Two parchment leaves containing parts of Surahs 18-20, only 63 of the Quran’s 6,236 verses. The parchment is radiocarbon dated to 568-645 AD, a range that begins decades before Muhammad’s first revelation in 610 AD. Carbon dating gives the age of the animal skin, not of the writing on it. Gabriel Said Reynolds notes that “our most ancient manuscript of the Qur’an does not agree with the standard text read around the world today.”

The founder of Islam. Born in Mecca, he lived there for 52 years before leading the Hijrah (migration) to Medina in 622 AD.

A wealthy Meccan merchant widow who employed Muhammad and then married him. She was his only wife until her death and, according to Islamic tradition, the first person to believe his claim to prophethood. Her Christian cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal reportedly identified the experience in the cave with the revelation given to Moses.

At age 40, Muhammad began receiving what Muslims believe are divine revelations through the angel Gabriel in the cave of Hira, initiating the Islamic movement.

Khadija’s paternal cousin to whom she brought Muhammad after the cave of Hira. Tradition describes him as an old, blind man who had followed Christianity and written out scripture in Hebrew letters. He identified the visitor as “the Namus” that God had sent to Moses, told Muhammad he would be called a liar and driven out, and promised to support him. He died shortly afterward, and the revelations reportedly paused for a time. He is the only figure in the tradition presented as an outside witness confirming the first revelation, and later Christian writers such as John of Damascus pointed to contact with an Arian or heretical monk to explain the movement’s origin.

Muhammad’s influential wife and daughter of Abu Bakr. She played a major political and military role after Muhammad’s death, notably leading forces at the Battle of the Camel in 656 AD. As a leading scholar, she narrated 2,210 traditions (hadiths), making her one of the most prolific sources of early Islamic tradition.

Facing persecution in Mecca, a group of Muhammad’s followers fled to Christian Abyssinia (Ethiopia), where the Negus granted them asylum. Islamic tradition records that the refugees recited the verses of Surah Maryam about Jesus to the Christian king.

Both Khadija and Abu Talib, Muhammad’s uncle and protector, died. The loss of his clan protection intensified opposition in Mecca and set the stage for the migration to Medina.

Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina), where he became a political and military leader as well as a religious one. This year became year one of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar, later formalized under Umar.

The first major battle between the Muslims of Medina and the Quraysh of Mecca. The Muslim victory against larger numbers was treated as divine vindication of Muhammad’s claims. The direction of prayer (qiblah) was also changed from Jerusalem to Mecca around this time.

A Meccan counterattack in which the Muslim forces were defeated and Muhammad was wounded. The reversal is addressed in the Quran as a test and a consequence of disobedience.

A Meccan-led coalition besieged Medina and failed. Afterward the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza was charged with treachery; its men were executed and the women and children enslaved, according to the earliest biography.

A ten-year truce with the Quraysh of Mecca that allowed the Muslim movement to expand. Islamic tradition also places letters sent to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and other rulers around this period.

Muhammad entered Mecca with little resistance, cleansed the Kaaba of its idols, and made the city the center of Islamic worship. Most of the Arabian tribes submitted over the next two years.

Muhammad died in Medina after a brief illness (likely from being poison), months after his farewell pilgrimage. He left no undisputed instruction about succession, and the disagreement over who should lead the community produced the lasting division between what became Sunni and Shia Islam.

The first Caliph (successor to Muhammad). He fought the Ridda (Apostasy) wars to consolidate the Arabian peninsula and oversaw the first gathering of Quranic verses into a single manuscript.

A battle of the Ridda wars against Musaylima, a rival claimant to prophethood. Islamic tradition records that many memorizers (huffaz) of the Quran were killed here, which prompted Umar to urge Abu Bakr to have the scattered Quranic material collected into one written codex.

The second Caliph. Under his leadership, the Islamic empire expanded rapidly, capturing Jerusalem, Egypt, and Iraq, and establishing the Hijri calendar. He was assassinated in Medina in 644 AD.

The decisive Muslim victory over the Byzantine army near the Yarmouk river, which opened Syria and Palestine to Arab rule. The Sassanid Persians were defeated at al-Qadisiyyah in the same period, beginning the collapse of their empire.

