The One and the Many

A revelatory account of early Islams great diversity by the worlds leading scholar of early Quranic manuscripts There is no one better placed than Franois Droche to write the historyand tell the storyof how the Quran went from words uttered by Muhammad to inviolable canonical scripture. This is a meticulous, lucid, and fascinating book.Shawkat Toorawa, Yale University According to Muslim dogma, the recited and written text of the Quran as we know it today scrupulously reflects the divine word as it was originally sent down to Muhammad. An examination of early Islamic sources, including accounts of prophetic sayings, all of them compared with the oldest Quranic manuscripts, reveal that plurality was in fact the outstanding characteristic of the genesis and transmission of the Quran, both textually and orally. By piecing together information about alternative wordings eliminated from the canonical version that gradually came to be imposed during the first centuries of Islam, Franois Droche shows that the Quran long remained open to textual diversity. Not only did the faithful initially adopt a flexible attitude toward the Quranic text, an attitude strikingly at odds with the absolute literalism later enforced by Muslim orthodoxy, but Muhammad himself turns out to have been more concerned with the meaning than the letter of the divine message.