In Part 1 we left the Prophet ﷺ receiving revelation, sweating on cold days, carrying words that had to survive him.
Allah had already made a promise about those words:
إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ
Inna nahnu nazzalna al-dhikra wa inna lahu la-hafizun.
Indeed, it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will be its Guardian.1
This part of the story is about how He guarded it. Because Allah's protection did not arrive as a miracle floating in the air. It arrived through people: their memories, their ink, their caution, and in one case, their willingness to be the only witness in the room.
Two vessels, not one
From the very beginning, the Quran was preserved in two forms at once, and each one checked the other.
فِي الصُّدُور (fi al-sudur), in the chests. Memorised, carried in the hearts of the huffaz.
فِي السُّطُور (fi al-sutur), in the lines. Written down on whatever could hold ink.
This is the single most important thing to understand about Quranic preservation, so let me say it plainly: the Quran was never only memorised, and never only written. If it had been only memorised, memory could fail. If it had been only written, a page could burn or a word could be misread. Together, each form guards the other. A written page that contradicts the memory of a thousand huffaz is corrected. A memory that slips is corrected by the page.
That double system started immediately, in the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ himself.
The scribes of revelation
Whenever revelation came, the Prophet ﷺ did two things.
First, he recited it aloud to whoever was present, and they memorised it.
Second, he called for the scribes. Companions such as Zayd ibn Thabit رضي الله عنه and Ubayy ibn Ka'b رضي الله عنه would come and write it down immediately.
There were no notebooks. There was no paper as we know it. So they wrote on what they had: pieces of tanned leather, flat white stones, thin shoulder bones, palm stalks, parchment, whatever was in reach. It sounds primitive. It was not. It was immediate, and immediacy is what mattered.
And then came the step that people rarely hear about.
The session did not end until it was verified
Once the scribes had written, the Prophet ﷺ would ask them to recite back what they had written. And as they recited, Jibreel عليه السلام was present, confirming.
If everything matched, it stood. If there was an error, the correction was made on the spot. The gathering did not disperse until this two-way process was complete: written down, then read back, then confirmed.
Scholars call the Prophet's ﷺ approval here taqrir, the confirming approval that carries the weight of Sunnah. In this case, that approval was itself divinely supervised.
Allah describes exactly this role:
لَقَدْ مَنَّ اللَّهُ عَلَى الْمُؤْمِنِينَ إِذْ بَعَثَ فِيهِمْ رَسُولًا مِّنْ أَنفُسِهِمْ يَتْلُو عَلَيْهِمْ آيَاتِهِ وَيُزَكِّيهِمْ وَيُعَلِّمُهُمُ الْكِتَابَ وَالْحِكْمَةَ
Laqad manna Allahu 'ala al-mu'minina idh ba'atha fihim rasulan min anfusihim yatlu 'alayhim ayatihi wa yuzakkihim wa yu'allimuhumu al-kitaba wal-hikmah.
Certainly did Allah confer a great favour upon the believers when He sent among them a Messenger from themselves, reciting to them His verses, purifying them, and teaching them the Book and wisdom.2
Teaching them the Book. He ﷺ did not just recite it. He oversaw its recording.
"But he ﷺ could not read or write"
This is the obvious objection, and it is a fair one. Let me put it the way I put it to my students.
Suppose I read a passage aloud to three hundred people on a call and ask everyone to write it down. Will all three hundred produce identical text? Of course not. Some will spell differently. Some will hear one word and write another. Some, especially this generation raised on short messages and abbreviations, will invent their own shorthand.
Now: if I ask you all to read your versions back to me, most of you will read back what you wrote quite accurately. But how do I know what you wrote is what I said? This is not about your sincerity. It is about the gap between hearing and writing.
So how could a Prophet ﷺ who said of himself ma ana bi qari' verify what many hands had written?
The answer is in the previous section: he was not verifying alone. Jibreel عليه السلام was present at those sessions. And the Prophet ﷺ was himself directly taught by Allah:
وَعَلَّمَكَ مَا لَمْ تَكُن تَعْلَمُ
Wa 'allamaka ma lam takun ta'lam.
