Zayd ibn Thabit

Zayd ibn Thabit was a young Companion of the Prophet Muhammad from the Ansar (the "helpers," the Muslims native to Medina), of the Banu Najjar clan of the Khazraj tribe. Tradition holds that he was too young to fight at the Battle of Badr (traditionally dated 624 CE) and was sent home. Reports say the Prophet had him learn the writing of other peoples — commonly named as the script of the Jews (Hebrew) and Syriac — so that he could read and answer correspondence, and that he became one of the scribes who wrote down revelation as it came; these details, including the languages and the speed with which he is said to have learned them, are traditional and vary by source.

He is best known for the role assigned to him in the early tradition: leading the gathering of the scattered written and memorized portions of the Qur'an into a single collection under the first caliph, Abu Bakr — undertaken, it is reported, after many memorizers died at the Battle of Yamama (traditionally 633 CE) — and then heading the committee that produced a standardized written text under the third caliph, Uthman. This account is preserved in the hadith collection of al-Bukhari (Kitab Fada'il al-Qur'an) and is traditionally held; modern academic scholarship debates the precise mechanics and historicity of the Abu Bakr-era collection as distinct from the Uthmanic standardization.

Zayd remained in Medina, where he was esteemed as a jurist, is reported to have served as a judge, and was regarded as a foremost authority on fara'id (the Islamic law of inheritance); a saying directing inheritance and Qur'an questions to him is attributed to the caliph Umar. In the first civil war, in the Sunni tradition he is reported to have supported Uthman, while Shia tradition emphasizes that he did not join the caliph Ali's campaigns — a partisan, divergently-reported point rather than a settled fact. His death year is genuinely disputed; 45 AH (665-666 CE) is the most commonly cited, with 42, 48, 51, 55 and 56 AH and "after 50 AH" also reported. One report (al-Waqidi, via al-Dhahabi — al-Waqidi being a transmitter many critics graded unreliable) gives his death at age 56, which sits uneasily with an estimated birth around 611 CE.