The Alarm of Hudhayfah ﵁

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Twelve Years Later

Twelve years after the battle of Yamama, twelve years after the night in which Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ laid down the suhuf in the house of Abu Bakr ﵁, the umma no longer looked as it once had. In the previous article we followed the chain of preservation along which those suhuf were passed on: from Abu Bakr ﵁ to Umar ﵁, and from Umar ﵁ to his daughter Hafsa bint Umar ﵂, the widow of the Prophet ﷺ and herself a literate hafiza in whose house the official archive came to rest. When Umar ﵁ took up the leadership after the death of Abu Bakr ﵁, those suhuf still lay in the private keeping of the caliphate, undamaged and uncopied. Before his own death at the hand of Abu Lu’lu’a, Umar ﵁ gave them into the keeping of Hafsa ﵂, and he appointed no successor, but left the choice to the people and to the council that would form it.

In the years that followed, under Uthman ibn Affan ﵁, the land on which the Companions ﵃ lived was no longer the same land. The Byzantine Levant had been opened, Egypt had been opened, and the Sassanid provinces fell one after another to the bedouin who left their desert without footwear and returned with their Book. Damascus, Hims, Basra, Kufa, Fustat: these were cities that within a single generation had passed from fire-temple or basilica to mosque, and along with their walls they inherited a task for which the umma had as yet no tool, namely how to keep the recitation of one Prophet ﷺ intact across a territory that expanded faster than any report could travel.

With the cities the teachers multiplied. Every great city had its own master of recitation, its own huffaz-school where the newly converted non-Arabs learned how the words of Allah ﷻ must sound in their mouths. In Kufa that was Abdullah ibn Mas’ud ﵁, sent to Iraq by Umar ﵁ himself, one of the first men to have recited the revelation openly at the Ka’bah and who had come to Islam even before Umar ﵁. In Basra sat Abu Musa al-Ash’ari ﵁ with his circle of several hundred students. And in Damascus taught Abu ad-Darda’ ﵁, whose circle of students would eventually number more than sixteen hundred men. Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁, called the master of recitation by the Prophet ﷺ himself, was regarded in Medina as the living touchstone.

Each city recited as its master recited, and each master recited as he had taken it from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ; and each recitation, measured against its source, was correct. This is the point we must hold onto above all, for it determines everything that follows: nowhere in this story is there a teacher who errs, a school that falsifies, or a text that decays, there is only an umma that has grown too large for the ear that once held it together.

Umar ﵁ had already seen that phenomenon coming during his own caliphate. When he heard that Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ was teaching in Kufa in the dialect of Hudhayl, one of the great tribes of the peninsula, Umar ﵁ wrote to him reproachfully that the Quran had been revealed in the tongue of Quraish and that he must therefore teach it in the tongue of Quraish, not in the tongue of Hudhayl. It was an admonition and not a verdict. Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ was the first man to have recited publicly at the Ka’bah, he had heard the Prophet ﷺ in person, and no one accused him of erring; Umar ﵁ reproached him only that his local dialect, however permitted, was not the solution to the problem of an empire that was expanding to the east and the west at once. A non-Arab convert who wanted to learn the Book for the first time was, Ibn Hajar later observed, best served when he was given the Quraishi pronunciation, for in any other dialect the Arabic would remain just as foreign to him, and in that one dialect the revelation had, after all, begun. Umar’s ﵁ concern was not about right and wrong, but about a firm foothold: in an empire full of tongues it was more practical to anchor the non-Arab to one tongue than to let him choose among seven of which he knew not one from home.

The warning of Umar ﵁ was, like so many of Umar’s ﵁ warnings, early. He died before the rift became visible. His dagger-stroke in the mosque left the question unresolved, and the umma moved on, faster than its governance.

But the cities no longer lay in one valley. Between Kufa and Damascus lay weeks on horseback. Between Basra and Fustat lay seas. And in the garrison towns on the northern frontier, where men from Kufa, men from Basra, and men from Hims slept in a single army camp, the recitations came to lie side by side for the first time, mouth to mouth, in the same row of the prayer.

The Ahruf and the People

To understand what happened in that army camp, we must go back for a moment to Medina. To a small quarrel that the Prophet ﷺ had once had to settle himself.