And He taught you what you did not know.3
The verification did not rest on human literacy. It rested on revelation supervising its own transcription.
And Allah made the seriousness of this unmistakable:
وَلَوْ تَقَوَّلَ عَلَيْنَا بَعْضَ الْأَقَاوِيلِ لَأَخَذْنَا مِنْهُ بِالْيَمِينِ ثُمَّ لَقَطَعْنَا مِنْهُ الْوَتِينَ
Wa law taqawwala 'alayna ba'da al-aqawil. La-akhadhna minhu bil-yamin. Thumma la-qata'na minhu al-watin.
And if he had invented about Us some sayings, We would have seized him by the right hand, then We would have cut from him the aorta.4
The scholars note the detail: the right hand, the hand that writes. The text was protected not only from invention in speech, but from invention in writing, from the very first moment it descended.
Who decided the order?
Here is a question worth answering plainly, because many readers quietly assume the opposite.
The Quran did not come down in the order you read it. Surah al-'Alaq came first, but it sits at number 96. So somebody must have arranged it. Who?
The arrangement of the verses within each surah is tawqifi, meaning it was fixed by divine instruction, not human judgement. As each passage came down, the Prophet ﷺ would tell the scribes where it belonged: place this verse in the surah in which such and such is mentioned.5 The order you recite in is the order he was told.
The arrangement of the surahs is discussed more among the scholars, and there are differing views on how much of it was fixed by instruction and how much was settled by the consensus of the companions who had heard him ﷺ recite them in order.6 But the practical point stands: the sequence was not invented later by an editor. It was received.
This matters for what comes next. When Abu Bakr's committee and later 'Uthman's committee did their work, they were not deciding what order the Quran should be in. That was already known, and known by hundreds of people who could recite the whole thing. Their task was to get it onto paper, correctly and completely.
A word about the seven ahruf
One term is about to start doing a lot of work in this story, and I do not want to leave you guessing at it.
إِنَّ هَذَا الْقُرْآنَ أُنْزِلَ عَلَى سَبْعَةِ أَحْرُفٍ، فَاقْرَءُوا مَا تَيَسَّرَ مِنْهُ
Inna hadha al-Qur'ana unzila 'ala sab'ati ahrufin, faqra'u ma tayassara minhu.
This Quran has been revealed in seven ahruf, so recite whichever of them is easier for you.7
The Prophet ﷺ said this after 'Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه heard Hisham ibn Hakim رضي الله عنه reciting Surah al-Furqan in a way he had never heard, seized him by the cloak, and dragged him to the Prophet ﷺ to settle it. The Prophet ﷺ listened to both men recite and told each of them, separately: that is how it was revealed.
Arabia was not one dialect. It was many tribes with genuinely different tongues, and many of the new Muslims were older people who had spoken one way their whole lives. The ahruf were a mercy: permission for the same revelation to be recited in more than one way, so that no one was shut out of the Book of Allah by their own accent.
Two things to hold on to, and then we move on:
The Quran is one. The permitted ways of reciting it are many.
And, crucially for Part 3: the concession was in the recitation, not in the writing.
What exactly the seven ahruf were, how scholars have classified them, and how they relate to the Qira'at that we have today, is a whole subject of its own, and it is the subject of the next session in this series. For now, this is all you need.
Why there was no single book yet
If preservation was so careful, why did the Prophet ﷺ never gather the whole Quran into one bound volume?
There are several reasons, and each of them is wisdom.
Revelation was still coming. For twenty-three years, the Book was not finished. You cannot bind a text that is still being sent down.
Some verses were abrogated. Rulings changed across those years, what the scholars study as nasikh and mansukh. A final written form had to wait until the sending down was complete.
The seven ahruf were still in use. Locking the text into a single written standard at that stage would have closed a door Allah had deliberately opened.
And the primary vessel was memory, not paper. This is hard for us to feel, because we outsource everything to our devices. But those companions trusted a trained heart more than they trusted a page. The Quran lived complete, and in order, in hundreds of chests.
