In the remaining parts of the study, I will be analysing variants of all the traditions regarding ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib's collection of the Qur’an. The traditions that will be treated in the following chapters represent all the available traditions that mention the collection of the Qur’an by ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib that I could find in the early Shiʿi and Sunni sources. There is no classification in the selection of the sources aside from occasionally naming the Sunni and Shiʿi sources. To provide a fair treatment of the subject, I have included any early text that contains relevant traditions on the issue. The traditions related to the issue were reported on the authority of four people: ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, Ibn Sīrīn, Muḥammad al-Bāqir and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. We will examine each group of variants in a different section.

Muḥammad Hādī Maʿrifat, in his research, had found around 10 traditions on the issue. Shehzad Saleem added around 11 more variants to what Maʿrifat had already found and thus increased the number of the variants to 21. Finally, my research finds seven more variants and brings the total number up to 28 variants. There are three more traditions on the issue but I could not fit them into any of the groups, consequently decided to exclude them from the analysis.

In the introduction to his article ‘The Murder of Ibn Abī l-Ḥuqayq,’ Motzki summarises ‘special biases’ by which Western scholars deal with the Muslim sources about the life of the Prophet. For Motzki, one of the most important biases being held against the Muslim sources is that ‘The background is theological, in that the traditions tried to create a specific theology of history, or in that the Muslims simply tended to put a halo around the founder of their religion.’

He then rationalises his reasons for choosing the subject of his article, which is to ‘reduce the risk of bias’: