Today I immensely enjoyed reading Joseph Witztum’s article in 𝑆ℎ𝑖𝑖 𝑆𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑅𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤. He takes up a specific aspect of an interesting issue: Shiʿi criticisms of the version of the Qurʾan codified by the caliph ʿUthmān (r. 644-656) ...
doi.org/10.1163/246824…
doi.org/10.1163/246824…
Shiʿi criticisms of ʿUthmān's codex are of many types – and many other Shiʿah rejected their premises, too – but they are of intrinsic historical interest. Sunni accounts were conscious of these and oft used ʿAlī as a mouthpiece to defend ʿUthmān’s codex of the Qurʾan and ...
to deflect criticism, for ex., of his alleged burning of older copies. (Below in this passage record by the 9th-cent. historian Ibn Shabbah, ʿAlī denounces those who call ʿUthmān ℎ̣𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑎̄𝑞 𝑎𝑙-𝑚𝑎𝑠̣𝑎̄ℎ̣𝑖𝑓, “the Qurʾan incinerator".) Witztum discusses, however, the ... 
criticism of the issue of 𝑡𝑎ʾ𝑙𝑖̄𝑓 - i.e., the order of the surahs and their verses as they appear in the codex - and how some Shiʿi scholars argued that the ʿUthmānic codex was faulty in this regard and that some verses were misplaced. Witztum discuss many examples, but ...
it is especially interesting to see where Western scholars like Theodor Nöldeke and Richard Bell, who did not have access to the early works Witztum discusses, agree with the Shiʿi scholars like ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm al-Qummī and Saʿd ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Ashʿarī. One example ...
is in the dialogue of Abraham in Q. ʿAnkabūt 29:16 ff. Q. 29:24 seems like it would fit better if it came immediately after 29:17; it seems "misplaced". Saʿd ibn ʿAbdallāh (d. ca. 912-14) would say that v. 24 𝑑𝑖𝑑 immediately follow v. 17 but ʿUthmān's committee erred by ...
placing it later in the surah. The 𝑡𝑎ʾ𝑙𝑖̄𝑓 of the ʿUthmānic codex was thus here “contrary to what God revealed” and the error arose due to “the paucity of their understanding of the [proper] arrangement [of the Qurʾan] and their scanty knowledge of the revelation.”
Nöldeke, as noted above, noticed the textual problem, too, but he proposed a slightly different solution. Rather than viewing 29:24 as “misplaced”, he regarded vv. 18-22 as “out of place” (in other words, likely inserted erroneously).
books.google.com/books?id=uKEHN…
books.google.com/books?id=uKEHN…
