What Happened During the Mu’arada

The sources are honest and sober on this point. We do not know everything. We know enough.

We know that it happened at night, for Ibn 'Abbas ﵁ speaks explicitly of every night in Ramadan. We know that it extended over the whole month. We know that it comprised the entire text revealed until then, not merely a selection. Abu Huraira ﵁ puts it briefly and clearly: the Prophet ﷺ and Jibril ﵇ went over the Quran once a year. Not portions, not chapters. The whole.

We also know that during these meetings the Prophet ﷺ was not only a listener. In other revelations Jibril ﵇ came in a visible form, sometimes in the form of a man, sometimes such that the Prophet ﷺ was in a physical state that those around him could see directly. Aisha ﵂ left a well-known description of this: she once saw how the revelation descended upon him on an ice-cold day, and how his forehead grew wet with sweat before it passed. With the mu’arada that physical trace is absent from the sources. It appears that this was a calmer kind of meeting, not the flood of a new revelation but a conversation between two old acquaintances about a text that they both knew inside and out.

We know further that this was a pattern that repeated itself every year, not only in the final year. That is a point where the sources are very careful. Abu Huraira ﵁ emphasizes that the Prophet ﷺ and Jibril ﵇ did this recitation yearly. For whoever reflects on how long that pattern ran: the first revelation came in 13 before the Hijra, the final year was 11 AH. That is a tradition that may have lasted more than two decades. Two decades of yearly calibration. A rhythm so regular that it became almost invisible in the life-story of the Prophet ﷺ, as breathing becomes invisible in a biography.

There was possibly a second layer as well. A report that stands in the name of Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ opens a window onto the way the mu’arada passed over from heavenly intimacy into human dissemination. According to that report, after a session in which the Prophet ﷺ and Jibril ﵇ had gone over the Quran together, he then recited to the Prophet ﷺ, who called his recitation eloquent. Al-Azami ﵀ honestly notes with regard to this report that its isnad is very weak, and we adopt that reservation. We therefore build no conclusive argument upon it, but mention it in order to show what image the early community itself preserved of the mu’arada: an image in which what was calibrated in secret did not remain lying on a heavenly shelf, but was soon passed on to a human reciter.

We picture it to ourselves. The month of Ramadan, the mosque in the late hours, the believers who have performed their nightly prayer, and a reciter who recites what the Prophet ﷺ had gone over with Jibril ﵇. The Prophet ﷺ listens. The calibration of that night becomes audible in the community, and the bridge from heaven to earth is crossed in a single evening.

Even without that weak report the underlying pattern stands, for it rests on firmer ground. How could a text that was verified in secret between Angel and Prophet ﷺ then attain the same degree of certainty in the wider community? The answer lies not in a single stray report, but in the entire working method of the Prophet ﷺ, who emphatically passed on to his scribes and reciters what he received. What he received, he passed on to his Companions ﵃, who passed it on again to their students, and they again to theirs. The recitation chain that in later centuries would be called isnad did not in fact begin only after the death of the Prophet ﷺ. It began during his life, in the mosque of Medina, each time a calibrated recitation sounded aloud in confirmation.

The Role of Jibreel as Co-Verifier

What makes these meetings so special is the position of Jibril ﵇ within them. He had not been merely the messenger who brought the revelation from the origin to the Prophet ﷺ. He was now also the verifier who came to check whether what he had conveyed had been preserved unblemished.

In ordinary prophetic history we see angels who convey messages and then depart. To Ibrahim ﵇ came three messengers, and they went again. To Maryam ﵍ came Jibril ﵇, and he went again. The message was delivered, the messenger vanished. The text, insofar as there was a text, lay from that moment in the hands of man, and man alone was responsible for what happened between reception and dissemination.

With the Quran it is different. Jibril ﵇ does not depart definitively; he keeps coming, every year anew, thirty nights long. He brings no new verses, but he hears the old verses, and the Prophet ﷺ hears him. That says something crucial about how Allah ﷻ regards His Book.

A book that is handed to man and thereafter roams freely can lose much in a human lifetime. It can be mingled with other words, can be reshaped by dialectical shifts, can be quietly amended by memories that, without ill intent, nonetheless corrupt. A book that is yearly verified against its heavenly origin cannot. For even if a bearer’s hand shifts, the next mu’arada brings the deviation to light. Even if a single memory falters, the Angel catches it.