Umar ﵁ later told the story himself. He heard Hisham ibn Hakim ﵁ reciting Surah al-Furqan, and he heard Hisham ﵁ using sounds and words that he, Umar ﵁, had never learned that way from the Prophet ﷺ. The anger of Umar ﵁ was known to everyone who had ever had dealings with him. He waited until Hisham ﵁ had finished his prayer, dragged him by his garment, and brought him to the Prophet ﷺ.

Seven ahruf. Seven modes, seven dialectal variants, seven permitted ways in which one and the same verse might sound in the mouth. The scholars would later write for centuries about what exactly was meant by this, whether it concerned whole dialects, small variations in word choice, or differences in conjugation and sound; but the essential point was clear from that afternoon in Medina onward, for the revelation had not been cast in one narrow form, it had been cast in a space, and that space was a mercy.

It was a mercy out of necessity, and the Prophet ﷺ had given it as such. The tribes of Arabia possessed differing tongues, and it would have been impossible to make them all give up their mother tongue at once in order to learn the Book in one foreign pronunciation. The ahruf spared the bedouin whose tongue could not manage certain Quraishi sounds, the convert whose mouth had yet to bend itself to the letters, the elder who had spoken one way her whole life. Thus the Book was made accessible to an umma that was not an umma of one tribe. The ahruf were a bridge.

But bridges, once built, can also become something else. What is mercy in the presence of one Prophet ﷺ in one mosque becomes something else when that Prophet ﷺ has passed on, when the mosque has multiplied into a hundred cities, when every city has its own master, and when the son of that master has never once heard the variant that in the neighbouring city is entirely normal. What in Medina was compassion became confusion at the northern frontier.

To see why, we must understand what the ahruf needed in order to be portable. They were not a written list from which one chose, but a living knowledge passed on from mouth to mouth, and that knowledge encompassed not only the sound of each variant but also the awareness that there was more than one and that they were all equally permitted. As long as both speakers shared that awareness, the difference was no problem; it became dangerous only once that shared awareness fell away.

And that awareness fell away with every link in the chain. For a Companion ﵁ who had himself sat with the Prophet ﷺ on the day a variant was granted, the matter was self-evident; for his student, who knew the variant only from the mouth of his master, his own recitation was the only one he had ever heard; and for the student of that student, three links removed from the Prophet ﷺ, every deviation was a scandal. The distance to the source grew with every city and every generation not only in time, but also in understanding: the ahruf still existed, but the awareness of what they were faded. Thus it came about that a perfectly valid reading, in the mouth of the one, sounded to the ear of the other like a rupture.

Hudayfah at the Front

Among the men who moved north in 25 AH was Hudayfah ibn al-Yaman ﵁, and to understand why his voice in particular came to carry weight, we must know who he was.

He was the bearer of the secret. The Prophet ﷺ had entrusted to him alone the names of the munafiqun, the hypocrites of Medina, the men who prayed in public and in secret plotted the fall of Islam. When one of them died and Umar ﵁ was later caliph, Umar ﵁ looked first to Hudayfah ﵁ before he went to the prayer for that deceased man: if Hudayfah ﵁ did not pray, then the caliph too stayed away. No writing, no list, no open declaration, only the silent weight of that one pair of eyes.

He was, in other words, a man who did not raise the alarm quickly, trained in secrecy and in discernment, trained to look at people and not judge at once. When such a man rides in haste to the caliph, that is in itself already a message.

He was also a soldier. He had spent the night at Khandaq when the Prophet ﷺ sent him alone into the camp of Abu Sufyan while the wind of Allah ﷻ howled over their tents. In 25 AH he stood at the northern edge of the empire, on the border of what is now called Azerbaijan and Armenia, where the troops of Sham and the troops of Iraq had been brought together for the first time under one joint command. It was precisely that merging that would break the matter open, for as long as the Iraqis remained among Iraqis and the Syrians among Syrians, no one ever heard a reading other than his own.

