Faḍā'il al-Qur'ān is the usual title given to chapters in various ḥadīth compilations or to individual works that deal with the ‘excellences’ or ‘merits’ of the Qur'an. The faḍā'il al-Qur'ān traditions found in common in the standard and non-standard ḥadīth compilations are concerned largely with the memorisation of the Qur'an, its compilation and being written down, its best reciters, and the excellences of certain surahs and āyāt. In the early part of the 3rd/9th century, separate works on faḍā'il al-Qur'ān began to emerge, which covered a wider range of topics. This article establishes that both the religious and the social historian may profitably mine the faḍā'il al-Qur'ān literature for valuable insights into, for example, the position of Qur'an reciters in early Islamic society; early attitudes towards writing conventions in the maṣāhif; modes of recitation; the probity of accepting wages for teaching the Qur'an; and the authoritativeness of oral versus written transmission of the Qur'anic text. A closer examination of the contents of the faḍā'il al-Qur'ān literature also yields valuable insights into the central role of the Qur'an, both as an oral and written text, and of its ‘people’ or its ‘advocates’, the so-called ahi al-Qurān, in the early Muslim community. Our preliminary survey allows us to state that, for some people, the Qur'an as the central sacred text of Islam came to stand in for the pristine, idealised Muslim polity. How certain groups of people chose to define their relation to the Qur'an (as its reciters, bearers, advocates, teachers and explicators of its grammar and language) and what aspect of the Qur'an they chose to emphasise (oral versus written) could then be regarded as a hallmark of their piety and fidelity to the memory of the earliest community under the Prophet and his rightly-guided caliphs. Such an endeavour assumed particular relevance in the merit-conscious society first established by cUmar (d. 24/644), in which people were ranked in terms of their moral excellences according to the principle of sābiqa (‘priority in Islam’), and from which they consequently derived their social standing. Our study, on the one hand, corroborates some of the information already available about the organisation of early Islamic society from other sources; on the other, it nuances and broadens this information. Our line of inquiry also allows us to refine a body of scholarship regarding the origins of the faḍā'il al-Qur'ān traditions, and their nature and the conclusions to be derived from this corpus concerning the attitudes of early Muslims towards the study of the Qur'an.
Role of Women Structuring the Society