The final review
And then, in the last year of his life, the Book was sealed.
Every Ramadan, Jibreel عليه السلام would come to the Prophet ﷺ and they would go through the whole Quran together. This is called al-mu'aradah, the mutual review. In the year the Prophet ﷺ passed away, it happened twice.
كَانَ جِبْرِيلُ يُعَارِضُهُ الْقُرْآنَ كُلَّ عَامٍ مَرَّةً، فَعَارَضَهُ مَرَّتَيْنِ فِي الْعَامِ الَّذِي قُبِضَ فِيهِ
Kana Jibrilu yu'ariduhu al-Qur'ana kulla 'amin marrah, fa-'aradahu marratayni fi al-'ami alladhi qubida fih.
Jibreel would review the Quran with him once every year, and he reviewed it with him twice in the year in which he passed away.8
That second review is known as العَرْضَة الأَخِيرَة (al-'Ardah al-Akhirah), the Final Review.
I want you to see why this is not a small detail.
It means that before the Prophet ﷺ died, the entire Quran, in its final wording and its final order, with everything abrogated already removed, was recited from beginning to end and confirmed by the angel who had brought it. Not reconstructed afterwards from scattered memories. Confirmed, in his lifetime, by the source.
And there were witnesses. Zayd ibn Thabit رضي الله عنه, who had written revelation for years, was present for that final review.9 Keep his name in mind. In a few pages he will be asked to gather the Quran, and then, twenty years later, asked again. The man entrusted with the written text was a man who had heard the Book confirmed in its final form.
Then the Prophet ﷺ passed away. And within two years, the people carrying that text began to die.
Stage two: Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه and the war that changed everything
After the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq رضي الله عنه took leadership of a community in crisis. Tribes across Arabia were abandoning Islam. False prophets had risen. This period is known as the Ridda wars, the wars of apostasy.
In one of those battles, at Yamamah, a very large number of the qurra', the reciters and memorisers, were killed.
Now understand what that means. When the Sahabah went out to fight, they carried two things with them. In their bags, the fragments of the Quran they had personally written, the way we carry our phones everywhere today, except that what they carried was infinitely more precious. And in their chests, the whole Book.
So when a hafiz fell on the battlefield, two archives died at once.
The death of a hafiz is not an ordinary death. It is a loss to the entire Ummah, and at that particular moment, with Islam only beginning to spread beyond Arabia, it was a threat to everything that was coming.
'Umar's idea, and Abu Bakr's refusal
'Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه saw what was happening and did what he was known for. He thought in a direction no one else was looking.
What if we gather it into one record, so that this can never happen again?
He brought this to Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه. And Abu Bakr refused.
كَيْفَ تَفْعَلُ شَيْئًا لَمْ يَفْعَلْهُ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ ﷺ
Kayfa taf'alu shay'an lam yaf'alhu Rasulullah ﷺ?
How can you do something the Messenger of Allah ﷺ did not do?
I want you to notice how beautiful that hesitation is. Neither man was ignorant. Both had memorised. Both understood the danger. And still, the first instinct of the first Caliph was: where is my evidence?
That instinct is worth borrowing. Before we say something, do something, or forward something, including the message that arrives with "share this and you will be rewarded," the first question is the one Abu Bakr asked.
'Umar رضي الله عنه did not give up, but he also did not bully. He kept bringing the reasons, the necessity, the consequence of doing nothing. And Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه later described the moment it landed:
فَلَمْ يَزَلْ عُمَرُ يُرَاجِعُنِي حَتَّى شَرَحَ اللَّهُ صَدْرِي لِلَّذِي شَرَحَ لَهُ صَدْرَ عُمَرَ
Fa-lam yazal 'Umaru yuraji'uni hatta sharaha Allahu sadri lilladhi sharaha lahu sadra 'Umar.
'Umar kept returning to me until Allah opened my chest to what He had opened 'Umar's chest to.10
Good influence looks like this. Not pressure. Persuasion, for something that matters.
