CORANO

QUR'AN. — The most common name of the sacred book of the Muslims.

**OUTLINE:**

I. Name

II. The Qur'an as God’s work

III. Author

IV. Compilation

V. Content

VI. Divisions

VII. Language

VIII. Commentaries, text, translations.

I. NAME

*al-Qur'ān* derives from the root *qr'*, which means “to read,” “to recite aloud.” *Qur'ān* therefore first of all signifies “recitation,” then the chanting of passages of revelation, then these passages themselves or even the totality of all the revelations of the Prophet Muḥammad, and finally the book that we call the Qur'ān. According to many scholars (F. Schwally, G. Wellhausen, Horovitz, etc.), in its particular meanings it would be a borrowing from the Syriac *qeryānā* (“lectio”), from the same root. In the Qur'ān itself the word *qur'ān* is used as a technical term for individual revelations and also (17:107; 25:34) in the sense of the total revelation.

Synonyms of *qur'ān* are *al-kitāb* (“the book” par excellence), *furqān* (“distinction” between good and evil) or “salvation,” “victory” (in this semantic sense derived from Syriac), *dhikr* (“admonition”), *al-muṣḥaf* (“the book,” “the codex”), and others less common.

II. THE QUR'AN AS GOD’S WORK

All Muslims consider the Qur'ān to be the work not of Muḥammad but directly of God. Unlike what, for example, the Catholic Church teaches about the inspiration (v.) of Scripture, they believe the Qur'ānic revelation to have “descended upon Muḥammad” through the Archangel Gabriel, who conveyed it to him from a “preserved tablet” (*al-lawḥ al-mahfūẓ*) kept in heaven. Therefore, everything in the Qur'ān is the direct word of God, and when citing any Qur'ānic passage one says: “God the Most High said...” The Qur'ān itself, however, admits that the heavenly prototype descended in clear Arabic language to the Prophet Muḥammad over a determined period and that even the previous revelations (Torah, Gospel, etc.), corrupted by Christians and Jews, likewise represent versions of the heavenly book. Nevertheless, the distinction between the heavenly prototype and the Qur'ān gradually disappears. Especially on two questions concerning the Qur'ān have Muslim theologians expended much ink. One is the “inimitability” of the sacred book (*i'jāz*). According to orthodox Sunnite theory, the Qur'ān is the greatest miracle (*mu'jizah*) of the Prophet, as is explicitly stated in the Qur'ān itself: “If men and jinn (v. also 11:16) should gather to produce the like of this Qur'ān, they could not, even if they supported one another” (27:90). However, in the religious history of Islam there are more than a few cases of impious men who sought to imitate the Qur'ān, such as, according to certain traditions, the famous poet al-Mutanabbī (d. 955), and the well-known saying attributed to the great skeptical poet Abū l-'Alā' al-Ma'arrī (d. 1058), who is said to have remarked about one of his own works: “Let it be polished for four centuries by the tongues of men in the mosques, and then we’ll talk about it again!” The Mu'tazilite an-Naẓẓām maintained that the Qur'ān, even if it is miraculous in content, is not at all miraculous in its style and that, theoretically, if it were not for God’s intervention, men could well have produced one equal to it in literary beauty. Naturally, such an assertion is also considered heretical. So too is the thesis of the second question, the assertion—especially propounded by the Mu'tazilites—that the Qur'ān is “created,” hence a body, and, as opponents argue, theoretically convertible even into a man or an animal. According to orthodox Sunnite doctrine, however, the Qur'ān is “uncreated.” The prince of Sunnite theologians, al-Ghazālī (v.), succinctly declares: “The Qur'ān is recitable with the tongue, writable in volumes, and preservable in hearts; yet it is eternal, subsisting in the essence of God, and is not subject to separation or division by its transfer into the memory of men and the pages of codices.” “What lies between the two boards of the volume is the word of God,” will definitively declare the most rigid orthodoxy.

