Preservation, Updating, Dawah

of thousands of the companions of the Prophet had learnt the complete Quran by heart. It was thus completely preserved in human memory. But as far as the writing of the Quran was concerned, it existed only in fragments on different kinds of writing materials. The first Caliphs, therefore, engaged scholars of the Quran from amongst the companions to prepare a single volume of the Quran. By employing the double checking system, that is, the Quran as memorized was checked with the Quran in its written form and the Quran in written form was checked with the Quran preserved in human memory. Thus the first caliph prepared the first bound volume of the Quran, which served as the standard copy. All the later copies of the Quran were made from this original volume. Thus, the Quran was preserved by following the double method—writing and memorizing, generation after generation, until it reached the age of the printing press, whereupon any possibility of human interpolation in the text was ruled out. Contribution of Muhaddithin (Scholars of Hadith) In addition to this, a huge number of eminent Muslim scholars arose among the first few generations of Islam to prepare a totally authentic and unparalleled historical record generally known as Hadith, Sirah and Maghazi. Within a surprisingly short period of time, they produced a vast and systematic body of literature that contains almost each word uttered by the Prophet, every action done by him, anything approved of or disapproved of by him, including other chronological details about his companions and the succeeding generations. This literature, as a whole, is rightly considered to be the second basic source of Islam after the Quran. The