Letters Bearing a Seal: The Chancery of the Prophet ﷺ

An Objection That Touches the Whole Series

There is an objection to early Islam so often repeated that it has come to sound almost self-evident. It runs as follows. Early Islam was an oral movement. A preacher in a desert town, surrounded by kinsmen who recited and memorized, but who did not write, because the Arabs of the sixth and early seventh century possessed no developed script. Whatever Quran came down, then, lived in memory and in memory alone, and only generations later, once the empire had established itself and script had developed, was that oral inheritance set on parchment. By that time, so the conclusion runs, the text had already passed through the hands of many voices and had therefore inevitably been distorted.

We have already met this reasoning in various guises across this series. It underlies Mingana’s premise, which claimed that the Arabs possessed no alphabet suited to recording revelation. It underlies the assumption that the early Quran existed only orally. And it underlies the broader thought that a text not immediately set down in writing can never afterward be reliably recovered in writing.

The appeal of that thesis is understandable. It fits a broader picture that the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held of the pre-Islamic Arabs, a picture of roving tribes without a writing culture, without libraries, without the institutions in which written knowledge is preserved. In that picture the poet was the repository of the language and memory was the only filing cabinet. And if memory was the only filing cabinet, then the Quran too must have lain within it, vulnerable to wear and drift, until a later and more literate generation finally set it down. So the thesis builds a chain: no script, therefore oral transmission, therefore late recording, therefore an uncertain text. Break one link of that chain, and the whole reasoning falls apart.

This article breaks the first link, and it does so not with a counterargument but with an object. Not with a line of reasoning about whether the Arabs could write, but with documents that prove they did, in precisely the years in which the thesis says they could not.

In the previous article we followed the principle of the seven aḥruf, the multiplicity of permitted modes of recitation that the Prophet ﷺ himself authorized, in which one and the same revelation could be recited, and in it we saw the living, orally textual richness of the Quran. But that same young community, alongside that reciting mouth, also had a writing hand, and it is toward that written, documentary side that we now turn. In an earlier article, moreover, we saw that script itself existed in mature form long before the Prophet ﷺ, in the dated inscriptions of Zabad, Jabal Usays, and Harran. In another article we met the scribes of the Prophet ﷺ themselves, the men who stood beside him with inkpot and shoulder blade each time the wahy came down. This article adds a third kind of evidence to those, and it is of a special sort. It is not an inscription in stone from a generation before Islam, and it is not a report about what happened in the mosque of Medina. It is something more tangible. It is the very state letters of the movement that received the Quran, written by its own chancery, dated within its own decade, sealed with its own seal, and at least in part physically preserved down to our own time.

We say it plainly at once, for the misunderstanding lies in wait. These letters contain no Quran. We do not claim here that a verse stands within them, and Al-Azami ﵀ does not do so on these pages either. What the letters prove is something else, something more modest and for that very reason more unassailable. They prove that the same movement, in the same year, with the same infrastructure, simply wrote. That there was a chancery. That there were scribes, more than sixty, who turned the Prophet’s ﷺ instructions into dated, sealed, dispatched prose. And if that channel existed for a letter to a Byzantine emperor, then it existed too for the revelation that formed the core of that whole movement.

What a Chancery Is

The word chancery sounds grand for an oasis community, but it describes precisely what arose in Medina. A chancery is the place where an authoritative administration produces its correspondence. Where incoming letters are read and answered, where treaties are drawn up, where messengers depart with a text that carries the authority of the sender. It requires three things. It requires writers who have mastered the craft. It requires a means of authenticating a document, so that the recipient knows it truly comes from the sender. And it requires a habit, a routine in which that writing is not incidental but systematic.

All three of these things were present in Medina, and the sources leave no doubt about it. As to the writers, we have already seen in the article on the scribes of the Prophet ﷺ that Al-Azami gives a list of roughly sixty-five Companions ﵃ who at one moment or another wrote for the Prophet ﷺ. That number is crucial for this article, and we will return to it at length, for it is precisely those sixty scribes who form the heart of the refutation toward which we are working. For now it is enough to establish that this was not a matter of one accidental literate man in an otherwise illiterate community, but of a whole corps of capable hands.