How those different readings had arisen can be read from the way the teaching had been set up in the provinces. In the time of Umar ﵁, Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁, the governor of Sham, had formally requested teachers, because the population, so he wrote to the capital, urgently needed instruction in the Quran and in the affairs of Islam. Umar ﵁ had thereupon sent three Companions ﵃, Mu’adh ibn Jabal ﵁, Ubada ibn al-Samit ﵁, and Abu ad-Darda’ ﵁; at first they worked together in Hims, then Mu’adh ﵁ moved on to Palestine, while Abu ad-Darda’ ﵁ settled definitively in Damascus, where his circle of students eventually numbered more than sixteen hundred men, divided into groups of ten under their own under-instructors. In Basra Abu Musa al-Ash’ari ﵁ did the same; Abu Raja’ al-Atarudi relates that he divided the students in the mosque of Basra into groups and supervised some three hundred of them. In Kufa Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ had been appointed by Umar ﵁ himself. Every city thus had its own institute and its own chain of transmission that reached back to one Companion ﵁.

It was, in a certain sense, one of the finest educational projects in the history of mankind, for within a single generation a network of Quran-schools had appeared that reached from Egypt to the Iranian highlands. But each of those schools was for practical reasons autonomous, without a messenger and without any synchronization, so that what a teacher taught in Hims remained unknown in Kufa, and what a teacher in Basra emphasized reached a student in Damascus only years later, by roundabout ways, and then often in a variant the other no longer recognized.

The Syrians had learned their recitation along the line of Damascus and the Iraqis along that of Ibn Mas’ud ﵁, and behind both lines stood Companions ﵃ who had taken their recitation directly from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ and taught it exactly as they had received it. Thus two impeccable transmissions lay side by side in the same army camp, without anyone possessing the shared awareness that could have reconciled the two.

What He Heard

It happened, as such things always happen, not in a council chamber and not in a mosque, but in the ordinary life of the camp: in a field tent, in the row of the communal prayer, or by a watch-fire where two soldiers passed the time by hearing the other recite. The sources preserve the nature of such clashes, not their words.

A Syrian opened his mouth at a verse, and out of that mouth came a sound that was unknown to the Iraqi beside him. The Iraqi straightened his back, the Syrian went on, and the Iraqi listened with ever greater disbelief until he interrupted him.

The difference in pronunciation was in itself innocent, but in the mouths of men who lacked the shared awareness of the ahruf, it turned into an accusation, and that accusation touched upon the most terrible thing a believer could imagine, namely that the other had taken the words of Allah ﷻ into his mouth and given them back mutilated. Here lies the pivot of the whole story: neither of the two men had corrupted the text, and yet each of them believed that the other did. The rift lay not in the Book, but in the ear that had drifted too far from the source to still know what it heard.

Hudayfah ﵁ heard it, and he heard it not once; he heard it in the camp of the Syrians and in the camp of the Iraqis, and he heard men who on the battlefield were brothers accuse each other in the bivouac of blasphemy, each convinced that the other had mutilated the recitation of the Prophet ﷺ. He knew that both were wrong and that both meant it.

Precisely for that reason it struck home with him. Hudayfah ﵁, bearer of the secret of the munafiqun and a tested reader of men, recognized the shape of what he heard. He had heard the Prophet ﷺ tell how the Jews and the Christians had come to dispute over their Books, and how every dispute had produced a new sect and every sect a new accusation. He knew what shape this sickness took once it gained a foothold, and he knew that it would not pass of its own accord.

He did not, then, wait until the campaign was over, and not even until the summer had ended; he handed over his command, had his horse saddled, and rode to Medina.

The Ride to Medina

The sources do not preserve how many days the ride cost him, but they do preserve its urgency: he went directly from the front line to the caliph, without the detour a man on leave would have taken, and he went inside with the dust of the northern plain still on his cloak.

Uthman ﵁ received him. The caliph was no stranger to Hudayfah ﵁, for they were contemporaries who had grown up together in the shadow of the first umma; but the man who now entered came not as an old friend, but as a soldier with a report.

And the report was a single sentence, transmitted in the early sources almost word for word the same, which already says something about the weight the transmitters attached to it.

It is a remarkable sentence in its restraint. Hudayfah ﵁ does not say that the umma has already been torn apart, but that it is on the point of tearing; he asks for no inquiry, no tribunal, no judgment over Ubayy ﵁ or over Ibn Mas’ud ﵁, he asks only for rescue. Adrik has the flavour of someone who snatches the hand away before a child falls into the fire, not later and not after deliberation, but now.