Patriarch Sophronius surrendered the city to Umar after a siege. Large, ancient Christian populations in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt came under Islamic rule and were governed as protected but subordinate communities (dhimmis) subject to the jizya tax.

Amr ibn al-As took Egypt from the Byzantines, bringing the large Coptic Christian church and the ancient center of Alexandria under Muslim rule.

The third Caliph. In approximately 652 AD, he ordered the standardization and canonization of the Quran, sending official copies to major provincial centers and ordering all other variant manuscripts, whether partial or whole, to be burned or erased so that his codex would have no rival. According to one account, Uthman even destroyed his own personal copy of the Quran. Five surahs were reportedly in dispute; his codex included three of them (Al-Fatiha 1, Al-Falaq 113, and An-Nas 114) and excluded the other two, al-Khal’ (“Casting-off”) and al-Hafd (“Hastening”).

A close companion of Muhammad and one of the men Muhammad named as a teacher of the Quran. He kept his own codex, which differed in wording and in the number of surahs, and he objected to the Uthmanic recension and the order to destroy other copies. Companion codices such as his and that of Ubayy ibn Ka’b show that the text was not uniform before Uthman’s standardization. These earliest codices were privately owned copies compiled by the companions and the earlier caliphs. Ubayy’s codex reportedly contained the two surahs, al-Khal’ and al-Hafd, that Uthman’s codex left out.

Rebels killed the third Caliph in his home in Medina, beginning the first Islamic civil war (fitna). Within the same year Aisha, Talha, and al-Zubayr fought Ali at the Battle of the Camel near Basra.

Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, husband of Fatimah, and the fourth of the Rashidun (“rightly guided”) caliphs. Shia Muslims hold that he should have succeeded Muhammad directly. He was assassinated by a Kharijite in Kufa in 661 AD.

Ali fought Mu’awiya, the governor of Syria, to a standstill and accepted arbitration. Those who rejected the arbitration broke away as the Kharijites, the first Islamic sect to declare other Muslims apostates deserving death.

After Ali’s death, Mu’awiya became caliph and moved the capital to Damascus, turning the caliphate into a hereditary dynasty. The Umayyads ruled the expanding empire until 750 AD.

Husayn, the son of Ali and grandson of Muhammad, was killed with his followers by Umayyad forces. The event hardened the Sunni-Shia division permanently and remains central to Shia identity and mourning.

An influential Umayyad Caliph who centralized power, made Arabic the official language, further standardized the Quran, and placed the name “Muhammad” on official coinage and on the Dome of the Rock.

Built by Abdul Malik on the Temple Mount. Its interior inscriptions are among the earliest datable Quranic-style texts in existence, and they directly address Christians, denying that God has a son and calling Jesus only the messenger of God and a word bestowed on Mary. Some of the wording differs from the Quran as it stands today.

Several early manuscripts are traditionally claimed to be copies made under Uthman, yet none of them share the same Arabic text. The Topkapi codex (Istanbul, mid-8th century) holds about 99% of the standard Quran with over 2,000 variants from the current standard Arabic text. The Samarkand codex (Tashkent, 720-790 AD) reaches only to Surah 43, about half the standard Quran with only one complete surah, and was copied by many hands with many errors and variants. The Ma’il codex (London) also reaches Surah 43 with hundreds of variants, the Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus (Paris) preserves about 20% of the standard Quran with 93 variants, and the Al-Husseini codex (Cairo) has many write-overs and corrections that move it toward the later Hafs text.

Muslim forces crossed from North Africa into the Iberian peninsula and overthrew the Visigothic kingdom, beginning nearly eight centuries of Islamic presence in Spain.

A year-long Umayyad siege of the Byzantine capital failed, halting the advance into Asia Minor and preserving the Eastern Roman Empire for another seven centuries.

Born in Damascus under the Umayyad Caliphate. He worked as a treasurer/administrator in the caliphal court before becoming a monk. While serving as a monk, he wrote “De Haeresibus” (On Heresies) in Greek. He describes the “Heresy of the Ishmaelites” (Islam) and writes about “Mamed” (Muhammad), suggesting he was influenced by an Arian monk. Historically, “Mamed” (the praised/anointed one) was used in the 4th century by Saint Ambrose as a title for Jesus Christ, the Messiah.

