Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Quran is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation directly from God, called Allah. Muslims hold that it was orally revealed to the prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel over a period of some 23 years.
The Quran consists of 114 chapters, known as surah, each made up of verses called ayah. The total number of verses in the most popular Hafs Quran is 6,236, and one estimate counts the text at 77,430 words.
The first caliph Abu Bakr ordered the Quran compiled into one volume after many companions who had memorized it were killed at the Battle of al-Yamama, appointing Zayd ibn Thabit for the task. The third caliph Uthman later established a standard version known as the Uthmanic codex.
Islamic tradition relates that Muhammad received his first revelation in 610, in the Cave of Hira, on the Laylat al-Qadr when he was 40. The revelations continued over some 23 years and concluded in 632, the year of his death.
The Sanaa manuscripts are Quranic fragments discovered in 1972 in a mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, consisting of 12,000 pieces and proven to be the oldest Quranic text known at the time. They contain palimpsests, and the scholar Gerd R. Puin dated them to the early 8th century and noted unconventional verse orderings and textual variations.
I'jaz is the Islamic doctrine that the Quran has a miraculous, inimitable quality in both content and form that no human speech can match. It is treated as proof granted to Muhammad to authenticate his prophethood, reinforced by his illiteracy.
Translating the Quran is regarded as problematic because an Arabic word may carry a range of meanings depending on context, making accurate translation difficult. The first translator was Salman the Persian, who rendered surat al-Fatiha into Persian in the seventh century, and Robert of Ketton produced the first Western-language version in Latin in 1143.