And he asks it in the only place where it can be asked. Not of Ubayy ﵁ and not of Ibn Mas’ud ﵁, for a judgment from the mouth of the one would unleash a conflict between two Companions ﵃; not of the council of elders, for they would each defend their own city. He asks it of the caliph, because only the caliph has authority over all the cities at once. The same discernment that had made him the bearer of the secret also showed him the only place where this could be resolved.

And Uthman ﵁ listened. His nature makes his decision all the weightier, for he was the man praised by everyone for his modesty, the gentle and wealthy merchant of Mecca who had bought free the well of Rumah and given it to the community, and who had never ruled with the fist as Umar ﵁ had done. He was, in everything, no man of haste and no man who liked to restrict.

But when the bearer of the secret of the Prophet ﷺ stood in his reception room and spoke the words yahud wa-an-nasara, Uthman ﵁ understood that the matter was greater than his own preference for gentleness and delay.

Uthman’s ﵁ Decision

He promised Hudayfah ﵁ rest and called together the Companions ﵃ who were still present in Medina. He did not lead them into a debate, he set the problem before them and asked their judgment on recitation in different dialects. The standardization thus began not as a decree from above but as a question to the men who knew the revelation best; what followed came out of consultation and not out of a fist.

The problem was, so he explained, not what most of his advisers first thought. It was no heresy, for none of the teachers in the cities had gone astray: Ubayy ﵁ had not lied, Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ had not deceived, Abu Musa ﵁ had invented nothing, and Abu ad-Darda’ ﵁ had made nothing up. They had all, each for himself, learned as the Prophet ﷺ had taught them, and given as they had received. The diagnosis of Uthman ﵁ was therefore no accusation against his own scholars.

The problem was something finer. It was not the root, it was its budding scent in every direction at once. The ahruf, the seven modes granted by the Prophet ﷺ, had been a mercy for an umma that lived within one day’s journey of Medina, within one field of view of the man who had received the revelation, and in which an unfamiliar variant could always still be laid before the Messenger of Allah ﷻ himself within a week.

That umma no longer existed. The Messenger of Allah ﷻ had passed on twelve years ago and had not come back to confirm or to deny, and the ahruf, formerly enclosed by his presence, now lay open across thousands of miles and hundreds of cities without any feedback. Without that feedback, every variant, however lawful, became for the neighbour an accusation. What in unity was mercy was in dispersion a wound.

It was, in other words, not the text that had been corrupted, but the relation between the text and the ear that heard it. And that relation could not be restored by placing one teacher above the others, for that would unleash a civil war among the Companions ﵃; nor could it be restored by leaving everyone to his own variant, for then what Hudayfah ﵁ had seen would multiply into every garrison town from Morocco to Khorasan. One way remained, and only the caliph could take it.

Uthman ﵁ came, in the consultation with the senior Companions ﵃, to a conclusion of which he knew that it would stand on his name forever. The question to the assembly was simple.

It is, on paper, a short exchange. Beneath that short exchange, in the silence of the men who said yes, lay the awareness that this was the weightiest decision of the caliphate up to that point. Uthman ﵁ was on the point of restricting not the Quran itself, but the breadth of its reading, and of binding for the first time the seven ahruf that the Prophet ﷺ had granted to one single variant, that of Quraish, the dialect in which the revelation had begun and in which the Prophet ﷺ had most often pronounced it.

He was not on the point of declaring Ubayy ﵁ wrong or of invalidating Ibn Mas’ud ﵁; he was on the point of saying that their separate freedoms, though individually correct, could no longer be borne by a community that could no longer hear them in the same mosque. It was no condemnation of the past but a provision for the future, and that distinction is the core of what happened here: a man who wanted to conceal a corruption would have erased the traces, whereas Uthman ﵁ set the authoritative archive precisely in the full light and called witnesses together.

No man afraid of his name in history would have taken this decision. Uthman ﵁, famous for his modesty and by no means a man of haste, took it, in the knowledge that its burden would rest on him forever.

The Request to Hafsa ﵂

The first practical consequence of that decision was a short, courteous message to a house on a neighbouring street.

