Who Wrote the Quran?

In Islam the Quran is not a book about Allah written by people. It is understood as Allah's own speech, conveyed word for word. The Prophet ﷺ is its messenger, not its author, and his own sayings are kept separately in the hadith collections so that the two are never mixed.

The Quran describes this process itself. In 26:192-195 it says it was sent down by the Lord of the Worlds, brought by a trustworthy spirit onto the Prophet's heart, in clear Arabic. In 2:97 Gabriel is named as the one who brought it, and 53:3-4 says the Prophet ﷺ does not speak from his own desire, and that what he conveys is revelation.

According to the account of Aisha recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, the first revelation came around 610 CE, when Muhammad ﷺ was about forty and in the habit of retreating to the cave of Hira near Mecca. The angel came to him and told him to read, and the first verses revealed were the opening of Surah Al-'Alaq (96:1-5).

The Prophet ﷺ is described in the Quran as unlettered (7:157), and 29:48 notes that he did not read or write scripture before it. Muslims see this as part of why the Quran's eloquence points beyond him. Revelation then continued in passages of different lengths, often in response to events, until shortly before his death in 632 CE.

The Quran was first an oral text. It was recited in prayer and learned by heart by many Companions. Alongside this, the Prophet ﷺ had scribes, the best known being Zayd ibn Thabit, who wrote passages down on whatever materials were available, such as parchment, palm stalks, flat stones and bone.

Muslim tradition holds that the order of verses within each surah was set by the Prophet ﷺ himself. Sahih al-Bukhari also reports that Gabriel reviewed the Quran with him every Ramadan, and twice in his final year.

After the Prophet's death, many Companions who had memorized the Quran were killed at the Battle of Yamamah. Sahih al-Bukhari reports that Umar urged the first caliph, Abu Bakr, to gather the Quran into one collection, and that Abu Bakr gave the task to Zayd ibn Thabit. Zayd collected the written pieces and checked them against what people had memorized. These sheets passed to Umar and then to his daughter Hafsah.

Under the third caliph, Uthman, around 650 CE, differences in how people in distant regions recited the Quran caused concern. Bukhari reports that Uthman had Zayd and a small group of Companions prepare standard copies from Hafsah's sheets, sent them to the main cities, and ordered other private copies to be destroyed. Accounts differ on how many copies were sent, with reports ranging from four to seven. The Quran read today descends from these Uthmanic copies, with vowel and dot markings added later to help readers.

Some non-Muslim historians argue that the Prophet ﷺ composed the Quran himself or drew on earlier sources. The Quran responds to this claim directly, for example in 10:38, which challenges anyone who says he invented it to produce a single surah like it. For Muslims, the answer to the question is simple: the Quran's author is Allah.