As to authentication, there was the seal. The Prophet ﷺ had a signet ring made, and its design is well enough known: three lines, to be read from bottom to top, with the words Muhammad, Rasul, Allah. With that seal letters were validated the moment they entered the reach of foreign courts, for a message without a seal carried no authority before an emperor or a governor. The seal was the hallmark of the chancery, the proof that a document had not merely been invented by a traveler but had been issued by the administration of Medina.

And as to the habit, the routine, we know that in the years after the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah a series of letters went out to the rulers around Arabia. To Byzantium in the northwest, to Persia in the east, to the princes and governors of the lands in between. It was no one-time gesture but a campaign, a systematic reaching out to the powers of the then world, and such a campaign presupposes an apparatus that can produce letters on demand and at scale.

Each of those three conditions deserves a moment of attention, for together they draw the profile of a real administration. A community can have one literate man and yet possess no chancery, for one man produces no systematic correspondence. A community can have a seal and yet possess no chancery, for without writers there is nothing to seal. And a community can send a single letter without being a chancery, for one letter is an exception and not a practice. What distinguishes Medina is that all three conditions were fulfilled at once. There were dozens of writers, there was an authenticating seal, and there was a sustained habit of corresponding. Only when those three come together may one speak of a chancery, and it is precisely that convergence that is attested in the sources about early Medina.

It is clarifying to compare the scale with what the thesis of an oral early Islam presupposes. That thesis draws a community in which writing is so rare that it can play no serious role in the recording of revelation. But a community that sends letters to emperors is not a community in which writing is rare. It is a community in which writing has become an instrument of administration, embedded in the routine of authority. The distance between those two portrayals is enormous, and the letters point unambiguously to the second.

This is the placement of our event. We set it around the year 628 of the Christian era, roughly seven years after the Hijra, in Medina. It is the phase between Hudaybiyyah and the conquest of Mecca, the phase in which the young state steps outward and lets its voice reach beyond the Hijaz. Some of the letters we discuss date to precisely that time, others somewhat later, toward the year eight or nine after the Hijra. But the phase as a whole is the same: the chancery of the Prophet ﷺ is operational, and it leaves behind traces that we can still point to centuries later.

Two Letters That Al-Azami Names

Al-Azami treats the diplomatic letters not as a separate study in their own right, but as part of a larger argument about Arabic palaeography. His chapter on the history of the Arabic script builds up a series of dated examples, and that series runs from early to late. It begins with the pre-Islamic inscriptions, which we have already met elsewhere in this series, and it advances from there to early Islam.

It is worth keeping that structure in view, for the strength of the argument lies in the order. Al-Azami begins with the dated inscriptions from before Islam, the stone witnesses that show a mature Arabic script existed a century and more before the Prophet ﷺ. From there he steps over the threshold of Islam, and seeks the earliest Islamic examples of that same script in use. So an unbroken line arises: the script existed before the revelation, it existed during the revelation, and in both phases it left dated traces. The letters are the last and most tangible link of that line, and they draw their persuasive force in part from the fact that they do not stand alone but are embedded in a chain of evidence.

Just before he arrives at the letters, he names one further intermediate step: an Islamic inscription on Jabal Sala’ near Medina, according to Hamidullah probably engraved during the Battle of the Trench, around the year five after the Hijra, that is to say around 626 of the Christian era. That inscription forms the bridge. It shows that the script existed not only outside the community but was used within it, hewn in stone, in the days of the Prophet ﷺ himself. It is a small detail in the argument, but it closes off a possible escape route. For one might object that the pre-Islamic inscriptions prove Arabic script, to be sure, but not that the community of the Prophet ﷺ used that script too. The inscription on Jabal Sala’ answers that objection before it is spoken. Here is Arabic script, dated within the decade of the Prophet ﷺ, hewn by people from his own surroundings and during one of the battles that his community fought.