Charles Martel defeated an Umayyad raiding army in central France, marking the furthest sustained advance of Muslim forces into western Europe.

The Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad dynasty and moved the center of the Islamic world east, founding Baghdad in 762 AD. Most of the hadith collections, biographies, and Quranic commentaries that survive today were written under Abbasid rule, more than a century after the events they describe.

Historian and biographer who wrote the first major biography (Sirah) of Muhammad, titled Sirat Rasul Allah. His original manuscript is lost but is preserved through later edits.

The Patriarch of the Church of the East defended the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and the crucifixion before the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. His account is one of the earliest recorded Christian-Muslim dialogues.

Jurist of Medina and author of the Muwatta, one of the earliest surviving collections of hadith and law. He founded the Maliki school, one of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence, alongside Abu Hanifa (d. 767), al-Shafi’i (d. 820), and Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855).

Muslim scholar who edited and preserved the biography of Muhammad by Ibn Ishaq, serving as our primary historical source for early Islamic history. He states in his introduction that he omitted material he found objectionable.

Caliph al-Ma’mun imposed the Mu’tazilite doctrine that the Quran is created rather than eternal, and had scholars tested and imprisoned over it. Ahmad ibn Hanbal resisted and was flogged; the policy was abandoned by 848 AD and the doctrine of an uncreated, eternal Quran became Sunni orthodoxy.

An influential Sunni scholar and historian from Tabaristan. He wrote the monumental commentary on the Quran (Tafsir al-Tabari) and a massive historical work of early Islam.

Islamic scholar from Bukhara, Uzbekistan. He painstakingly collected and compiled 7,439 authentic traditions (ahadith) of Muhammad after evaluating hundreds of thousands of reports. He is the collector of the Sahih Bukari hadiths.

Scholar from Nishapur and student of al-Bukhari. His Sahih Muslim is regarded with Sahih Bukhari as the most reliable of the Sunni hadith collections, roughly 240 years after Muhammad’s death.

A Baghdad scholar who restricted the acceptable recitations of the Quran to seven readings (qira’at), later expanded to ten. The readings developed between the 8th and 10th centuries because the early Arabic script lacked vowels and most consonant dots, and adding dots and vowels changes the word and its meaning, so a single consonantal form can be read as many different words. One written text supported multiple readings, among them Hafs ‘an ‘Asim, and this ruling was a further act of canonization roughly 300 years after Muhammad.

Persian theologian, jurist, and mystic whose work shaped Sunni orthodoxy for centuries. His critique of the philosophers and his integration of Sufi practice into mainstream Islam largely settled the relationship between reason and revelation in Sunni thought.

A Hanbali scholar in Damascus who called for a return to the practice of the first three generations (the salaf) and rejected later innovations. He also wrote a lengthy refutation of Christianity, and his work is a primary influence on modern Salafi movements.

An influential Sunni scholar, exegete, and historian in Syria. He authored a widely cited commentary on the Quran (Tafsir Ibn Kathir) and a multi-volume history of Islam.

Historian and early social theorist from Tunis, author of the Muqaddimah. He applied critical scrutiny to the transmitted reports of the past, and his work is a major source for the history of the Islamic world.

Al-Azhar published a standardized printed edition of the Quran in the Hafs ‘an ‘Asim reading, the text that the Ottomans had already favored. This edition is the basis for nearly every Quran printed today, and about 93% of the Muslim world uses the Hafs text. The Warsh (another Arabic Quran) reading remains in use in parts of North and West Africa, and there are roughly 5,000 differences between the Hafs and Warsh Qurans alone. Today there are many Arabic Qurans, not just one.

During restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana’a in Yemen, workers found a cache of early Quranic parchments, including a palimpsest whose erased lower text preserves a non-Uthmanic version with differences in wording and surah order. It is one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts known, with its layers dated from the 650s into the 700s AD, there are about 70 variants between the erased and upper layers, and hundreds of variants overall.