What Exists Today

In terms of what exists today, we definitely, without any doubt, by even the consensus of the Orientalists, have several parts of the Qurʾān from early first-century Islam. There would be some debate amongst Orientalists as to whether there is actually an edition of the Qurʾān that goes back to this original ʿUthmānic edition. The Muslims would say that there are two, possibly four.

There is a copy now which is called the Samarkand copy, which used to be in southern Russia and which is now in Tashkent, and it is definitely first century; but is it one of the original ʿUthmānic copies? The Muslims believe it is. And there is also one in Egypt that definitely goes back to the year 68 after the hijrah, without a doubt; it is on gazelle leather, which lasts an incredibly long time. And then there is also an edition which is in Najaf in Iraq, which says at the end of it — and it is written in an authenticated Kufic script from that first period — that this was written by ʿAlī, the fourth caliph.

So we believe that we do have original texts from this first period. But even if we did not, there is no doubt in a Muslim scholar's mind, and in the minds of the vast majority of Orientalists who have really examined this situation — like Nicholson, in his book called The Literary History of the Arabs; he was a Cambridge scholar, the teacher of A. J. Arberry, who translated the Qurʾān, or interpreted it, into English. Nicholson says there is really no doubt about the authenticity, the historical authenticity, of the Qurʾān. This is not somebody who believes in the revelation, but he is accepting that the book is intact in terms of its historical authenticity: that this is the book that this original community was hearing and was seeing.