Then come the two letters. Al-Azami presents them as items five and six of his palaeographical series, and he gives an image of each.

The first is the letter of the Prophet ﷺ to al-Mundhir bin Sawa, the governor of al-Ahsa’, in the east of the Arabian Peninsula on the coast of the Gulf. Al-Azami dates this letter to around the year eight or nine after the Hijra. He refers for the image to Figure 9.9 in his book, and he gives the location with precision. The letter is held in the Topkapi Sarayi in Istanbul, registered as item number 21/397, and Al-Azami refers to its treatment in Hamidullah, in his work Six Originaux des Lettres Diplomatiques du Prophète de l’Islam, on page one hundred and eleven. The caption to the image points, moreover, to a detail that distinguishes the letter from ordinary correspondence: at the lower left is the seal of the Prophet ﷺ. That is no ornamental border flourish, it is the validation of the chancery, the mark that makes the document a document of state.

The choice of al-Ahsa’ is telling in this connection. It was no neighboring village but a region on the eastern coast of the peninsula, hundreds of kilometers from Medina, at the edge of the Persian sphere of influence. A letter that reached so far, addressed to a governor of a distant province, is by its nature a document of state. It requires a sender with authority, a messenger who bridges the distance, and a document that preserves its authenticity along the way. Hence the seal. Without that validation a governor on the Gulf would have had no reason to take seriously a parchment that came from the Hijaz. The seal turned a piece of inscribed leather into an instrument of statecraft.

The second is the letter of the Prophet ﷺ to Hiraql, the name under which the Byzantine emperor Heraclius is known in the Arabic sources. Al-Azami refers for this letter to Figure 9.10, and he names as source again Hamidullah, this time page one hundred and forty-nine of the same work. The letter to Heraclius comes from a somewhat earlier phase than the one to al-Mundhir, somewhere around the year six or seven after the Hijra, when the campaign of letters to the surrounding rulers got under way.

At this second letter we must pause for a moment, for the addressee is no provincial governor but the emperor of the mightiest empire on the northern border of Arabia. Byzantium in those years was the heir of Rome, a state with a centuries-old bureaucracy, with chanceries that conducted correspondence in Greek and Latin, with an imperial court accustomed to the forms of diplomacy. That an oasis community from the Hijaz should address such a court, and that the document of that address should have been preserved, is in itself already a refutation of the picture of a scriptless desert movement. One does not correspond with an imperial chancery without oneself possessing a chancery. The letter to Heraclius is not only a proof of Arabic script, it is a proof that that script was deployed at the highest level of the international relations of that time.

We must be exceedingly precise here, for it is precisely on this point that pious imagination likes to stumble. It is known that the Prophet ﷺ, in his invitations to foreign rulers, put into words the core of the message, and one would be inclined to say that the letter to Heraclius therefore contained a Quranic verse. But that is not what Al-Azami claims on these pages, and we move here solely within what he claims. On pages one hundred and twenty-three and one hundred and twenty-four of his book he presents the letters not for their content but for their existence. They serve in his hands as pieces of evidence of script, not as pieces of evidence of text. They show that the chancery of Medina produced dated, sealed documents, and that is precisely what his argument needs. What stood in them word for word he leaves undiscussed in this place, and so we do too. The documentary fact stands upright, wholly on its own, and it has no need of verse content in order to weigh.

Where Al-Azami Lets His Argument Arrive

Why does Al-Azami name these letters at all? They do not stand in his chapter by chance. They stand at the end of a chain of evidence, and that chain has an address. After he has enumerated the letters, he draws his conclusion in a single sentence. These examples, he writes, sufficiently refute Rev. Mingana’s premise concerning the early Arabic alphabet.

Here the threads of this series come together. Mingana had claimed that the Arabs of the early seventh century possessed no developed alphabet suited to recording a text like the Quran. On that premise rested a whole construction: if the script was absent, then the Quran must have been purely oral, and if it was purely oral, then its early written form was a later reconstruction and therefore suspect. The letters pull that premise out at the root. They are themselves, physically, dated Arabic script from precisely the period in which Mingana claimed such script did not fully exist. An emperor does not receive a letter in an alphabet that supposedly does not exist. A governor does not receive a sealed document in a script that the community supposedly did not command. The mere existence of the letters undoes the assumption on which the thesis of an oral early Islam was built.