Choosing the right person
Once convinced, Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه did not appoint himself. He asked: who is the best person for this?
They agreed on Zayd ibn Thabit al-Ansari رضي الله عنه: young, brilliant, one of the Prophet's ﷺ own scribes of revelation, and, as we have just seen, a witness to the Final Review.
إِنَّكَ رَجُلٌ شَابٌّ عَاقِلٌ لَا نَتَّهِمُكَ، وَقَدْ كُنْتَ تَكْتُبُ الْوَحْيَ لِرَسُولِ اللَّهِ ﷺ، فَتَتَبَّعِ الْقُرْآنَ فَاجْمَعْهُ
Innaka rajulun shabbun 'aqilun la nattahimuka, wa qad kunta taktubu al-wahya li-Rasulillah ﷺ, fa-tatabba'i al-Qur'ana fajma'hu.
You are a young man, intelligent, and we do not doubt you. You used to write the revelation for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. So track down the Quran and gather it.10
And Zayd's reaction? He refused too, at first, asking the very same question Abu Bakr had asked. Then he said something that tells you exactly how heavy this felt:
فَوَاللَّهِ لَوْ كَلَّفُونِي نَقْلَ جَبَلٍ مِنَ الْجِبَالِ مَا كَانَ أَثْقَلَ عَلَيَّ مِمَّا أَمَرَنِي بِهِ مِنْ جَمْعِ الْقُرْآنِ
Fa-wallahi law kallafuni naqla jabalin min al-jibali ma kana athqala 'alayya mimma amarani bihi min jam'i al-Qur'an.
By Allah, if they had asked me to move a mountain, it would not have been heavier on me than what he ordered me to do, gathering the Quran.10
He accepted anyway. And then he built a method.
Two conditions, and no exceptions
Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه made an announcement in Madinah: whoever has with him any written portion of the Quran recorded in the presence of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, let him bring it.
Two conditions applied to every fragment:
One: it had to have been written in the Prophet's ﷺ own presence. Not copied from someone else's page. Not written from memory afterwards. Written there, in front of him, as part of the verification sessions we described earlier.
Two: two witnesses had to testify to that. Your word alone was not enough. Not because anyone doubted your honesty, but because honesty is not the same thing as accuracy.
Think about the caution here. These were companions of the Prophet ﷺ. Zayd himself had memorised the Quran. Every single hafiz in Madinah knew what belonged in the text. They could have written it out from memory in a matter of weeks.
They refused to.
They did not trust memory alone, not because memory is worthless, but because a system resting on one pillar is a system that can fall. So every verse had to be attested in writing and confirmed against the memories of the huffaz. Two independent records, cross-checked.
The verses held by one man
Following this method, Zayd رضي الله عنه recovered the entire Quran. Except at the very end, where he came to a passage he could find in writing with only one person:
حَتَّى وَجَدْتُ آخِرَ سُورَةِ التَّوْبَةِ مَعَ أَبِي خُزَيْمَةَ الْأَنْصَارِيِّ لَمْ أَجِدْهَا مَعَ أَحَدٍ غَيْرِهِ
Hatta wajadtu akhira surati al-Tawbati ma'a Abi Khuzaymata al-Ansariyyi lam ajidha ma'a ahadin ghayrih.
Until I found the last part of Surah al-Tawbah with Abu Khuzaymah al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anyone besides him.10
Those were the closing verses of Surah al-Tawbah:
لَقَدْ جَاءَكُمْ رَسُولٌ مِّنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ عَزِيزٌ عَلَيْهِ مَا عَنِتُّمْ حَرِيصٌ عَلَيْكُم بِالْمُؤْمِنِينَ رَءُوفٌ رَّحِيمٌ
There has certainly come to you a Messenger from among yourselves. Grievous to him is what you suffer; he is deeply concerned for you, and to the believers he is kind and merciful.11
Let that land for a moment. The verse describing how much the Prophet ﷺ cared for his Ummah was the one verse that came within a hair of being missing.
