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Does this imply that the Qur'an we now possess was always a single corpus?

No, for it is claimed that collections of individual verses (ayas) might possibly have been
gathered from the time of the Caliph Abu Bakr (c.633-34) and afterward (Newman
1996:311), since various acquaintances and even Mohammad's personal secretary were
consulted as resources at different times. More reliably, it is said that under the third
caliph, `Uthman (c.652), another collection was made was made and standardized
because recitations in different locales of supposedly identical passages were showing
differences, some of dialect and others of substance (ibid:312) a fact which is reflected
in the Hadith (ibid:313). Hence, `Uthman authorized the production of four copies of his
collected text while he ordered earlier codices to be destroyed (though not all appeared to
have suffered the intended fate), and one each of these four copies was placed in strategic
cities, namely, Medina, Kufa, Basra and Damascus (Cooper 1985:55). The Arabic word
itself, qur'an, means either "the reading/recitation" or "the collected things," a collection
generally regarded today as Uthmanic (Cooper 1985:55) and showing a preference for
Quraysh tribal dialect whenever conflicting readings had earlier surfaced.

However, this paper shall not concern itself with the historical issues of

compilation and textual divergence, nor with the related issue of the Islamic "doctrine of
abrogation," nor with the so-called "Satanic verses." These bear upon the topic, but need
to be left aside for the sake of time and space. Instead, we return to inquire about
Moslem views on the mechanism of conveyance of holy writ from heaven to earth. In
theory, do Moslems view the giving of the Qur'an in the same way that they
(theoretically) view the giving of supposedly-lost autographa of the Judaeo-Christian
faith? How specific was the divine work of inspiration in the Moslem tradition did it
apply to each word of the Qur'an, to the phrase or clause, or only to the ideas in general?

Islamic tradition claims that the Qur'an is eternal and uncreated, i.e. that its

revelations given from that first occasion on Mt. Hira and beyond come much later than
its actual existence as a text on a "guarded tablet" residing in the presence of Allah. This
is taught in Sura 85:21-22 ("Nay! It is a glorious Qur'an, in a guarded tablet") and 43:3-4
("Surely We have made it an Arabic Quran that you may understand. And surely it is in
the original of the Book with Us, truly elevated, full of wisdom.").

It has been suggested that the most accurate grasp of the origination of the Qur'an

comes not from analogy with the Judaeo-Christian scriptures but with the incarnation of
Jesus: as Jesus is the Word of God incarnate, the Qur'an has been described as the Word
of Allah inlibriate. Eugene Nida (1954:171), whose writings typically evidence great
patience of understanding and a keen desire for flexibility, nevertheless put it curtly: "It
is now heresy for a Mohammedan to say that Mohammed wrote the Koran; rather, one
must believe that the Koran is a word-for-word copy of the pre-existent, eternal Koran
which is in heaven."

Orthodox Islam insists without wavering that this eternal Qur'an was given in

Arabic because that is the language of heaven (Sura 43:2), a claim that also appears in
Surah 41:2 ("A revelation from the Beneficent, the Merciful God: A book of which the