Quran

• 1. Introduction

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  The Quran appears about 70 times within its own pages, naming itself in dozens of ways. It calls itself al-furqan, the discernment. It calls itself umm al-kitab, the mother book. It calls itself huda, the guide, and dhikr, the remembrance. The word itself comes from the Arabic verb qara'a, meaning he read or he recited. Muslims believe it was spoken to the prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, beginning on the Laylat al-Qadr when he was 40. The revelations arrived in pieces over some 23 years, ending in 632, the year of his death. Today it is organized into 114 chapters called surah, each broken into verses called ayah. Yet for all its fixed shape, the book carries deep questions inside it. How did scattered recitations on bones and palm leaves become a single volume? Why do scholars still argue over whether it was created or uncreated? Why does a text revered as God's own speech rarely name the people and places it describes? And why has no critical edition, built from the oldest manuscripts, ever been produced?

• 2. From Recitation To Volume

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  In the Cave of Hira, during one of his retreats to the mountains, Muhammad is said to have received his first revelation in 610. A'isha later described seeing the prophet inspired on a very cold day, with sweat dropping from his forehead as the inspiration ended. Muhammad himself compared some revelations to the ringing of a bell. His critics had a harsher reading. Because his experiences resembled those of figures known in ancient Arabia, they accused him of being possessed, a soothsayer, or a magician.

  The revelations classified as Meccan make up two-thirds of the book. They were transmitted orally, then recorded in the years leading up to the Hijrah, the period from 622 to 632 known as Medinan. According to tradition, some Quraysh captives taken at the Battle of Badr won their freedom by teaching Muslims the simple script of the day. The Quran began to be recorded on tablets, bones, and the broad flat ends of palm leaves. It did not exist in book form when Muhammad died in 632, at age 61 to 62.

  Musaylima changed that. When many companions who had memorized the text were killed by him at the Battle of al-Yamama, the first caliph Abu Bakr decided to compile it into one volume. He appointed Zayd ibn Thabit, described as the person who wrote down the divine revelation for the Messenger of Allah. Zayd gathered material from parchments, palm-leaf stalks, thin stones, and from men who knew it by heart. After Abu Bakr's death in 644, the compiled Mushaf passed to Muhammad's widow, Hafsa bint Umar.

• 3. The Uthmanic Standard

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  Around the 650s, Islam had spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula into Persia, the Levant, and North Africa. Soldiers from different tribes worshipped together in large military garrisons, and conflicts broke out over differing readings of the text. Islamic scholars explained these as the use of seven syllables, the ahruf. When the problem reached the third caliph Uthman, he ordered a committee headed by Zayd to prepare a standard text, now called the Uthmanic codex, with copies sent to various city centers.

  Other versions were collected and destroyed on Uthman's orders. None of the variant copies attributed to figures such as Abdullah ibn Masud, Ubayy ibn Ka'b, and Abu Musa al-Ash'ari survive today. The historian Michael Cook notes that early Muslim accounts of the collection sometimes contradict themselves. The book is not arranged in the order the revelations were received, and scholars debate how it gained its present sequence. Some hold it came through divine revelation in Muhammad's lifetime, while others credit a reasoning decision by Uthman's committee.

  The ahruf are persistently described as different from the qira'at, which today refers to different pronunciations of the Quranic rasm. Initially scorned as man-made, the ahruf were sanctified five centuries later by being linked to a divine source. Shia tradition preserved more than 1,000 hadiths ascribed to the Imams that indicate distortion of the text. According to Etan Kohlberg, this belief was common among Shiites in the early centuries. Today Shias recite according to the qira'at of Hafs on the authority of Asim, the prevalent reading in the Islamic world.

• 4. The Missing Critical Edition

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  Numerous researchers have observed that there has never been a critical text of the Quran built on manuscript evidence that checks the accuracy of transmission. The widely used text relies on the Uthmanic recension alone. By contrast, the Old and New Testament have been studied and reconstructed for centuries. The general consensus among experts is that reconstructions should rest on the oldest manuscripts, not on traditions.

  In 1972, in a mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, manuscripts consisting of 12,000 pieces were discovered, later proven to be the oldest Quranic text known at the time. These Sanaa manuscripts contain palimpsests, pages from which text was washed off to reuse the parchment. The faint underlying layer, the scriptio inferior, remains barely visible. The German scholar Gerd R. Puin investigated the fragments for years. His team made 35,000 microfilm photographs, dating them to the early 8th century.

  Puin noted unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography, and concluded the text was evolving rather than fixed. A survey of non-Muslim sources found no awareness of a unique Muslim scripture until the 8th century. Both Muslim and non-Muslim sources indicate that suras such as the Cow, the Women, and the Family of Imran circulated as separate works in that century. A recent purge mirrored the ancient one. A large number of pre-1924 variants were destroyed in the river Nile to standardize the 1924 Cairo edition, which follows the reading of Kufan Asim b. Bahdala and is the main version used today.

• 5. A Book Of Allusions

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  Events are referred to, but not narrated. Disagreements are debated without being explained. People and places are mentioned, but rarely named. This allusive style means commentary is needed to explain what the text refers to. The Quran alludes to narratives found in biblical and apocryphal texts without quoting any paragraph directly. Islamic theorists explain this as a focus on the moral lessons drawn from events.

