The variants that we have covered above come through a mixture of both Sunni and Shiʿi transmitters and give the impression that they halt abruptly; they do not provide information about the reaction of the Muslim community to the codex of ʿAlī. Certainly, if a very prominent figure like ʿAlī remained in his house for a considerable period and collected the Qur’an in a unified form for the first time, there must have been some reactions from other Muslims, unless he collected the Qur’an for merely scholarly reasons and his personal use and did not present it to anyone. Perhaps this was the understanding of Sunni scholars who assumed that if the traditions regarding ʿAlī's collections were not fabricated, ʿAlī's codex must have been merely a personal copy at best, thus excluding it from the official history of the Qur’an.

However, the traditions that we will examine in the following sections suggest otherwise. They seem to provide the rest of the story, which involved a tension between Abū Bakr and ʿAlī due to ʿAlī's delay in pledging allegiance to Abū Bakr. Also, ʿAlī did present his copy of the Qur’an to the people including the Caliph Abū Bakr but they refused his work; in return he walked away with another oath that they would never see his copy of the Qur’an again. In addition, one version goes so far as to state that ʿAlī undertook the task at the specific request of the Prophet who before passing away handed over written material about the Qur’an to ʿAlī and asked him to collect it.

Isnād Analysis

We have four variants that were reported on the authority of the sixth Imām, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. They appear in Tafsīr al-Qummī, Baṣāʾir al-Darajāt, al-Kāfī and Manāqib Āl Abī Ṭālib. The variant mentioned in Ibn Shahrāshūb's Manāqib Āl Abī Ṭālib did not have a sanad so we assume the author copied the tradition from one of the other three books without mentioning the name. Therefore, we cannot include it in the isnād analysis.