A book, a chain of reports and a script

This lesson asks you to compare sacred writings and oral teachings, to describe why they matter, and to give specific examples. The curriculum itself names the Qur'an among its examples. The museum offers the Qur'an and the hadith; your class adds the sacred writings and oral teachings of the other traditions. ¹

Ask of each source how it reaches a reader: written down or passed from person to person. Compare what each way keeps well and what it risks losing, using only what the sources report.

Look at how each reaches a reader. The Encyclopaedia of Islam article on Hadith says that once books of tradition were compiled, each tradition had two parts: the chain of authorities, isnad or sanad, running back to the source, and the text, matn ^{2 3}. It notes a theory that traditions should be conveyed orally and not written, and says the books themselves contain traditions supporting it: Abu Dawud gives two in succession, the first saying the Prophet ﷺ commanded that traditions be written and the second that he forbade it ³. In its article on the Qur'an it says the primary significance of the book for the great majority through the centuries has been its oral form, the recitation first chanted by Muhammad to his followers over about twenty years ⁴, and that in the author's account the oral tradition became the standard by which the written text was judged ^{4 5}.

How was the written text of the Qur'an fixed? According to the article, the orthodox view is that the book was perfectly preserved in oral form from the beginning and written down during Muhammad's lifetime or shortly afterwards; the complete consonantal text is believed to have been established in the reign of the third caliph, Uthman, and the final vocalised text in the early fourth Islamic century ⁶. The article says that the history of the text after Muhammad's death is, in its author's words, still far from clear. The author judges the story of Abu Bakr's collection unhistorical, and says the account of Uthman's reign fails critical analysis in its details, but that most Western scholars accept its central point: that the Qur'an of today goes back to Uthman's time ^{6 7}. He names two scholars with other positions and judges that neither gives convincing reasons for rejecting the Muslim accounts altogether ⁷. The museum decides nothing between them.

It is often claimed that a hadith's validity depends on its chain, not its text. The article says this is generally true but not the whole story, since al-Hakim mentions traditions with very reliable men in the chain that he holds faulty and weak, which he says needs considerable knowledge and discussion with the learned to detect ⁸. For the Qur'an, the article notes the popular view that al-Hajjaj introduced vowel signs and dots, and says the Muslim accounts of this introduction vary and are unreliable, and that the vowelled and dotted script came into use slowly ⁹.

The museum's Qur'an page rests on the frozen files of the Tanzil project, in the Hafs transmission ¹⁰. The Encyclopaedia of Islam adds that two transmissions are in general use, Hafs from Asim and Warsh from Nafi, and that the Egyptian standard edition rests on oral tradition ¹¹. It says the classical literature records thousands of variants, none found in the manuscripts known to Western scholars ⁶. A hadith comes through a chain, and the article calls the Muslim criticism of transmitters very detailed, while saying that Western scholars have tended to argue it did not go far enough ¹².

The Qur'an and the hadith both reach a reader through people: reciters who memorise and recite, and narrators who pass on reports in a chain. Which would you expect to keep exact wording better, a continuous oral recitation or a chain of reports, and what in these sources would you point to as evidence?

• The Qur'an: what the Encyclopaedia of Islam says about its collection, readings and structure; the museum does not write out the verses.
• The prophetic hadith: its writing down, the six books, the grades, and what Western scholars say.
• The isnad: the chain of transmission and how it is treated.
• The standardisation of the mushaf: what the accounts say of Uthman's reign.

Read the Qur'an and the hadith. Write a two-row table: how each reaches a reader, and one detail the source gives.