  Moses is the most frequently mentioned individual, named 136 times, his life recounted more than any other prophet's. Abraham appears in 35 chapters, more often than any biblical figure apart from Moses, revered as a hanif and the builder of the Kaaba in Mecca. The Quran consistently calls Islam the religion of Abraham, millat Ibrahim. Other figures fill its pages with brief allusions: the Seven Sleepers, the Queen of Sheba, and the mysterious Dhul-Qarnayn, the man with two horns who built a barrier against Gog and Magog meant to last until the end of time.

  Strikingly, the book says very little about Muhammad himself, his companions, or his contemporaries. An exception is his slave and adopted son Zayd, named in connection with his divorced wife entering Muhammad's marriages. The clearest biographical traces are the brief mention of his followers settling in Yathrib after their expulsion by the Quraysh, and the Muslim victory at Badr. Some modern commentators, faced with figures that do not match historically known people, suggest reading them as representative characters rather than real ones.

• 6. Judgment And The Hour

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  Roughly one-third of the Quran is eschatological, dealing with the afterlife and the day of judgment at the end of time. The book does not assert a natural immortality of the soul. Human existence depends on God's will. When he wills, he causes a person to die, and when he wills, he raises them again in a bodily resurrection. Belief in the afterlife is often paired with belief in God, in the phrase Believe in God and the last day.

  Suras 44, 56, 75, 78, 81, and 101 relate directly to the afterlife and warn of the imminent day. It is called the Day of Judgment, the Last Day, the Day of Resurrection, or simply the Hour. Less often it is the Day of Distinction, the Day of the Gathering, or the Day of the Meeting. Many signs of the apocalypse in Islamic eschatology come from non-Quranic sources, though terms like fitna, Dabba, and Gog and Magog were read apocalyptically. At the time of the Mongol conquests, ibn Kathir identified Gog and Magog with the Turks and Mongols.

  In Surah At-Takwir the apocalypse arrives in poetic form. The sun is rolled up, the stars fall, the seas are set on fire, the mountains are moved, people run away in fear, and pregnant women miscarry. A square is set up, and the lord of the day comes and shows his shin. The gathered are invited to prostrate. One question asked there is why the innocent female children were killed. Beyond the Quran, apocalyptic writings feature the Dajjal and the Mahdi, with Jesus, Isa, returning from heaven to stop the havoc.

• 7. The Inimitable Word

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  In Islam the doctrine of i'jaz holds that the Quran has a miraculous quality, in both content and form, that no human speech can match. This inimitability is treated as proof granted to Muhammad to authenticate his prophethood. The doctrine is reinforced by his illiteracy, since an unlettered prophet could not be suspected of composing it. The aesthetic experience of reciting and hearing the text is often regarded as a main reason behind conversion in the early days.

  Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was an instrument of challenge, propaganda, and warfare, and the word for poet, shair, connotes a man of inspirational knowledge and unseen powers. To the early Arabs, poetry was sihr halal, and the poet a genius believed to commune with jinn. The first works on i'jaz appeared in the 9th century in Mu'tazila circles, emphasizing the literary aspect alone. The grammarian Al-Rummani listed features of its eloquence, including tashbih, istiara, and clarity of speech, bayan.

  The most famous works on the doctrine are two medieval books by the grammarian Al Jurjani, who died in 1078. Dala'il al-i'jaz, the Arguments of Inimitability, and Asrar al-balagha, the Secrets of Eloquence, argued that the book's power lay in a special quality of its stylistic arrangement. Not everyone agreed. Orientalist scholars Theodor Noldeke, Friedrich Schwally, and John Wansbrough pointed to linguistic defects, judging the text careless and imperfect. The language has been described as rhymed prose, conspicuous in the earlier Meccan suras where short verses throw the rhyming words into prominence.

• 8. Reading And Reverence

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  Surah Al-Fatiha, the first chapter, consists of seven verses and is recited in full in every rakat of the salah, making it the most often recited surah. Sura Al-Ikhlas ranks second. According to many early authorities, Muhammad said Ikhlas is equivalent to one-third of the whole Quran. During prayers the text is recited only in Arabic. A person who memorizes the entire book is called a hafiz, or hafiza for a woman, and ideally the verses are recited with a special prosody called tajwid.

  Reverence shapes how the physical book is handled. Before reading, ablution is performed, and the reader seeks refuge in Allah from the accursed Satan before beginning with the basmala. The book must never rest beneath other books, but always on top of them. One must never drink or smoke while it is read aloud, and it must be heard in silence. Worn-out copies are wrapped in cloth and stored, buried in a mosque or cemetery, or burned with the ashes buried or scattered over water.

  Understanding the text spawned whole disciplines. Tafsir is exegesis, divided into tafsir bi-al-ma'thur, received from Muhammad and his companions, and tafsir bi-al-ra'y, reached through personal reflection. Esoteric commentary on the hidden batin is called ta'wil. Henry Corbin narrates a hadith tracing to Muhammad that the Quran has an external appearance and a hidden depth, an esoteric meaning concealing another, for seven levels in all. The first translator was Salman the Persian, who rendered surat al-Fatiha into Persian in the seventh century. Robert of Ketton's 1143 Latin version, Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete, was the first into a Western language, and George Sale produced the first scholarly English translation in 1734.