Reassessing Qurʾānic Codification: A Critical Appraisal of Nicolai Sinai’s Methodology

Abstract

This article reassesses Nicolai Sinai’s account of Qurʾānic codification and situates it within current debates on the textual history of the Qurʾān. It evaluates Sinai’s claim that the consonantal skeleton (rasm) attained closure under the caliph ʿUthmān in the mid-seventh century and examines his use of three evidence streams: Islamic historiography, internal textual analysis, and early epigraphic/manuscript data. To sharpen the appraisal, the study introduces a comparative frame that juxtaposes Sinai’s findings and methods with those of Fred M. Donner and Angelika Neuwirth, who represent influential but distinct approaches to the Qurʾān’s formation. The comparison shows how differing evidentiary priorities and hermeneutic assumptions yield divergent chronologies and mechanisms of fixation. On balance, the material and codicological indicators substantively support an early codification compatible, though not identical, with Donner’s reconstruction and partially convergent with Neuwirth’s canon-formation account. The article contributes the first tightly integrated, method-centred comparison of Sinai with Donner and Neuwirth and proposes explicit evidentiary-weighting criteria—prioritising material over internal textual over narrative sources when in tension—to guide future codification research. It concludes by underscoring how methodological choices decisively shape scholarly reconstructions of when and how the Qurʾān became textually stable.