The Battle of Yamāmah and the First Collection

In 633 there was a battle called the Battle of Yamāmah. It was actually fighting people in the Najd area, where there was a man who claimed that he was a prophet; and Abū Bakr sent an army to these people, and there was a battle that ensued, and many of the Qurʾān reciters were killed. People who knew the Qurʾān by heart were killed in that battle.

So at that point ʿUmar wants the entire book to be collected. He goes to Abū Bakr and he says: you have to collect this Qurʾān. And Abū Bakr says: I am not going to do something that the Prophet (peace be upon him) did not do himself. In other words, the Prophet (peace be upon him) did not put it in a book collected together, and I do not want to do that. And ʿUmar kept telling him: you have to do this, this is a good thing, you must do this. What if people die? The Qurʾān will get lost. And he said, finally: I became convinced of that which ʿUmar was convinced of.

He decides to collect the entire Qurʾān. He gets one of the most learned people of the Qurʾān, Zayd ibn Thābit, and he tells him: you need to gather the Qurʾān, I want you to gather the Qurʾān. Zayd says: how can you do something that the Prophet (peace be upon him) did not do? They were very worried about introducing anything new, because much of the Qurʾān is talking about how previous revelations were changed — that the people who came after changed the teaching of their prophet — so there was a real fear within the first community of doing anything that their Prophet (peace be upon him) had not done. So Abū Bakr continues to tell Zayd, and Zayd says: I realised that what Abū Bakr and ʿUmar were saying was true.