The Qur'an

Overview

About four hundred and sixty pages in English, a little shorter than the New Testament, in 114 chapters called suras, each made of numbered verses called ayat, which means signs.

Muslims hold that it is the speech of God, revealed in Arabic to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel between 610 and 632, memorised and written down by his followers, and collected into a single authorised text under the caliph Uthman around 650. It is not regarded as a book about God, or as inspired human writing, but as God’s own words, which is why translation has a different status here than in Christianity: a rendering into English is a commentary, and the Arabic is the Qur’an.

Two things confuse new readers and both are worth knowing in advance.

The arrangement is not chronological. After the short opening sura, the rest run roughly from longest to shortest, which means the text begins with the late Medinan material, the most legal and the most situational, and ends with the earliest Meccan revelations, the short, incantatory ones. Reading front to back is reading backwards through the life.

And the mode is not narrative. God is the speaker throughout, addressing Muhammad, the believers, the unbelievers, the Jews and Christians, or humanity, and the addressee shifts without warning. Stories are alluded to rather than told, because the first audience knew them, and the same episode reappears in different suras with different emphasis. A reader expecting Genesis will find something closer to sustained oratory.

The argument

The Meccan period, roughly 610 to 622. These suras are short, rhythmic, heavily rhymed in Arabic, and built on oath formulas: by the dawn, by the fig and the olive, by the night when it covers. They are the parts that sound like poetry in any translation and they are at the back of the book.

Their content is concentrated. There is one God, who created everything and will judge everyone. The signs of his power are visible in the natural world, in rain that revives dead ground, in the alternation of night and day, in the making of a human from a clot. The dead will be raised, which the Meccans found absurd and which the text answers by pointing to the first creation. And the day of reckoning is coming, described with enormous force: the sun wound up, the stars falling, the she-camel ten months pregnant abandoned, every soul knowing what it has brought.

The moral attack is directed at a specific society, the wealthy trading oligarchy of Mecca. Sura 107 condemns the man who repulses the orphan and does not urge feeding the poor. Sura 104 curses the slanderer who piles up wealth and counts it, thinking it will make him immortal. The link between denying judgement and neglecting the destitute is made again and again.

Opposition is met by a recurring pattern: the stories of earlier prophets, Noah, Hud, Salih, Lot, Shu’ayb, each sent to a people who rejected him and were destroyed. Muhammad is placed in a series, and his opponents are told what happened to their predecessors.

The Hijra and the Medinan period, 622 to 632. In 622 the community moved to Medina, and Muhammad became the leader of a political community rather than a warned prophet in a hostile town. The revelations change accordingly. They are longer, more discursive, and they legislate.

Subjects covered: prayer, the fast of Ramadan, the pilgrimage, alms; marriage, divorce, inheritance shares, the treatment of orphans and their property; contracts, debt, witnesses, and the prohibition of usury; permitted and forbidden food; and the conduct of war, including when fighting is permitted, how captives are treated and when to accept peace.

Much of this material is occasional, responding to events in the community, and the classical tradition developed an elaborate science of the occasions of revelation to keep track of what answered what. Verses that appear harsh or lenient in isolation frequently belong to a specific episode, and the difference between reading them with and without that context is large.

The Medinan suras also argue directly with Jews and Christians, called the People of the Book. The position is layered: they received genuine revelation, they are to be respected, the Qur’an confirms what came before, and yet they have altered or misunderstood their scriptures. Jesus is a prophet, born of a virgin, a worker of miracles, not crucified but taken up by God, and emphatically not divine. The denial of the Trinity and of the sonship of Christ is explicit and repeated.

Recurring structures. Sura 12, on Joseph, is the one extended continuous narrative, and is called the most beautiful of stories in its own opening verse. Sura 1, the Fatiha, is seven verses recited in every prayer and is the most repeated text in the world. Sura 2 is the longest and contains the Throne Verse. Sura 36, Ya Sin, is recited for the dying. Sura 55 has a refrain repeated thirty-one times: which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

How to read it

Begin at the end. Read the Fatiha first, then go to the back and read the last thirty or forty suras, which are the earliest and the most immediately powerful, and then work forward into the long ones. Abdel Haleem’s introduction recommends something like this and it transforms the experience.

Read each sura’s introduction if your edition has them. Abdel Haleem gives a short paragraph before each, saying when it was revealed and what it concerns, and that is usually enough context to follow it.

Listen to some of it recited. This is not a pious suggestion. The text is meant to be heard, its structure is aural, the rhyme and assonance carry a great deal of the meaning, and recitation is a major art form. Twenty minutes of listening explains more about what kind of thing this is than any amount of commentary.

Accept the repetition as design. The same prophets, the same warnings, the same contrasts between the garden and the fire, appear dozens of times. In an oral text delivered over twenty-three years to a community that memorised it, repetition with variation is the structure, not a defect.

Know the basic interpretive tools. Meccan versus Medinan; the occasions of revelation; the disputed doctrine of abrogation, by which a later verse may supersede an earlier one, which is where most arguments about the harsher war verses take place. You need not adjudicate these, but knowing they exist prevents the naive reading that treats every sentence as free-standing.

On translations: Abdel Haleem for clarity and readable modern English. Arberry for the closest thing to the rhythm in English. Nasr’s Study Quran if you want traditional commentary on the page. Avoid older versions with archaic diction, which make it sound like a Victorian imitation of the King James Bible, an effect entirely absent in the Arabic.

And read it beside the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels if you can. The three texts share a cast and disagree about them, and the disagreements are where the theology lives.

Questions it raises

• What difference does it make to read a scripture that presents itself as the literal speech of God rather than as an inspired account of him?
• The suras are ordered by length. What does that arrangement do to a reader, and what would a chronological order change?
• There is no compulsion in religion sits in the same book as verses commanding war. How should a reader hold them together?
• Jesus is honoured as a prophet and denied as a son. What is at stake in that particular disagreement?
• The earliest material attacks the rich for hoarding. Why does that theme come first?
• If the text is untranslatable in principle, what exactly is someone reading it in English reading?