The consequence is a text that could never drift farther from its source than one Ramadan away. That follows directly from the nature of the procedure itself, for the distance between text and origin was bounded anew each time by the next yearly review. A feedback loop with so short a cycle is exceptional for a transmitted text.

For the modern reader a thought arises here that has already resounded in earlier articles, but that here takes its sharpest form. When people who study the textual history with an open heart are pointed to the “late compilation” of the Quran, or to the idea that the text was only cast into its definitive form decades after the Prophet ﷺ, they often do not realize that they are reasoning past the mu’arada. For before Abu Bakr ﵁ ever had a suhuf bound, before 'Uthman ﵁ ever had a mushaf copied, before a single Companion ﵁ ever raised the idea of collecting the Quran into one book, the text had already been recited together with Jibril ﵇ twenty times or more. The testing against the source was not something the umma had to undertake decades later. That testing was completed each year in Ramadan by heavenly authority itself.

What Abu Bakr ﵁ and 'Uthman ﵁ would later do was no reconstruction. It was consolidation. The difference between those two words is the difference between building a dike out of nothing and reinforcing a dike that already stands.

The Final Year

In 10 AH the Prophet ﷺ set out from Medina for his farewell pilgrimage, where on the plain of 'Arafat he gave the umma the broad lines of its responsibility for the future. According to the classical tafsir tradition, at that pilgrimage verse 5:3 descended: today I have perfected your religion for you. That perfection concerned the religion as a whole, and one may not simply connect it to the mu’arada; it does, however, mark the juncture in time in which the last Ramadan fell.

Between that farewell pilgrimage and his death in the year 11 AH lay a short window of time. In that window fell the last Ramadan, and in that last Ramadan something happened that broke the custom.

Jibril ﵇ came, as every year. But this time he did not recite the whole Quran with the Prophet ﷺ once. He did it twice.

Abu Huraira ﵁ lays it down in a hadith of a single sentence: the Prophet ﷺ and Jibril ﵇ went over the Quran once a year, and in the year in which he died they went over it twice. It is a sentence that in its sober wording sounds almost offhand. But for whoever reads it with the awareness of what follows, a whole world lies within it.

Twice. A doubling of the testing. A twofold confirmation of what rested in the breast of the Prophet ﷺ. What the Angel did once when everything ran normally, he now did twice because the end was near. The calibration was sealed in a double seal.

The Prophet ﷺ himself knew what this meant. He had not needed to ask Jibril ﵇ why. He understood it at once. And he shared that understanding with the person who stood closest to him.

Fatima ﵂ and the Whispered Tone

We see them before us. The Prophet ﷺ in his chamber, his daughter Fatima ﵂ called to him. What he is about to say to her is no address to the Companions ﵃, no announcement to the umma, no verse that will be written down. It is a confidence between a father and his youngest daughter, and it is transmitted in the terms in which Fatima ﵂ would herself later recall it.

She told Aisha ﵂ what had been said. Aisha ﵂ preserved it and passed it on. From her preservation it made its way into al-Bukhari’s Sahih, under the chapters that treat the value of the Quran.

Thus it comes down to us, as a single line, in the transmission of a daughter who hears her father speak of his own death. In the Arabic wording of al-Bukhari it sounds as Ma ara illa qad hadara ajali, I see none other than that my term has arrived. It is no complaint and no fear, but a calm observation, uttered by a man who understood what he had just perceived.

Fatima ﵂ wept, Aisha ﵂ adds. And then she laughed. The Prophet ﷺ had afterward told her something more, something that would console her, that she would be the first of his family to follow him into the Hereafter. That is another story, belongs to another history. For our history, what precedes it is enough.

We pause for a moment at the fact that the information reached us by way of two women. The Prophet ﷺ chose for this moment not one of his most prominent Companions ﵃, not Abu Bakr ﵁ in whom in all other matters he placed his trust, not 'Umar ﵁ whose acuteness he valued. He chose his daughter. And Fatima ﵂ chose, in turn, to share what she knew with Aisha ﵂. Between those two women a communication passed that proved to be of significance for the umma, and without their willingness to pass it on, the umma would never have known why the double mu’arada of that year was so weighty.

