The following paragraphs aim to consider, programmatically and in broad strokes, parameters and distinctions that would allow for modelling of the process of Qurʾānic composition, primarily during the period preceding the definitive redaction of its standard skeletal-morphemic, literary-canonical text that is commonly called ʿUthmānic, what may for convenience be referred to as the redaction of Zayd. This discussion will seek to suggest, explore, and diagrammatically to represent one major thesis: that what eventually became the Qurʾān as a literary unit was not the serial transcript of inspired enunciations called Revelation as delivered initially by Muḥammad, which is habitually presumed to have been redacted serially, however subject these redactions may have been to textual expansions, interpolations and selfreferences, and to subsequent arrangement in larger units. The process of Qurʾānic composition is far more complex than is suggested by the standard, explicit or implied stenographic model of composition, and more interesting.

The observations that the text of the Qurʾān was, over time, subjected to certain revisions, the limiting case of which is abrogation (naskh), and also that it contains repetitions and expansions and other evidence of textual evolution, has long been noted. Noldeke long ago considered this to be evidence of the successive performances of Qurʾānic fragments. More recent scholarship has variously regarded such phenomena ‘recycling’ repetition, or, more elaborately described, repeated recitation with actualisation, adaptation, modification and interpolation. What is being suggested here, however, is a shift in overall perspective in which these and other facts be considered constitutive of the text, rather than being somewhat auxiliary accretions to a text generally, no matter how vaguely and implicitly, considered to have had the stable core. What is being suggested is that the elasticity of the Paleo-Muslim Qurʾān be considered a primary feature rather than a detail.

Preliminary Remarks

This body of phenomena, clear traces of which are observable in the received text of the Qurʾān, indicate the process by which the elements of the text were composed and recomposed by the conjoined instantiations of oral performance and entextualisations over time, the latter referring to a certain autonomy that the text comes to acquire in relation to context. These conjoined processes constituted the Qurʾān's pre-literary textual forms and components, and are conceptualised here under the generic technical term ‘reiteration’, which is in part intended to convey greater concreteness than might be conveyed by the vague ‘transmission’. The process of scriptualist as distinct from earlier entextualisation, whereby the canonical, literary skeletal-morphemic text was later composed, is referred to as ‘collation’, used here for the sake of greater exactitude and in preference to ‘collection’ to render the Arabic jam‘. Two scholars have in recent years highlighted the centrality of these processes, one, with primary emphasis on the text and somewhat in abstraction from the Sitz im Leben of its composition, by describing some important features of rewriting; the other, more pointedly, raised the necessity of conceptualising this phenomenon in its own right.