Ḥakīm ibn ʿAbbād related: “The first reprehensible practice to show itself in Madinah was people keeping pigeons for flight and shooting pellets—he meant with a sling—so ʿUthmān ordered a man to deal with it, and he clipped their wings and smashed the slings.”

Reliable reports from several chains affirm that ʿUthmān once recited the entire Qur’an in a single rakʿah (unit of prayer).

ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Mubārak narrated—through al-Zubayr ibn ʿAbd Allāh from his grandmother—that ʿUthmān fasted continuously throughout the year.

Anas said: “Ḥudhayfah returned to ʿUthmān—he had been campaigning with the Iraqis before the expedition to Armenia. During that campaign the troops of Syria and Iraq came together and fell into dispute over the Qur’an. What Ḥudhayfah heard of their disagreement alarmed him, so he rode straight to ʿUthmān and said, ‘Commander of the Believers, rescue this ummah before they differ over the Qur’an the way the Jews and Christians differed over their scriptures.’ ʿUthmān was deeply troubled, so he sent word to Ḥafṣah, Mother of the Believers: ‘Send us the parchments on which the Qur’an was collected.’ She sent them, and he appointed Zayd ibn Thābit, Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr, and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Ḥārith ibn Hishām to copy them into codices. He instructed them, ‘If you and Zayd disagree about any expression in Arabic, write it in the dialect of Quraysh, for the Qur’an was revealed in their tongue.’ They set to work until the codices were completed. ʿUthmān then returned the parchments to Ḥafṣah, sent a copy of the Qur’an to every military district, and ordered that every manuscript differing from the copy he had dispatched be burned. That was the time when the variant manuscripts were consigned to the fire.”