This is the point at which the documentary character takes on its full weight. A report can be contested, a chain of narrators can be challenged, a memory can be dismissed as unreliable. But a sealed parchment that lies in a museum is of another order of evidence. It is there, or it is not there. And Al-Azami’s point is that it is there. The early community wrote, sealed, dispatched, and preserved. The pen was no later acquisition but a tool that lay at hand from the beginning.

Gruendler’s Attack and the Answer of the Sixty Scribes

At this point a dissenting voice comes forward, and Al-Azami does not leave it unanswered. In a footnote to the letter to al-Mundhir he cites the orientalist Gruendler, who casts doubt on the authenticity of these prophetic letters. Gruendler holds that their genuineness is more than doubtful, and he gives for this a single argument: the letters do not display the same handwriting. The reasoning is that when two documents from the same sender show different hands, at least one of the two must be forged, for surely a sender writes in a single hand.

Al-Azami rejects that reasoning with a sharpness he rarely shows. This is utter nonsense, he writes, and he explains why. The Prophet ﷺ had more than sixty scribes, and to expect their handwritings to match one another is absurd. Here we see why the number of sixty-five scribes, which we encountered earlier, is no incidental statistic but the heart of the matter. Gruendler reads the difference in handwriting as a sign of forgery. Al-Azami reads the same difference as the inevitable consequence of a large chancery. Where many hands write, the handwritings differ, and that difference proves no fraud but rather the size of the scribal corps.

More than that, Al-Azami turns the difference into a positive argument. At the image of the Heraclius letter he expressly notes that one should observe the clear difference in handwriting between this letter and the previous one, and that this difference is due to the use of a different scribe. What the skeptic presents as a crack in the evidence, Al-Azami turns into a confirmation of it. The two letters were written by two different men, and that is precisely what one expects of an administration that had dozens of literate helpers at its disposal. One sender, several hands, one authority. The variation in script is the fingerprint pattern of a real chancery, not the scar of a forgery.

Note what is doctrinally at stake in this exchange. Gruendler’s assumption is that writing in early Medina was a scarce, almost unique phenomenon, so that one might expect one hand, one writer, one handwriting. Under that assumption a difference in handwriting becomes suspect. Al-Azami’s refutation turns that assumption entirely around. Writing in Medina was not scarce but widespread. There was no single literate person who produced all the documents, there were dozens. And once one acknowledges that, the objection evaporates, for in a community with sixty scribes it is uniformity of handwriting that is unlikely, and diversity that is expected. The whole orientalist insinuation rests on a false picture of how literate the early community was, and the letters themselves, with their different hands, correct that picture.

The error of reasoning that here comes to light is instructive, for it recurs again and again in orientalist polemic. It consists in imposing a modern or a foreign expectation upon a historical reality, and then declaring that reality suspect because it does not meet the imposed expectation. Gruendler expects one sender to write in one hand, because he imagines the sender as a person who pens his letters with his own hand. But the Prophet ﷺ did not pen with his own hand; he dictated, and his dictation passed through the hand of whoever was available as a scribe at that moment. In that light the difference in handwriting is no anomaly but the normal course of things with dictation. The fault lies not in the letters but in the expectation with which Gruendler approached them.

We have seen the same pattern earlier in this series with Mingana, who approached the dotless consonants of an early manuscript with the expectation that a text without diacritical points must be multiply readable and therefore unreliable, and who then presented his own readings as variants of the text. In both cases the structure is the same. A scholar imposes an expectation that is foreign to historical practice, then comes upon something that does not meet that expectation, and declares that something to be a problem of the text instead of a problem of his own expectation. Al-Azami’s method is always to test the expectation itself against the sources, and always the source proves sound and the expectation skewed. With the letters that test is particularly simple: sixty scribes, therefore many hands, therefore a difference in handwriting. The arithmetic leaves no room for the suspicion of forgery.