Hafsa bint Umar ﵂, daughter of the murdered caliph and widow of the Prophet ﷺ, had since the death of her father carried something no other person on earth carried: she had the suhuf in her care. The leaves that Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, Umar ﵁, and Abu Bakr ﵁ had brought together after the battle of Yamama, and which in the previous article we saw pass from the lap of a soldier to the archive of the first caliph, had for many years lain in her dwelling.

Here we must pause for a moment, for this is one of the quietest but weightiest arguments in the whole history of the compilation.

Consider what it means. The official archive of the caliphate, the document each letter of which had under Abu Bakr ﵁ and Umar ﵁ been tested against two witnesses and against the aural transmission of the living huffaz, had for twelve years lain unused and uncopied, unconsulted and undamaged in a private dwelling. It did not lie locked away in a palace and it was not guarded by soldiers or made the object of political dispute; it lay in the care of a woman whose integrity was undisputed, and the umma had let it lie.

She had let it lie not out of negligence, but out of reverence. The ahruf-permission of the Prophet ﷺ meant that the oral transmission in every city could continue independently, so that there was no practical compulsion to consult the suhuf of Hafsa ﵂. And yet the archive was there: it was not forgotten, not destroyed, not stolen and not swallowed by a disaster, and when the umma suddenly needed it in 25 AH, it was still there, complete and untouched.

It is, in text-critical terms, a rarity in a history that teems with lost manuscripts and reconstructed codices. Here was an autograph that had never gone missing, never been recopied, never been reworked. Bergsträsser, the German orientalist, would much later formulate rules for the evaluation of manuscripts and rank them according to their distance from the original autograph, and his sharpest rule held that when the original still exists, every copy made of it loses all significance. Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ had reduced that distance to the source to zero already twelve years earlier, and Hafsa ﵂ had kept it there, so that Uthman ﵁ did not have to reconstruct what was lost but only had to copy what had been preserved undamaged.

Uthman ﵁ knew that. That is why he sent no scholar, no secretary, and no army to fetch the leaves, but a request, politely phrased, with the promise of return attached.

She granted it and released the leaves. And Uthman ﵁ kept his word; in a later transmission we see how he is reminded once again of that same promise and how he returns the suhuf to her undamaged after the compilation. The early sources know, alongside this best-known account, a second, less current transmission in which Uthman ﵁ first has an independent collection assembled before he compares it with the suhuf; but both streams agree completely on one point, namely that the suhuf of Hafsa ﵂ were the pivot of the whole operation.

No court in the world today would dare negotiate such a transfer without a thick dossier of guarantees. In Medina, in 25 AH, it happened between a caliph and a widow of the Prophet ﷺ by means of one message and the promise of honest return, and that promise was enough.

The Weightiest Judgment of a Caliph

The suhuf were, on the appointed day, brought to the house of Uthman ﵁. We do not see them come in on the back of a donkey; we do not see them in a chest. We know only that they arrived, and that from that moment the caliph began to run the race against time.

He understood what he held in his hands. They were not just any leaves. They were, as Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ would later say, the material that had been brought in under two witnesses at the gate of the Prophet’s Mosque, the material each sentence of which had been sworn to by at least two Companions ﵃, the material of which even the last two verses of Surah Bara’a, which had been found only with Abu Khuzaima ﵁ in written form, had been inserted after huffaz-confirmation.

He also understood what he had to do. He had to make, from this archive, a new type of document. Not loose suhuf, not a collection of leaves of varying sizes like the text he had before him, but bound, identical mushafs. Books, meant to be sent to the provinces in all four directions. Books in one dialect, the Quraishi, so that a student in Damascus and a student in Kufa and a student in Basra could have the same text before them without their masters having to accuse each other.

He understood, finally, whom he needed for this. No youth who could merely read, but the scribe of the Prophet ﷺ himself, the man who had already completed the first compilation under Abu Bakr ﵁. He needed Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, again. And alongside Zayd ﵁ he needed Quraishi tongues to decide on the dialect where dispute was permitted: Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr ﵁, Sa’id ibn al-As ﵁, Abdurrahman ibn al-Harith ibn Hisham ﵁.