III. AUTHOR

For those who do not accept the Islamic dogma, it is evident that Muḥammad (v.) is the author of the celebrated book, the object of veneration by nearly 400 million human beings. It is not equally easy, however, to establish scientifically how, when, and to what extent Muḥammad produced the Qur'ān. In the Qur'ān itself the mysterious adjective *ummi* is applied to Muḥammad in two passages (7:156 and 158). Most Muslim scholars interpret it as “illiterate” before the divine revelation (for a good many European scholars it would mean “lay,” “popular”; for Nallino it means “national,” “Arab”). Moreover, the Qur'ān itself speaks of visions (43:5 ff.: vision of Gabriel at a distance of two bowshots; 81:23: Gabriel is seen on the “luminous horizon,” always accompanied by acoustic revelations; this predominance of the acoustic, of “the word,” over fantastic vision seems to be a characteristic of Semitic religious spirit [cf. biblical theophanies, e.g., with the fantastic visions of Hindu legends]). The tradition (*ḥadīth*) that narrates the first revelation to Muḥammad speaks of the great figure of the Archangel who remained persistently before the Prophet no matter which part of the horizon he turned to; while the passages 72:1 and 73:1, with the related tradition that presents the Prophet seized by feverish fits and crying “Wrap me up!,” show his explicit and seemingly sincere conviction that he was not inventing but that an external force was suggesting the words to him (53:3-4; 75:16-18). All these data from Islamic tradition and the Qur'ān itself suggest, at least for certain parts of the book (all the passages cited above are Meccan), a sincere good faith on the part of the Prophet in considering himself not the author but the proclaimer of divine proclamations, the fact that Muḥammad did not write down in any way what he proclaimed but preserved it in his memory, and finally a fragmentary nature to the revelations (17:107; 76:23; 25:34), corroborated by Islamic tradition according to which the order of the revelations does not correspond to the present order of the book. From tradition it can moreover be fairly clearly deduced that passages of the Qur'ān were at least in part written down by the Prophet’s secretaries on various materials (i.e., shoulder blades, palm leaves, etc.) and collected only after his death. Clear evidence that in the earliest times everything was entrusted to memory is 87:6: “We shall make you recite and you will not forget, except what God wills”; while the reference to a *ḥāṭṭ al-waḥy* (“written revelation”) in a poem by the panegyrist of Muḥammad, Hassān b. Thābit, seems to confirm precisely what has been said above. In any case, if it is certain that the Qur'ān as a whole and in

It is difficult to attribute even the authentic work of Muḥammad to him the order of the verses in the longer sūrahs, let alone the general order of the sūrahs; nor is it likely that all the contents of the present Qur’ān derive literally from the mouth of the Prophet. Already some puritanical Khārijites (q.v.) erroneously denied the authenticity of sūra 12 (the Sīra of Joseph), considering it too frivolous and profane; while the Shīʿites held that important passages had been omitted from the Qur’ān, including two entire sūrahs (the Sīra of the Two Lights or an-Nūrayn and that of al-Walāya), though in practice they use, faute de mieux, the Sunnite textus receptus. The attempts of Western scholars (De Sacy, Weil, etc.) to deny the authenticity of certain passages in the present Qur’ān likewise appear rather weak. More probable is that some authentic passages of Muḥammad’s revelations were not included in the Qur’ān of ʿUthmān (q.V. below; it is strange, for example, that the present Qur’ān contains no names of Muḥammad’s Meccan opponents, members of influential families who later converted). Yet on the whole Muḥammad may properly be called the author of the Qur’ān.

A theory long current in Christian circles (e.g., St Paschasius and others), and objectively refuted by Marracci, held that the Qur’ān was the work of a certain Nestorian monk Sergius or Baḥīrā, who dictated it to the young shepherd Muḥammad in order to injure Catholicism. This theory was not new, for the Qur’ān itself (16.105; 23.5) reports that similar accusations were made by unbelievers in the Prophet’s own time. More serious modern scholars, however, have abandoned Marracci’s view that the Qur’ān is of diabolical inspiration; the Englishman Muir was one of its last authoritative advocates. As to the period of composition, there is no reason to reject the Muslim tradition that places it roughly within the twenty-three years between the first revelation (placed in 609: the first revealed passage would be 96.1–5 or 74.1 ff.) and the Prophet’s death (632). The apparent contradiction with 97.1, which seems to confine the revelation of the Qur’ān to the famous “Night of Power,” is easily resolved by Muslim tradition: on that night the Arabic Qur’ān descended from the celestial “Preserved Tablet” to the lowest heaven (as-samāʾ ad-dunyā), whence it was gradually revealed to the Prophet by Gabriel.

IV. REDACTION

The present recension of the Qur’ān is therefore, both according to Muslim tradition and the prevailing opinion of Western scholars, later than the Prophet’s death (632). According to the most widespread tradition, it was Abū Bakr, the first caliph, at ʿUmar’s suggestion, who ordered Zayd ibn Thābit, Muḥammad’s secretary, to collect everything of the sacred book that had been written down or preserved in memory. Zayd arranged the sūrahs in order of length, and after Abū Bakr’s death they were entrusted to Ḥafṣa, one of the Prophet’s wives. Copies were sent to the provinces, and as textual corruption had crept in, the third caliph ʿUthmān (644–55) ordered, to prevent disputes over authenticity, a group of scholars—among them Zayd himself—to prepare authorized copies and destroy all others. Muslim sources (al-Fihrist of an-Nadīm and al-Itqān of as-Suyūṭī) report that Ibn Masʿūd’s pre-ʿUthmānic recension lacked the first and last two sūrahs, while that of Ubayy contained two extra short ones: the added or omitted passages are all eulogies and prayers lacking any specifically Islamic content. Both recensions differed markedly from the ʿUthmānic in the order of the sūrahs. It also appears that at the time of collection there were already small groups of sūrahs felt to be units. The hypothesis of Casanova and A. Mingana, that the Qur’ān attained its present arrangement only through the work of al-Ḥajjāj at the time of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (685–705)—a period when a revision and fixing of the text did in fact occur—is not generally accepted. Yet for various reasons (imperfections of contemporary Arabic script, carelessness in the chapters, etc.) variants in the sacred text have continued to exist and still do, though usually, though not always, of minor importance. Orthodoxy resolved the issue by invoking an unclear tradition according to which the Qur’ān was revealed in seven al-rūf (“letters”), a term interpreted as “versions,” and declared equally orthodox the readings of ten, and later seven, celebrated scholars chosen arbitrarily. At present the two authorized versions in use are the Kūfan, employed in Egypt and the lands to the east, and the Medinan, used elsewhere in the Muslim world.