For what the Prophet ﷺ had told her in confidence was not a vague foreboding. It was a conclusion from an observation. He had received the Angel twice where he usually received him once. He knew what that said.

For our history of the text this moment gives something extra. The communication that Fatima ﵂ gave to Aisha ﵂, and that Aisha ﵂ passed on to the umma, is no lost story in the sources. It is a hadith that stands in al-Bukhari’s ﵀ most carefully filtered collection, with a chain of transmitters of which each link is nameable. That the information about the double mu’arada made its way, by way of a whispered tone between father and daughter, and thereafter by way of a conversation between two women, into the public legacy of the umma, is in itself a sign of how seriously even the most personal communications of the Prophet ﷺ were preserved.

Nothing was lost. A conversation between Fatima ﵂ and her father was passed on by Aisha ﵂ to those around her. Those around her passed it on to the next generation. And in the third or fourth link it made its way into a written collection that we can still consult today. The personal became public, without losing its intimacy.

Zayd ﵁ and Ubayy ﵁ as Witnesses

The mu’arada did not end with the Angel.

A report that Al-Azami mentions from the work of A. Jeffery adds a final layer to the picture. After the final session with Jibril ﵇ in that last year, the Prophet ﷺ recited together with Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁ to each other. And to Ubayy ﵁, one of the most experienced reciters among the Companions ﵃, he recited in that same last year twice.

This is no detail to read past. It is, for the textual history of the Quran, one of the focal points of the whole life of the Prophet ﷺ.

For what happens here is a transmission. The heavenly testing was completed and Jibril ﵇ had done his double calibration, and now the Prophet ﷺ transmitted that same calibrated text to the two human witnesses who had written it down for him the most and had worked with him the most: the youngest of the scribes and one of the most seasoned reciters. Both were present, both participants in the final recitation, and both from that moment bearers of a text that had already been gone over twice with the Angel.

This explains why Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, in the next article, when Abu Bakr ﵁ gives him the task of collecting the first suhuf, does not begin from nothing. He has heard it. Not once, but in that last year once more, and in a manner that he knew was the definitive one. This explains why Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁ later takes such a central place in 'Uthman’s ﵁ commission. He was not merely a learned reciter, he was witness to the conclusion.

We must pause for a moment at what this means. If we ask ourselves who heard the text of the Quran in its definitive form from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ, in the knowledge that it was the final version, then two names stand on that list. Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁. Their presence at those last recitations is not symbolic. It is functional. They were eyewitnesses, or better said, eyewitnesses-with-voice, of a text that had been calibrated twice with the Angel that very month.

The choice of precisely these two men is moreover no coincidence. Zayd ﵁ was, as we saw in the previous article, the youngest of the scribes, the man whose house lay next to the mosque and who came with inkpot and shoulder blade in hand when the revelation descended, and he thereby represented the written side of the transmission. Ubayy ﵁ represented the oral side. He was the qari’, the learned reciter, and al-Bukhari ﵀ preserves the report that the Prophet ﷺ conveyed to him that Allah ﷻ had commanded him to recite Surah Al-Bayyina to him. Writing and voice, pen and mouth: the two channels along which the Quran would go into the future came together in the two witnesses of the final mu’arada.

And it is no coincidence that in the generation after the death of the Prophet ﷺ these two names are again and again linked to every verifying act. Zayd ﵁ compiles the first suhuf. Ubayy ﵁ represents the Madinese recitation tradition. 'Uthman’s ﵁ commission listens to them. They were not just learned Companions ﵃, they were the human contact points of the last mu’arada.

What This Means for the Textual History

Before we go to the close, we summarize what the mu’arada precisely proves, and what it does not prove.

It proves that during the life of the Prophet ﷺ the Quran was not merely passively received, but was actively verified each year in Ramadan against its heavenly source, by the Angel who had originally brought the revelation. That is a documented, recurring procedure that one rarely encounters on this scale and with this regularity in the history of transmitted revelation texts.

It proves further that in the last year this verification was doubled. Not as new revelation, but as final confirmation. The text was doubly sealed before the Prophet ﷺ departed. What was collected under Abu Bakr ﵁ in 12 AH was not a text still subject to uncertainty about its extent or form. It was a text that had, only months earlier, been gone over twice with the Angel, and in the presence of human witnesses of whom Zayd ﵁ himself would become the compiler.

