Al-Hajjaj and the Text: The Chapter That Bears His Name Over the Mushaf

The Most Feared Man in the Empire, and a Chapter Bearing His Name

Kufa, 75 AH. A short man with a piercing voice climbs the minbar of the mosque, his face veiled. Then he uncovers it and delivers the speech history memorized word for word: "I see heads that have ripened and are ready for the harvest, and I am their reaper." This is al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi (d. 95 AH), the Umayyad governor of Iraq — the man who bombarded the precincts of the Kaaba with catapults during the siege of Ibn al-Zubayr, and whose name became, within Muslim memory itself, a byword for bloodshed.

Some two centuries after his death, a scholar in Baghdad — Abu Bakr Ibn Abi Dawud al-Sijistani (d. 316 AH), son of the compiler of Sunan Abi Dawud, one of the foundational Sunni hadith collections — wrote the earliest surviving book devoted to the copies of the Quran: Kitab al-Masahif. In it stands a chapter whose title stops the reader cold: "Bab: ma ghayyara al-Hajjaj fi mushaf Uthman" — "Chapter: what al-Hajjaj altered in the mushaf of Uthman."