For all Muslims the Qurʾān is the word of God. In the first centuries of Islam, however, many individuals and groups, and some Shīʿīs, believed that the generally accepted text of the Qurʾān is corrupt. The Shīʿīs asserted that redactors had altered or deleted among other things all passages that supported the rights of ʿAlī and his successors or that condemned his enemies. One of the fullest lists of these alleged changes and of other variant readings is to be found in the work of al-Sayyārī (3rd/9th century), which is indeed among the earliest Shīʿī books to have survived. In many cases the alternative readings that al-Sayyārī presents substantially contribute to our understanding of early Shīʿī doctrine and of the early and numerous debates about the Qurʾān in general.

Etan Kohlberg, D.Phil. (1971) in Oriental Studies, Oxford University, is Emeritus Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published extensively on Imami Shīʿī history, doctrine and literature including A Medieval Muslim Scholar at Work (Brill, 1992). Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi D.Phil. (1991) in Oriental and Religious Studies, Sorbonne (Paris), is Professor of Classical Islamic Theology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne. He has published mainly on Imami Shīʿī Islam, including La religion discrète : croyances et pratiques spirituelles en islam shiʿite (Vrin, 2006).

Students of Islamic religion and literature and the history of religion will find this edition of significant interest.