What an Object Proves That a Story Does Not

There is a categorical difference between the two kinds of evidence that this series brings forward, and this article is the place to sharpen that difference, for the letters belong to the second kind.

The first kind is the evidence of transmission. When a Companion ﵁ relates that he sat beside the Prophet ﷺ with an inkpot and a shoulder blade, and that he recorded the descending verses and afterward read them back for verification, then that is a testimony. It is a strong kind of evidence, provided the chain of narrators is reliable, and the science of the isnad is designed precisely to weigh that reliability. But it is and remains a report about the past, passed down from mouth to mouth and from pen to pen, and the skeptic can always set beside it the question of whether the chain is sound.

The second kind is the evidence of the object. A sealed parchment that lies in a museum tells nothing about the past; it is a piece of the past. It is no report that can have been distorted in transmission, for it was not transmitted but preserved. It lay there, it lies there, and its script is to be seen with the naked eye. This is the reason Al-Azami deploys the letters at precisely the place where he deploys them. They bear an evidentiary burden that transmission, however strong, by its nature cannot bear. They set the writing of the early community not in the form of a story but in the form of a tangible fact.

It is important to see that these two kinds of evidence do not replace but reinforce one another. The transmissions tell us about the content and the carefulness of the writing process around the revelation, something that a loose parchment could never tell us. The letters in turn confirm, along the material road, that the capacity to write which the transmissions presuppose was indeed present and active. The one without the other would be less convincing. Together they close the case. Whoever distrusts the transmissions can point to the letters; whoever finds the letters too scarce can point to the abundance of the transmissions. The skeptic who wishes to deny both at once must explain away both a whole tradition of testimonies and a series of physically preserved documents, and that burden cannot be borne.

Why This Undermines the Thesis of an Oral Early Islam

We return to the objection with which this article began, for now we can dismantle it with the letters in hand.

The thesis of an oral early Islam rests on the assumption that script in the time and the environment of the Prophet ﷺ either did not exist, or was so marginal that it could play no serious role in the recording of revelation. The letters show that this assumption is untenable. In the very years in which the last verses of the Quran came down, the community produced dated state correspondence in developed Arabic script, sealed with the seal of the Prophet ﷺ, and addressed to the mightiest rulers of its world. The capacity to write was there, it was mature, and it was routinely deployed.

And here lies the simple but decisive inference. If a community is able and accustomed to write letters to a Byzantine emperor and to a governor on the Gulf, then that same community is certainly able and accustomed to write the revelation that it regards as the literal word of Allah ﷻ and that forms the heart of its whole existence. One can hardly imagine that a movement which took the trouble to set its diplomacy on parchment and to seal it would entrust its holiest text to memory alone. The priorities point the other way. What counted most received the most care, and the written care for the Quran is accordingly attested more abundantly in the sources than that for any letter whatever.

The letters thus form an independent crossroads of evidence. They confirm along an entirely different road what we already knew along the road of the scribal transmissions. The transmissions tell us that during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ writing took place, that Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and his fellow scribes recorded the descending verses on parchment and bone, that there was reading back and correcting. The letters prove along the material road that this capacity to write truly existed and was used, for they are there, tangible, dated, sealed. The two lines of evidence, the textual and the material, point to the same fact: early Islam was not purely oral but from the very outset also written.

The Modesty That Makes the Argument Strong

There lurks in this kind of evidence a temptation that we must resist, for it would in fact weaken the argument. The temptation is to claim more than the sources bear. To say that the letter to Heraclius contains a verse from the Quran, or that the al-Mundhir letter cites a passage word for word, and so to make of a documentary piece of evidence a kind of textual relic. We do not do that, and it is important to understand why that is not restraint but rather strength.