A note on the names, because this is a place where accounts often get blurred. The companion in this report is Abu Khuzaymah al-Ansari رضي الله عنه. There is a second, closely related story involving a different companion, Khuzaymah ibn Thabit al-Ansari رضي الله عنه, and a verse of Surah al-Ahzab. That one belongs to the next stage of the story, and we will come to it in Part 3. Scholars have discussed at length whether these are two men or one; the safest thing is to keep the two reports distinct, as the narrations themselves do.12
What they produced
What Zayd ibn Thabit رضي الله عنه completed under Abu Bakr's رضي الله عنه instruction is known as الصُّحُف البَكْرِيَّة (al-Suhuf al-Bakriyyah) or al-Suhuf al-Siddiqiyyah, the sheets of Abu Bakr.
An important detail, and one that students of this subject are regularly examined on: these were not yet a bound book. They were verified sheets, separate pieces of tanned leather and parchment, each one authenticated, arranged in the known order, and kept together as one complete collection. A codex in substance, not yet in form.
The Suhuf stayed with Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه until his death. Then they passed to 'Umar رضي الله عنه during his caliphate. And after 'Umar, they did not go to the next Caliph. They went to his daughter Hafsah رضي الله عنها.
That was not nepotism. Hafsah was not only 'Umar's daughter. She was Umm al-Mu'minin, a wife of the Prophet ﷺ, and a woman of learning who could read and write in an age when few could.
The complete, verified text of the Quran was placed in her keeping.
Twenty years later, a message would arrive at her door from the third Caliph. What she handed over would become the master copy for every Mushaf on earth.
Next in this series: One Book, One Ummah, on how a quarrel between two armies on a distant frontier led 'Uthman ibn 'Affan رضي الله عنه to make the most consequential decision in the history of the written Quran.
Written by Zahra Ahmad, and adapted from the first session of The Journey of the Quran deep dive series.
Surah al-Hijr 15:9. ↩
Surah Aal 'Imran 3:164. ↩
Surah al-Nisa 4:113. ↩
Surah al-Haqqah 69:44-46. ↩
Reported in the collections of Sunan Abi Dawud (Kitab al-Salah) and Jami' al-Tirmidhi (Abwab Tafsir al-Quran), in the report of Ibn 'Abbas رضي الله عنهما questioning 'Uthman رضي الله عنه about Surah al-Anfal and Surah Bara'ah. ↩
For the discussion of tartib al-ayat and tartib al-suwar, see al-Suyuti, al-Itqan fi 'Ulum al-Quran, in the chapters on the collection and arrangement of the Quran, and al-Zarkashi, al-Burhan fi 'Ulum al-Quran. ↩
Sahih al-Bukhari 4992; also Sahih Muslim, Kitab Salat al-Musafirin, in the report of 'Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه and Hisham ibn Hakim رضي الله عنه. ↩
Sahih al-Bukhari 4998, narrated by Ibn 'Abbas رضي الله عنهما. See also the report of Fatimah رضي الله عنها in Sahih al-Bukhari (Kitab al-Manaqib) and Sahih Muslim (Fada'il al-Sahabah), in which the Prophet ﷺ tells her of the twofold review in the year of his passing. ↩
Reported by Ibn Abi Dawud in Kitab al-Masahif, and discussed by Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani in Fath al-Bari in the chapters on the collection of the Quran. ↩
Sahih al-Bukhari 4986, the report of Zayd ibn Thabit رضي الله عنه on the collection of the Quran under Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه. ↩↩↩↩
Surah al-Tawbah 9:128. The passage continues to the end of the surah, 9:129. ↩
The Abu Bakr collection report (Sahih al-Bukhari 4986) names Abu Khuzaymah al-Ansari and the end of Surah al-Tawbah. The 'Uthmanic copying report (Sahih al-Bukhari 4988) names Khuzaymah ibn Thabit al-Ansari and Surah al-Ahzab 33:23. Ibn Hajar discusses the relationship between the two in Fath al-Bari. ↩