ABSTRACT
The early Community was apparently able to view the Qur'an both as the word of God and as the word of Muhammad, insofar as God's words came to the Prophet as an integral part of his prophetic experience. While the dogmatic distinction of later Islam between the fundamental nature of the divine word and that of the human words that issued from the same prophetic lips preserves the "immaculateness" of the quranic revelations, it does so in a somewhat artificial and literalistic way. It has been suggested that in many respects the authority of the Prophet was and is inseparable from that of the Qur'an, and that Muhammad's intimate, personal involvement in the revelatory process was understood in the early Muslim generations as a natural corollary of his office. The "unity" and "freedom" in the early Muslim understanding of revelation becomes still clearer when one turns to the specific question of non-qur'anic channels of divine authority.
