Boldiari tells us that Hozaifatibnil-Yaman...

Boldiari tells us that Hozaifatibnil-Yaman, on his return from the expedition to Armenia and Azarbaijan, expressed his anxiety about the variation among the members of the expedition in the recitation of the Qur'an, and asked the Third Caliph to take the necessary steps to unite the Muslims to avoid controversy over the Book of God such as existed about the Holy Scriptures of the Jews and the Christians; even today there are different versions of the Old and New Testaments, some parts being regarded as apocryphal by some and not by others.

The Third Caliph asked Omar's daughter Hafsa to hand over the collection left with her so that copies could be made. He ordered Zaid, Abdullah ibne Zobair, Sayeed ibnul As and Abdur-Rahman ibne Harith ibne Hisham to make copies of it. The Third Caliph told the three Khoraishites that wherever they differed from Zaid in the recitation of the Qur'an and its pronunciation, it should be written in the dialect of the Qoreish since it was revealed in their dialect.

They did as they were bidden and prepared copies of the collection, and returned the original to Hafsa and sent the copies to all corners of the empire. The Third Caliph ordered the Qur'an in all other forms or collections to be burnt and destroyed.

Bokhari relates that the son of Zaid claimed that he had heard his father say, "when we were copying the collection, we missed a verse from Sura-e-Ahzab which I used to hear the Holy Prophet reciting; we searched for i4 we found it with Khozaimat ibne Thabith Ansari and we put it in the same Sura in the collection." These two traditions of Bokhari regarding the collection of the reign of the First Caliph and the copying of it during the reign of the Third Caliph contain a slight contradiction regarding the missing verse.

Now, besides these two, there are twenty more traditions regarding the collection of the Qur'an, each contradicting the other in some way. Eleven of them are mentioned in the Muntakhab-e-Kanzul Ummal and the rest have been taken from Itqan of Suyooti and others. The following is a brief account of these traditions. In one tradition ibne Abi Shaiba relates that Ali said that Abu Bakr was the greatest one in the collection of the Qur'an, being the first person to collect the Qur'an.