Several scholars have recognized the importance of seventh-century women as participants in and transmitters of the early history of Islam. At least one historian has traced the conscious effort by medieval male scholars to rewrite the lives of prominent seventh-century women to accord with their ideal of the Muslim woman. One area that scholars have not explored is the ways male religious authorities in the ninth and tenth centuries attempted to limit women’s association with al-mushaf, the Qur’anic codex. Hafsa bint ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (d. 665), wife of the Prophet and daughter of the second caliph, played an important role in the collection and codification of the first written Qur’an, but by the eleventh century Hafsa’s name had been completely eliminated from accounts of this significant part of Islamic history. This paper will demonstrate that male writers consistently diminished Hafsa’s role in the project and that this was part of a larger pattern of severing women from the written scripture. Malik ibn Anas (d. 796) refers to the mushaf only seven times in his Muwatta’ yet two of those references concern women. Ibn Hanbal’s (d. 855) Musnad includes several reports associating women with the Qur’anic codex, two of which relate incidences of women reading the Qur’an without male guidance. With the exception of one hadith, none of the accounts of women possessing or reading the Qur’an are repeated after the ninth century. Abu Ubayd’s (d. 838) Fada’il al-Qur’an and al-Bukhari’s (d. 870) Sahih both include detailed accounts of Hafsa’s role in preserving the first Qur’an. In his Tafsir, al-Tabari (d. 923) alters Hafsa’s role and in al-Askari’s (d. 1010) account, Hafsa does not appear at all. The late ninth and tenth-century accounts of the collection and codification of the Qur’an illustrate a conscious rewriting of Hafsa’s role in those projects. Moreover, it appears that as the written Qur’an became more prominent in society, the connection of Hafsa and other women to the Book was deliberately diminished by male scholars, thereby eliminating yet another option for Muslim women; the written word of God is the domain of men, and women have no business participating in that sphere. The life of Hafsa as written and rewritten by successive male scholars provides a prism for examining the deteriorating position of women in the early centuries of Islam.