Evidence of the Earliness of the Qu’ran (Nicolai Sinai)

1. Article: https://jstor.org/stable/24692364
2. However, in recent years various scholars have espoused a conjectural dating of the Quran’s codification to the time of Abd al-Malik, or have at least taken the view that the Islamic scripture was open to significant revision up until c. 700 ce. The second installment of this two-part article surveys arguments against this hypothesis. It concludes that as long as no Quranic passages with a distinct stylistic and terminological profile have been compellingly placed in a late seventh-century context, the traditional dating of the standard rasm (excepting certain orthographical features) to 650 or earlier ought to be our default view.
3. Evidence in favor of a mid-7th century closure of the Qu’ran
4. (1) Unanimous ascription of the standard rasm to Uthman

(2) Text-critical arguments

(3) Internal features of the Quran (i): lack of fit with post-650 Islamic

(4) Internal features of the Quran (ii): absence of narrative framing

(5) Internal features of the Quran (iii): lack of linguistic normalization

1. Conclusion
2. He actually infers that this prototype may have reached closure in the late 630s.

There are good reasons to believe that the arrangment of verses in most suras go back to the lifetime of the Prophet

If the Quran had gone through a revision that lasted until 700, it would have been absurd to use the word “caliph” in a completely non-political context. We would have expected a political mention of the word Caliph, related to that period, even if indirectly. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TqocrII0gY&ab_channel=PaderbornerInstitutfürIslamischeTheologie

And if there had been much redaction going on until 700, many of the problems that preoccupied commentators in later periods would have been solved by editing the text. For example, “…the first house built was in Bekke” (3/96) They could easily replace the “b” in the verse with “m” and solve an anomaly.