What Is the Quran? The Book Muslims Believe Was Spoken, Not Written

The tradition holds that Muhammad, aged about forty, was meditating in a cave on Mount Hira outside Mecca in the year 610 when a presence commanded him to recite, and the first verses that came, on God who taught man by the pen what he did not know, are the beginning of the ninety-sixth chapter. The revelations continued for the rest of his life, in Mecca for twelve years and in Medina for ten, sometimes in response to events and questions, and he recited each to his companions, who learned them by heart and wrote them on whatever was to hand, palm stalks, leather, shoulder blades. The Quran describes itself as confirming the earlier scriptures given to Moses and Jesus, and as their correction and completion.

The Quran has 114 chapters, suras, arranged not in the order they were revealed but roughly from longest to shortest after the short opening prayer, so that the book begins with the long legal and narrative chapters of Medina and ends with the brief, intense early chapters of Mecca. Each sura is named, usually for a word in it, The Cow, The Bee, The Spider, and divided into verses, ayat, of which there are about 6,200. The text is not a narrative like the Bible but a discourse, in which God speaks, addresses the Prophet and humanity, argues, warns, consoles, legislates and returns to its themes from many angles. Its main concerns:

• •The oneness of God, tawhid, and the rejection of any partner or idol
• •The prophets, from Adam through Abraham, Moses and Jesus to Muhammad, and the peoples who rejected them
• •The Last Day, the resurrection, judgement, paradise and hell
• •Worship: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, almsgiving
• •Law and conduct: marriage, inheritance, contracts, war, food and drink
• •Signs: the created world, the sky, the rain, the growth of the seed, offered as evidence of God

At Muhammad's death in 632 the Quran existed in memory and in scattered writings, and after many reciters were killed in battle the first caliph, Abu Bakr, had it collected into a single copy. The third caliph, Uthman, around 650, had that copy checked against the reciters, issued a standard text to the main cities and ordered variants destroyed, and the Uthmanic text is what every Quran contains today. The early Arabic script lacked vowel marks and distinguished some consonants poorly, so the recited tradition, passed from teacher to student in an unbroken chain, has always governed the written one, and the ten canonical readings that survive differ in pronunciation and small details of wording but not in substance. Manuscripts from the first Islamic century, including leaves found in Birmingham University in 2015 radiocarbon-dated to within a few decades of the Prophet's death, match the standard text closely.

Because the Quran is held to be God's actual speech, the Arabic is the Quran and a translation is not; translations are called interpretations of the meaning and are used for understanding, while the Arabic is recited in prayer by Muslims of every language, whether or not they speak it. The text's rhythm, rhyme and sound are part of what it is, and its literary quality, which the Quran itself offers as a challenge that no human could match, is the basis of the doctrine of its inimitability. The art of recitation, tajwid, with its rules of pronunciation and its melodic styles, is a discipline of its own, and a reciter with a fine voice can fill a stadium. Calligraphy of its verses is the central visual art of Islam, since the text could be beautified where the human image could not.

A Muslim hears the Quran every day in the five prayers, and many complete it in the month of Ramadan, when a thirtieth is recited each night. It is interpreted through a vast literature of commentary, tafsir, that draws on the Prophet's own explanations, the circumstances of each revelation, the grammar of the Arabic and the consensus of scholars, and the questions of which verses qualify which, how the legal verses apply, and how the literal and the figurative are to be told apart are what the schools of Islamic law and theology have argued for fourteen centuries. Non-Muslim scholars study its text, its history and its relation to the Jewish and Christian traditions it engages with, and the two conversations, inside and outside, have grown closer since the manuscripts began to be dated. For a fifth of humanity it is the voice of God in the original, and the book that most of them know at least partly by heart.

The Quran is the scripture of Islam, believed to be God's own speech in Arabic, revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel between 610 and 632, memorised and written by his companions and fixed as a single text under the caliph Uthman around 650. Its 114 chapters, arranged roughly by length, speak of the oneness of God, the prophets, judgement, worship and law, its Arabic is recited in prayer by Muslims of every tongue, and its interpretation is the work of the Islamic sciences.