Uthman

By the 640s the Quran existed in written fragments and, above all, in the memories of reciters, and the regional armies had begun to recite it differently. The tradition remembers the general Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman returning from the Armenian and Azerbaijani front alarmed at the disputes he had heard between the men of Syria and the men of Iraq over how the revelation should be read. Uthman's response was to commission a definitive written text. A committee under Zayd ibn Thabit, who had served the Prophet as a scribe, worked from the sheets kept by Hafsa, a widow of the Prophet, and settled on the dialect of Quraysh where usage differed.

Master copies were then sent out to the main centres (Kufa, Basra, Damascus and Mecca among them, with one kept in Medina), and the order went out that other written versions be withdrawn and destroyed, so that a single consonantal skeleton, the rasm, would stand behind every copy. That standard text is the one Muslims read today. Several of the very oldest Quran manuscripts have been linked by tradition to this moment: the Samarkand Kufic Quran now in Tashkent is venerated as one of Uthman's own codices, and this atlas files that artifact against him for exactly that reason. Modern manuscript scholarship treats such attributions cautiously, the oldest folios are early but not demonstrably the caliph's personal copy, while confirming that a single Uthmanic archetype does lie behind the surviving early tradition.

Uthman came from the Umayyad clan of Quraysh, one of the richest trading families of Mecca, and he kept his fortune after converting to Islam early, in the first years of the movement. That wealth made him one of its most important early patrons. Tradition credits him with buying the well of Rumah to give the young community of Medina fresh water, with equipping a large part of the "Army of Hardship" that marched to Tabuk, and with paying to enlarge the Prophet's Mosque. It is the background to his epithet al-Ghani, "the Generous."

His other epithet, Dhu al-Nurayn, "Possessor of the Two Lights," records something rarer: he married two of the Prophet's daughters, Ruqayyah and then, after her death, Umm Kulthum. No other man is remembered as having done so, and it bound him closely to Muhammad's household. Among Sunnis he is counted the third of the four Rashidun, the "rightly guided" caliphs whose rule is held up as a model, and he is one of the ten Companions promised paradise. His standing in Shia memory is far more critical, and the reasons for that belong to the story of how his caliphate ended.

The second half of Uthman's reign was dogged by a charge that has followed him ever since: that he favoured his own Umayyad relatives, appointing them to the richest governorships, Muawiya in Syria, and his foster-brother and kinsmen in Egypt and Iraq, and that he let his cousin Marwan dominate his administration. Discontent gathered in the garrison towns of Kufa, Basra and, above all, Egypt, whose grievances were as much about the division of conquest revenue as about piety.

In 656 armed provincials came to Medina, blockaded the caliph in his house, and after a standoff broke in and killed him. He is said to have refused to let his supporters shed Muslim blood in his defence, and to have been struck down with a copy of the Quran open before him, an image the tradition has never forgotten. He was the first caliph to be murdered, and by a Muslim mob rather than an external enemy.

His death did not settle anything; it opened the first fitna. Ali, chosen as the next caliph, was at once challenged by those who demanded vengeance for Uthman: first Aisha, Talha and Zubayr at the Battle of the Camel, then Muawiya, who raised Uthman's bloodied shirt as a banner at Siffin. The civil wars that followed hardened into the enduring division between what became Sunni and Shia Islam, which is why Uthman's assassination is reckoned one of the hinge events of Islamic history.