Topic
Qur'anic Textual History
Scholarship on the textual history of the Qur'an spans several distinct evidentiary categories: the traditional Islamic historiographic account of the Uthmanic recension, surviving early manuscripts, and non-manuscript epigraphic sources such as inscriptions and coinage. These sources are not always in full agreement on points of detail, and reconstructing the earliest textual history requires weighing each category's strengths and limitations rather than treating any single source as conclusive on its own.
Content referencing this topic
- Research Paper
The Dome of the Rock Inscriptions and Early Islamic Identity
What the 72 AH Dome of the Rock inscriptions can and cannot tell historians about the state of the Qur'anic text and Islamic religious identity at the end of the first Islamic century.
- Research Paper
Islam: History, Authority and the Development of Islamic Tradition
A historical-critical review of the Qur'an and Hadith as sources of religious authority in Islam, distinguishing established fact, scholarly consensus, majority and minority opinion, disputed claims, and theological interpretation at every step.
- Research Paper
The Sana'a Palimpsest and Qur'anic Variant Readings
What the erased lower text of the Sana'a palimpsest does, and does not, tell us about variation in the earliest written transmission of the Qur'an.
- Research Paper
Women in Mainstream Islam: Protection, Restriction, and the Historical Development of Religious Practice
A historical-critical review testing whether practices commonly described as Islamic requirements for women — segregation, face-veiling, travel guardianship, exclusion from mosques and public office — rest on the Qur'an itself or on later hadith, jurisprudence, dynastic custom, and regional practice.
- Article
Islam: A Reader's Guide to the Qur'an, Hadith and Early Islamic History
A plain-language companion to Revert Way's academic review of the Qur'an and Hadith: the same evidence, sources, and arguments, with every technical term and historical figure introduced on first use.
- Evidence Library
The Sana'a Palimpsest
A Qur'anic manuscript with an earlier, partially erased layer of text (Sana'a I) beneath the standard text, radiocarbon-dated among the oldest surviving Qur'anic manuscripts.