ABSTRACT
Except in the case of some New Religious Movements, there usually exists a significant gap of decades, even centuries, between the time the words were first spoken, recited, sung, composed, and/or written and the time they became encapsulated within a text that was (mostly) unalterable and recognized as “scripture.” That is, the processes of compilation and canonization are often chronologically distant from the origin of the material. The traditional accounts in Islam and even some theories put forth by scholars skeptical of those accounts place the origins, compilation, and canonization in close temporal proximity. Yet, an examination of these accounts and theories shows that the situation in early Islam was more complex, and more skeptical theories suggest those accounts are not just inaccurate, but were fabricated and circulated to mask the true processes that led to the Qurʾān.
