View source for Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars:Textual History of the Qur'an

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According to orthodox Islamic belief, the Qur'an is the unchanging, eternal word of [[Allah]], pre-existent before all time and space, handed to the [[Muhammad ibn Abdullah|prophet]] through divine revelation. The text of this final word of Allah is thus eternal and unchanging, as opposed to the previous revelations given to [[People of the Book|people of the book]], which were changed and corrupted over the ages. This picture, though, is highly complicated by the fact that the Islamic tradition recognizes 7 or 10 historical reading traditions, each with two transmitters featuring many different short vowels and consonantal dottings to vocalise the "rasm" or consonantal skeleton of the text. Recent work on the language of the Qur'an, extant manuscripts, and discoveries such as the [[Sana'a Manuscript]] complicate this picture significantly more. From the Sana'a palimpset it is apparent that the received text of the Qur'an at one point had variants which were not preserved in any of the reading traditions, and the reading traditions themselves differ sometimes significantly in grammar and meaning. The Islamic tradition itself also complicates the picture. The below hadith traditions indicate that the complete, pristine text of the Qur'an did not make it out past the first generation of Muslims. According to the tradition, many of the Muslims who had memorized the entirety of the Qur'an were killed in battle before they could put their verses to writing, and some verses were lost with them; the ends and beginning of some of the suwar or chapters were in dispute, and several ahadith state that the entirety of the Qur'an was not passed down. Shi'ites in particular have traditions which claim that up to a quarter of the Qur'an was not passed down to the present day. Some hadith also claim that entire verses were "cancelled" or removed from the text for no apparent reason. All of these traditions were written down in or after the second Islamic century, so they likely reflect the thoughts and feelings of people alive at that time about the textual integrity of the Qur'an, which was by this time well known as the sacred text of the Muslims and their empire. 

{{Main|Textual History of the Qur'an}}