This book pursues the two main goals of textual criticism concerning ancient texts to the text of the Qur'an: 1) to discern the earliest available form of the text, and 2) to illuminate the consequent history of the text. Keith Small shows that the earliest obtainable text is an early edited form of the Arabic consonantal text, but not the original texts described in Islamic historical sources.

With "Qur'ans""" "Books of Divine Encounter," Keith E. Small has written a rich visual history of the Qur'an focused on more than fifty manuscripts in the collection of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. One of the oldest and finest collections of Qur'an in the English-speaking world, it includes treasures from parchment pages from Islam s earliest centuries to a highly adorned copy of the Qur'an that once belonged to Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century ruler of the Islamic Kingdom of Mysore. Beginning with a brief introduction, Small takes readers through the Qur'an s origins. The...