The argument of this article has no need of the verse content. It does not stand or fall with the question of what precisely stood written in the letters, but only with the question of whether they existed and whether they were written. And that question can be answered with an easy conscience by yes. As soon as one would wish to thicken the answer with claims about Quranic content that the consulted source does not support on these pages, one opens a flank to the skeptic. Then the conversation is no longer about the incontestable fact of the script, but about the contestable question of which verse would have stood where, and that shift plays into the opponent’s hand. We therefore keep the argument precisely as narrow as it is strong. The letters are documentary evidence of a writing chancery. More they need not be, and more we do not make of them.

This modesty accords with the spirit of this whole series. We have always distinguished between what is established and what is assumed, between what a source really says and what one would like to make it say. The palimpsest of Mingana dissolved the moment one tested his so-called variants against what actually stood there. The dating of the Tübingen fragment gained its weight precisely because it came from a neutral, non-Islamic source and was not attributed to an author who could never have known it. Here too the same discipline holds. We ascribe to the letters precisely the evidentiary force they bear, no more and no less, and it is that very precision that makes the conclusion unshakable.

One might think that a narrower argument is also a weaker argument, but in dealing with critical sources the opposite is true. A broad argument that rests on many separate claims is as strong as its weakest claim, for the opponent need only undermine one of them to set the whole tottering. A narrow argument that rests on one incontestable fact, by contrast, offers no point of purchase at all. The documentary fact of the letters is such an incontestable fact. They exist, they are dated, they bear the seal of the Prophet ﷺ, and they were written in developed Arabic script from the first century of Islam. Whoever wishes to contest that must contest the objects themselves, and that is precisely what Gruendler attempted and in which he, as we saw, ran aground on his own ill-considered expectation of uniform handwriting. The narrow fact stands where the broad argument would have been undermined.

This posture also has a dignity that is not merely strategic. It reflects the respect for the truth that characterizes the whole tradition of the history of the text. The umma has never had the need to thicken the evidence for its holy text, for the evidence was abundant enough to make thickening superfluous. Whoever is sure of his case does not exaggerate. And it is precisely that soberness, that refusal to claim more than the source bears, that is a sign of confidence rather than of doubt. The letters need contain no verse in order to weigh, and we do not ask them to contain one either. They need only exist, and that they do.

The Seal as Image

Allow us to hold one image fast before we close this article, for it sums up the matter. At the bottom of the letter to al-Mundhir, at the lower left in the corner of the parchment, is the impression of the seal of the Prophet ﷺ. A small mark, three lines of text, no more. But that mark is the signature of an administration. It says: this document is genuine, it comes from the authority of Medina, and whoever receives it may build upon it.

That same seal, that same administration, the same scribes and the same pen that validated this one document, were also the environment in which the revelation was written down. The chancery that dispatched a letter to an emperor was not a different world from the mosque in which Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ sat with his inkpot beside the Prophet ﷺ. It was the same community, the same decade, the same writing apparatus. And a community that seals its letters does not leave its holiest words to the chance of memory alone.

So this documentary piece of evidence joins with the rest of the history of the text that this series tells. The script existed already before the revelation, in the inscriptions that are older than the Prophet ﷺ himself. The script was used during the revelation, by the scribes who stood beside him. And the script left traces outside the revelation, in the state letters that to this day have been preserved in Istanbul and in the studies of Hamidullah. Three kinds of evidence, one conclusion. Early Islam wrote.

What was recorded in the mosque of Medina on those loose scraps of parchment was no oral memory that was set down for the first time centuries later, but a text that was written while it descended, in a community that demonstrably and habitually handled the pen. But how was that written and memorized text, year after year, tested against its heavenly origin, so that it could not drift a hair’s breadth from its source? In the next part of our series we return from the parchment to the voice, and follow a recurring act that took place each Ramadan in a house in Medina: the annual review of the entire revelation between Jibril ﵇ and the Prophet ﷺ, the recitation that in the tradition is called mu’arada and that in the last year of his life was doubled.

The pen by which Allah ﷻ swears was in Medina no abstraction. It lay in the hands of more than sixty scribes, it sealed letters to emperors, and it recorded verse after verse until the Book was complete. What they wrote down remained preserved.

والله أعلم