So-and-so, the son of so-and-so, might be as much as three days’ journey from Madinah. They would dispatch to him, have him brought, and then ask, “In what manner did the Messenger of Allah—may peace and blessings be upon him—teach you the verse such-and-such?” They would then write it exactly as he reported.

Ibn Shihāb said: On that day they disagreed over the word al-tābūt. Zayd said, “al-tābūh,” while Ibn al-Zubayr and Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ said, “al-tābūt.” Their difference was referred to ʿUthmān, who ruled, “Write it with a tāʾ, for it was revealed in the dialect of Quraysh.” Al-Bukhārī and al-Tirmidhī have transmitted this report.

Ibn ʿAtiyyah commented: Zayd read it with an hāʾ, whereas the Qurayshīs read it with a tāʾ, so it was fixed with the tāʾ, and the codices were written in that form for all succeeding generations. From that exemplar ʿUthmān produced additional copies.

Others have said that he made seven copies; others say four, and that is the more common view. He dispatched master copies to Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and the reciters of every region adopted the copy that reached them as the basis of their readings. None of them deviated from his codex in the form in which it had come to them. Any differences found among the Seven Readers—whereby some include letters that others omit—owe to the fact that each relied on what had reached him in his own copy and transmitted it. ʿUthmān had written those particular words in some of the copies and left them unwritten in others to indicate that every form is sound and that recitation by any of them is permissible.

Ibn ʿAtiyyah further said: ʿUthmān then ordered that all other codices be burned or torn up. One recension records the verb with an unpointed ḥāʾ (burned) and another with a khāʾ (torn), meaning that after being torn they were buried; the version with the unpointed ḥāʾ is preferable.

Abū Bakr al-Anbārī relates in his Kitāb al-Radd, on the authority of Suwayd ibn Ghafalah: I heard ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib—may Allah honor his face—say, “People, fear Allah and beware of exaggerating about ʿUthmān or of saying, ‘He is the burner of the codices.’ By Allah, he did not burn them except with the unanimous agreement of us, the Companions of Muhammad—peace and blessings be upon him.”

ʿUmayr ibn Saʿīd narrates that ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib—may Allah be pleased with him—said, “Had I been the ruler at the time of ʿUthmān, I would have done with the codices exactly what ʿUthmān did.”

Abū al-Ḥasan ibn Baṭṭāl said: ʿUthmān’s command to burn the muṣḥaf and the other codices when he gathered the Qur’an establishes the permissibility of burning books that contain the names of Allah Most High. Doing so is an act of honoring them and of protecting them from being trodden underfoot or discarded in desolate places.

Muʿammar reports from Ibn Ṭāwūs, from his father, that he used to burn documents when a pile of letters containing the basmalah—“In the Name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful”—had accumulated before him. ʿUrwah ibn al-Zubayr likewise burned some legal writings that were in his possession on the day of al-Ḥarrah, while Ibrāhīm held it disliked that papers be burned if they contained