IB World Religions 5.3.1. the Qur'an: Divine Origin, Composition and Collation Notes

5.3.1. The Qur'an: Divine Origin, Composition and Collation

Divine origin and revelation

1. Muslims hold that the Qur'an is the speech of Allah, sent down to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Jibril (Gabriel) over roughly twenty-three years. The word qur'an means recitation, and the text calls itself a recitation before it is ever a book.
2. The tradition dates the first revelation to a night in Ramadan around 610 CE, when the Prophet was in retreat in the cave of Hira outside Makkah. The first words he received begin Iqra, meaning recite or read.
3. That night is remembered as Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, which Muslims mark in the last ten nights of Ramadan with extra prayer and recitation.
4. Revelation is called wahy, and Muslims distinguish its modes: words brought by an angel, meaning placed directly in a prophet's heart, and speech heard from behind a veil. The Qur'an is held to belong to the first mode, delivered in exact words.
5. Many Muslims teach that the Qur'an exists with Allah on the lawh al-mahfuz, the Preserved Tablet, and was sent down from there. Revelation on this account discloses something already complete rather than composing something new.
6. The revelation arrived in pieces rather than all at once, often in answer to events in the community. Muslims read the staging as deliberate, since the Qur'an itself says it was sent down gradually so that hearts might be strengthened.

The Prophet as messenger

1. Muslim teaching draws a firm line here: the Prophet Muhammad is the messenger of the Qur'an and not its author. The wording is held to be Allah's, and the Prophet's task was to receive it, recite it and explain it.
2. The traditional accounts describe him as ummi, usually understood to mean unlettered, and Muslims often present this as evidence that the text did not come from his own learning or reading.
3. The distinction is kept in the sources themselves. The Prophet's own sayings and deeds are collected as Hadith and carry great authority, yet they are never recited in salah (ritual prayer) and are never called Allah's speech.
4. A middle category, hadith qudsi, reports Allah speaking through the Prophet but in the Prophet's own wording. Muslims treat these reports as sacred while still marking them off from the Qur'an.
5. The doctrine of i'jaz, the inimitability of the Qur'an, supports the claim of divine origin. The text challenges its hearers to produce a single surah like it, and Muslims hold that nobody has ever met the challenge.
6. Muslims accordingly avoid calling the Qur'an the Prophet's book or the Prophet's teaching. Islamic art also avoids depicting the Prophet, which keeps attention on the message rather than on the man who delivered it.

Surahs, ayahs and the mushaf

1. The Qur'an is arranged in 114 chapters called surahs, each made of verses called ayahs, a word that also means sign. The shortest surah runs to three ayahs and the longest to 286.
2. The surahs do not stand in the order they were revealed. After the short opening surah, al-Fatihah, they run roughly from longest to shortest, so the chronology of revelation has to be learned separately.
3. Every surah but one opens with the basmalah, the formula in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Muslims use the same words before eating, writing, travelling and beginning work.
4. Each surah carries a name, usually taken from a striking word inside it, and a label marking it as revealed at Makkah or at Madinah.
5. For recitation the text is divided into thirty roughly equal parts called juz', an arrangement that lets a reader complete the whole Qur'an across the thirty nights of Ramadan.
6. Muslims distinguish the recited Qur'an from the mushaf, the written copy between two covers. Handling the mushaf carries its own etiquette, including ritual washing before touching it and never letting it rest on the floor.

Memorisation and the huffaz

1. The Qur'an was preserved in memory before it was preserved in volumes. The Prophet recited each new passage to his Companions, who learned it by heart and repeated it in salah.
2. A Muslim who memorises the entire text is called a hafiz, plural huffaz, and the practice continues today in schools from Morocco to Indonesia.
3. Memorisation is not simply a feat of recall. Each learner recites to a teacher who learned the same way, so the chain of transmission is a chain of named people.
4. Written records were kept from early on as well. Companions such as Zayd ibn Thabit served as scribes, writing on parchment, palm stalks, flat stones and shoulder bones.
5. Those written pieces were scattered rather than bound. Muslim accounts describe them as an aid to memory rather than the primary record, which reverses the usual relation between a text and its copies.
6. Because the text was carried in living memory, later collation could be checked against reciters and not against documents alone. Muslim accounts of the collation return to that point repeatedly.

Collation in the Prophet's lifetime

1. One account, held by many Muslims, is that the Qur'an was substantially collected during the Prophet's own lifetime. On this view the order of ayahs within surahs, and of surahs within the whole, was given by revelation and taught by the Prophet.
2. Those who hold it point to the yearly review called the mu'aradah, in which the Prophet and Jibril are said to have recited the whole revelation to each other each Ramadan, and twice in the final year.
3. They also point to recitation in prayer. If Companions were reciting long surahs in a settled order during the Prophet's life, the order was already fixed before he died.
4. On this account the work done later was a matter of gathering scattered written pieces into one volume. It was not a matter of deciding what the Qur'an contained or how it ran.
5. Many Shi'ah Muslims add that 'Ali ibn Abi Talib compiled a copy immediately after the Prophet's death, arranged in the order of revelation and annotated with the occasion of each passage.
6. Shi'ah scholarship holds that the Qur'an now in use is complete and unaltered. It treats 'Ali's copy as a differently arranged and heavily annotated text rather than as a different Qur'an.

Collation under Khalifah 'Uthman

1. A second traditional account places the decisive work after the Prophet's death. Muslim sources describe Abu Bakr, the first khalifah, meaning successor,, ordering a collection after many huffaz were killed at the battle of Yamamah.
2. Zayd ibn Thabit is said to have carried out that work, gathering written fragments and testing each against memorised recitation. The resulting sheets passed to Hafsah, a widow of the Prophet.
3. About twenty years later the third khalifah, 'Uthman ibn 'Affan, faced disputes between Muslims from different regions of the growing ummah who had learned to recite in noticeably different ways.
4. 'Uthman had Hafsah's sheets copied into a standard mushaf, sent a copy to each major garrison city with a reciter to teach from it, and ordered rival written copies withdrawn.
5. The early script recorded consonants without the dots and vowel marks added later, so one written text still supported several accepted recitations. Muslims call these the qira'at and treat them as part of the revelation rather than as corruption.
6. Muslims present the two accounts as complementary rather than rival. The order of the text is traced to the Prophet, the single official copy to 'Uthman, and Sunni and Shi'ah scholarship alike hold that the result is the Qur'an as revealed.