The One and the Many

“With four decades of painstaking manuscript research behind him, there is no one better placed than François Déroche to write the history—and tell the story—of how the Quran went from words uttered by Muhammad to inviolable canonical scripture. This is a meticulous, lucid, and fascinating book.”—Shawkat Toorawa, Yale University“A masterful and clearly written synthesis of Déroche’s pioneering and pathbreaking scholarship on early Islamic manuscripts over the past three decades.”—David Stephan Powers, Cornell University“The author engages in true investigation … connecting the Qur’anic text, the theory of ‘readings,’ and different layers of tradition in their historical context with his observations from manuscripts of the seventh and eighth centuries. He thus shows that, from the time of the Prophet until about the tenth century, a plurality was at work in various ways, revealing an approach to the Qur’an and its transmission very different from the literalism that has been observed.”—Jean-Marc Balhan, Revue Études“A summary of the author’s life’s work: Déroche is a master of manuscripts, and very artfully takes the reader through the earliest ones.”—David Cook, Rice University

François Déroche, professor at the Collège de France, is the world’s foremost authority on early Qur’anic manuscripts and a leading scholar of the history of the Arabic book.

Malcolm DeBevoise has translated more than forty works from French and Italian in every branch of scholarship. He is a three-time winner of the French-American Foundation translation prize for nonfiction.