It proves that the umma that transmitted the text did not act out of reconstructive need. It acted out of consolidative duty. The content was fixed. The order was fixed. The placement within surahs was fixed, for Jibril ﵇ had himself instructed it on various occasions. What was lacking was not the text, but the physical binding together.

It proves, finally, that the skepticism that occasionally surfaces in modern polemics about the “late compilation” of the Quran rests on a false premise. The premise is that a text which does not exist as a bound codex is thereby an unfinished text. But the mu’arada shows that the content of the Quran had already, two decades before the first binding, been calibrated yearly down to its last verse against the heavenly source. The form of the binding came later, yes. But the text that was bound was not what was fished up from collective memory after the Prophet ﷺ. It was what had been recited twice with the Angel in his last Ramadan, and what he then transmitted to Zayd ﵁ and Ubayy ﵁.

Between the second mu’arada and the deathbed lay only a few months, and between the deathbed and the start of Abu Bakr’s ﵁ collection lay about a year. For a textual history this is not late, but rather a remarkably short transition from oral and scattered written recording to a bound codex.

The Bridge to the Eyewitness

When later the story turns to the plain of Yamamah, to the battle against Musaylimah the liar and to the huffaz who would fall in a single engagement, we will see how 'Umar ﵁ comes to Abu Bakr ﵁ in panic and urges him to bind the Quran into one bound whole.

What the mu’arada history adds to that future moment is this: ‘Umar’s ﵁ panic was no panic about the text itself. It was panic about the bearers. The text was fixed. It had been gone over twice with the Angel in the last year. It had been transmitted to Zayd ﵁ and Ubayy ﵁. It lay on hundreds of riqa’, adim, aktaf, adla’, likhaf, and 'usub in just as many houses. What the umma was losing, however, were the human memories that went along with the text.

When Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ in the year 12 AH began to collect the pieces of bone, parchment and palm stalk from the houses of Medina, he did no archaeology. He did bookkeeping. He knew precisely what belonged in his writing box. He had himself heard the Prophet ﷺ recite it, in the presence of Jibril ﵇, in the last mu’arada of the Prophet ﷺ. What he collected on loose sheets in 12 AH was what he had heard with his own ears in 11 AH. No reconstruction. A writing-out.

For the umma that would bear this text through the centuries, the mu’arada remains a resting point where doubt seldom comes. Scholars of many generations, among them at-Tabari ﵀, Ibn Hajar ﵀ and al-Baqillani ﵀, have brought this same fact back again and again to its core: that the Quran did not come into being through human negotiation or editorial compromises, but was gone over yearly in Ramadan with the Angel, in the last year twice, and was transmitted to its bearers in the presence of nameable human witnesses. Whoever understands this chain understands why the umma, in its wide geographical dispersion, does not dispute the content of the text. There is nothing to dispute, for the testing was completed fourteen centuries ago, in a manner to which no later generation could add or subtract anything.

That is, finally, the deepest effect of the mu’arada on the history of the text. It was, year after year, a documented testing of the text against its divine origin, and it is that recurring audit which gave Zayd ﵁ the certainty to begin in 12 AH, which gave 'Uthman ﵁ his standard in 25 AH, and which gives the umma to this day the confidence that the Quran it holds in its hands was not drawn up by human commissions, but was calibrated during the life of the Prophet ﷺ against its own heavenly source. Twice in his last Ramadan, before the eyes of two human witnesses.

And all of that, like so many crucial moments in the history of the umma, began with a nightly visit in Ramadan. An Angel who came, as he came every year. A Prophet ﷺ who recited with him, as he recited every year. And one year, one single year, in which that one cycle doubled itself, and in which a daughter heard her father whisper that his term had come.

That the double mu’arada of that last year has come down to us, we owe to a chain that ran through the household of the Prophet ﷺ: Fatima ﵂ entrusted it to Aisha ﵂, and Aisha ﵂ passed it on to the umma. She was not merely the transmitter of this one report, but the sharpest eyewitness that the history of revelation knows, the woman in whose room the wahy descended and upon whose observation our whole picture of how it descended rests. In the next article we therefore pause at her testimony, before the text is bound into a single volume after the death of the Prophet ﷺ: the testimony of Aisha ﵂ about the wahy.