After harsh criticism by fellow orientalists, the theory advanced by Vollers in the early 20th century has recently been revived and redeveloped by Van Putten & Stokes. Central to their thesis is the idea that the Qurʾān, rather than being composed with fully Classical case inflection, was in fact originally composed in a Hijazi Arabic vernacular. Unlike Classical Arabic, Hijazi Arabic had a reduced case system and lacked, among other things, tanwīn and word-final short vowels. The data brought forth by van Putten are very compelling, drawing on historical linguistic observations and the orthography, phonology, and morphology of the qurʾānic consonantal text (QCT). There remain, however, several loose threads that warrant further investigation. For example, the canonical readers, the earliest of whom operated in the late seventh/early eighth century, all transmit reading traditions with classical case inflection. Furthermore, the orthography of several words in the QCT remain unexplained in Van Putten’s model. In this paper, I propose an alternative model of the observed data. Namely, that the orthography of the Qurʾān, upon which Van Putten builds his hypothesis, indeed represents the spoken vernacular in seventh century Hijaz. However, the Qurʾān, as a literary text, was in fact composed, delivered, and transmitted in a literary register with a Classical Arabic-like case system. To support this hypothesis, I draw upon qurʾānic rhyme, historical linguistics, early Islamic inscriptions, and early qurʾānic manuscripts. The strength of my proposed model is that it does not discard any of the data advanced by Van Putten, and simultaneously provides an explanation for several problematic observations.