Sacred writings and oral teachings

Writings and spoken teachings are kept in different ways. For each item you meet, ask who preserved it, in what form, and what believers do with it. Then compare two items from the same tradition by their recognised importance.

Read the first part of the report as the record of the compilation of the Qur'an gives it. The story of the compilation in the caliphate of Abu Bakr is related on the authority of Zayd ibn Thabit (may God be pleased with him), and its origin is in the Sahih of al-Bukhari ². Abu Bakr sent for Zayd after the killing of the people of al-Yamama, and Umar was with him; Umar said that the killing had raged among the reciters, and he feared that much of the Qur'an would be lost, and he saw that it should be gathered ². Abu Bakr hesitated because the Prophet ﷺ had not done it, and Umar kept urging him until God opened his heart to it ². Then Abu Bakr told Zayd that he was a young man of sense who could not be accused and who had written down the revelation, and asked him to trace the Qur'an and gather it; Zayd in turn hesitated, until God opened his heart, and he gathered it from scraps, shoulder-blades, palm-stalks and the breasts of men ². In this report, then, two men hesitate before the decision, Abu Bakr and Zayd.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam article on Hadith, as the record of hadith reports it, sets the Muslim criticism of traditions beside the Western one. Before the recognised books were compiled, serious students recognised that much of Tradition was fabricated ^3 4, and the effort to test genuineness produced biographical works on the people in chains, whose birth and death years show whether a transmitter could have met the person he quotes ⁴. The article states that the Muslim criticism was very detailed and shows a genuine effort to clear away what was false, but that Western scholars have tended to argue it did not go far enough; it names Goldziher, who showed that Hadith stands on less firm ground than the conventional doctrine supposes ⁵. It reports J. Schacht's argument that chains grew as time passed, though its author does not feel justified in explaining away the whole of Tradition on these lines ^5 6. The record gives no verdict between the two.

The sermon reaches the museum in two accounts. In The Sealed Nectar, he says he left among them the Book of God ⁷; in the account the record gives from Ibn Ishaq, in the Sira of Ibn Hisham, he left among them the Book of God and the Sunna of His Prophet ⁸. Ibn Ishaq does not name the day of Arafat at the place of the sermon, and The Sealed Nectar says that a verse came down after the sermon, which Ibn Ishaq does not say here ^9 10. The report of the gathering of the Qur'an has two chains: al-Bukhari's runs through Ibn Shihab from Ubayd ibn al-Sabbaq from Zayd ², and al-Tabari's through Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri and Kharija ibn Zayd to Zayd ibn Thabit ¹¹.

The two accounts of the sermon word what he left among the people differently: the Book of God alone in one ⁷, the Book of God and the Sunna of His Prophet in the other ⁸. If you were a historian with only these two accounts, which clues in the records, such as the chains, each source's distance from the event and the purpose of each book, would you weigh, and what further evidence would you ask for?

• The compilation of the Qur'an: al-Bukhari's report from Zayd ibn Thabit, and the copy made under Uthman in al-Tabari's report.
• Hadith: the chain and the text, the six books, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam on Muslim and Western criticism.
• The sermon at Arafat: the accounts of The Sealed Nectar and of Ibn Ishaq, and the marks of the narration.