The Quran Was Compiled After Muhammad’s Death — and Parts Were Nearly Lost
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By Islam’s own account (Sahih al-Bukhari 4986), the Quran was not collected in a book during Muhammad’s lifetime. After many reciters died at the Battle of Yamama, Umar feared “a large part of the Quran may be lost,” and Abu Bakr commissioned Zayd ibn Thabit, who protested that shifting a mountain would have been lighter work, and who then gathered the text “from palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones, and from the men who knew it by heart.” The last verses of Surat al-Tawba were found “with none other than” a single man, Abu Khuzayma al-Ansari. A community one careless battle away from losing parts of its scripture is not a community in possession of a supernaturally guarded text.
Common Muslim Responses
Muslims answer that preservation was primarily oral — thousands of huffaz carried the whole text in memory — and the written collection was a redundancy, not the primary vehicle. The Abu Khuzayma report concerns written attestation only; the verses were known in memory.
Counter-Rebuttal
The sources themselves undercut this, critics reply: Umar’s stated fear was precisely that the deaths of memorizers endangered the text, which is incoherent if oral preservation was secure; and the next sections show that the memorizers disagreed with each other about the text’s contents.