In other sources we see how Uthman ﵁ expanded this core further into a committee of twelve, which also included Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁ himself, and Anas ibn Malik ﵁, and Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁, and Malik ibn Abi Amir ﵁, and others, Quraishi and Ansari together. He wanted, deliberately, the two sides of Medina, the Emigrants and the Helpers, both to be represented in the writing room. He wanted no later voice to be able to say that this was a Quraishi decision against the Ansar, or an Ansar decision against Quraish. He wanted it to be the decision of the umma, carried by every group that the Prophet ﷺ had personally raised.

Above that committee hung an instruction. There was no doubt about it. Uthman ﵁ said to the three Quraishi men who would work directly beside Zayd ﵁:

One instruction, one rule that in case of doubt rendered the judgment. No philosophy, no theology, no lofty language, only the simple fact that the revelation had begun in a specific tongue and that on every contested point that tongue would be decisive.

It is remarkable how little Uthman ﵁ said to the committee, for he gave no address on the unity of the umma, called no one to account over the past, and named no guilty city. He gave an order, he gave a tiebreaker, and he let the men who knew the Quran do their work. Whoever has something to hide makes a plea; Uthman ﵁ made none.

The meeting room was arranged. The suhuf of Hafsa ﵂ came to lie on a table. Beside them lay the leaves that had been made in the preceding years by individual Companions ﵃, personal copies that circulated in every city; for, as we shall see in a later phase, Uthman ﵁ also had new primary sources brought in, in order to compare his new Mushaf not only with the suhuf but also with an independently collected second stream.

He wanted, in other words, not only that the Mushaf should be correct, but that it should be doubly correct, so that no later generation could say that one archive alone had ruled or one committee member alone had decided. The first suhuf of Abu Bakr ﵁ and the independently collected fragments had to confirm each other before a single line was bound into a definitive book.

The sun went down over Medina, the suhuf lay on the table, and the huffaz stood ready. Beyond the walls of the city, in hundreds of cities at once, men still recited as they had learned, each as his master had laid it in his mouth, and they did not yet know that in the house of Uthman ﵁ the twelve had already taken up the pen.

In the days and weeks that followed, a new book would come into being. No new revelation, no new text, no new content, but a new form, one single form in which the revelation of Allah ﷻ from Morocco to Sind and from Yemen to the Caspian mountains would sound identical in every mouth. It would later cost Uthman ﵁ his life, and it would give the umma a unity of text that it would never lose again thereafter.

And it would begin, not with a verse, not with a committee, and not with a decree, but with a soldier who had ridden back from the north and said to a silent caliph: save this umma before it disputes as the Jews and the Christians disputed before it.

It is, in hindsight, remarkable that the impulse did not come from the heart of the caliphate. It came not from Medina, where the scholars sat, nor from Mecca, where the holy places lay; it came from the outermost edge of the empire, where men from different provinces stood shoulder to shoulder for the first time in the same row of the prayer and after their fighting saw something for which no sword sufficed. The soldier who had stood there and recognized the pattern brought the warning; the caliph who had the whole umma in view could do something with it. The standardization was thus no whim of the centre but an answer to an observation from the field.

Hudayfah ﵁ himself returned, as far as the sources tell us, to the front after his warning. He had brought what he had had to bring, and he had no role in the committee, no place in the writing room, and no share in the editing of what would follow. He had been the watchman who had raised the alarm, and the builders of the wall came after him; but for the history of the Book his name stands before that of every builder, for without his ride there would have been no Mushaf and without his one sentence no unity.

The judgment of a caliph is rarely heaviest when the choice is clear; it is heaviest when every option hurts. Uthman ﵁ chose, and he chose to restrict the ahruf for the umma, not out of contempt for what the Prophet ﷺ had granted, but out of reverence for what the Prophet ﷺ had left behind: one community of faith, one Book, and one spiritual direction, in hundreds of cities at once. He chose unity over breadth, silence over discussion, the one dialect in which the revelation had originally sounded, and he let the rest go, with a broken heart. This was no cover-up but an act of preservation: the permitted readings were not wiped away but summed up in the tongue in which the revelation had begun, and the suhuf that proved it returned undamaged to the woman who had preserved them.

In the next article we follow what the twelve, with the suhuf of Hafsa ﵂ before them and the instruction of Uthman ﵁ above them, did in the weeks that followed.