V. CONTENT

As regards the content of the Qur’an, one may well repeat what Marracci wrote in the 17th century: «Vix dici potest quid determinante contineat Alcoranus: est enim miscella et farrago innumerarum rerum» (Prod., I, Rome 1691, 225). It is noteworthy that the Qur’an itself (3:5) admits that in the book «there are verses firmly established which are the foundation of the Book, and others ambiguous», and it reproaches those inclined to evil for giving greater importance to the ambiguous ones, though these too are revealed by God. This is one of the earliest distinctions made by Muslims regarding the content of the Qur’an: muḥkam, «unambiguous», and mutashābih, «ambiguous». The material is mostly divided by them into aḥkām («sentences», the juridical and normative part), qiṣaṣ («stories», the legendary part), and mawāʿiẓ («parenesis», «exhortations»), all of which are often inextricably mixed. Among the aḥkām are, albeit in a disjointed form that would later give commentators much work, precepts on prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, marriage, inheritance division, criminal law, etc. The legendary part contains, besides sometimes distorted biblical accounts (e.g., Mary the mother of Jesus is confused with Mary the sister of Aaron), legends of Talmudic or Christian-apocryphal origin (e.g., the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus) and profane origin (the legend of Alexander the Great and the mysterious Khidr); the parenetic part includes some of the most beautiful passages of the Qur’an, in its oldest chapters, exhorting to monotheism, penitence, and depicting the horrors of the striking hour, i.e., the end of the world and the universal judgment. The protagonist of the text also varies frequently: now God speaks in the first person, now Muḥammad speaks, now Gabriel converses with the prophet, now criticisms are put into the mouths of his adversaries. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Muslims themselves, beginning with the Prophet, noticed actual contradictions between one passage and another in the sacred book and sought to remedy them by applying their concept—somewhat anthropomorphic but robustly personalist—of the deity, affirming (2:100; 16:103) that God can abrogate one or more verses. Entire treatises exist on this question known as that of the «abrogating and the abrogated» (al-nāsikh wa-l-mansūkh). A typical example of progressive evolution in Allah’s precepts is that of the prohibition of wine. In 16:69 it is still permitted, cited first as proof of God’s generosity; in 2:216 «there is more evil than good»; in 4:46 the faithful are advised not to perform prayer while intoxicated; in 5:92 wine is an abomination and the work of Satan. A glance at these citations suffices to render plastically the chronological disorder of the present arrangement of the Qur’an. In this disorder, a Muslim commentator like al-Rāzī discerns an original coherence of superhuman origin (one must not forget the profound Islamic sense of the personal arbitrariness of the Divine). Moreover, in the study of the Qur’an, one must cast off one’s modern European mentality: we would probably find an arrangement not much better in a Qur’an personally redacted by Muḥammad.

VI. DIVISIONS

The present Qur’an is, externally speaking, divided into 114 chapters (sūrah, pl. suwar; the etymology of the term is disputed) of greatly varying length (from 3 to 286 verses), arranged, as has been said, in approximate order of length, except for the first sūrah, a short and beautiful prayer. Each sūrah is divided into a certain number of more or less lengthy verses called āyah, pl. āyāt (lit. «signs», «miracles»; cf. Heb. ’ōth), whose division and numbering vary according to the schools. At the beginning is found the formula Bismi ’llāhi ’r-raḥmāni ’r-raḥīm («In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful»); the ninth sūrah is an exception, probably because it was originally joined to the eighth. In 29 sūrahs, immediately after the aforementioned formula, one reads numerous letters such as, e.g., khā’-yā’-sīn, etc. Neither Muslim scholars nor Western scholars have succeeded, despite sagacious efforts, in providing a definitive explanation. Among the few hypotheses not proposed is the one—by no means improbable if one admits the paranormal state of the Prophet at the moment of the revelations—that these letters are meaningless sounds or cries, similar to those of glossolalia of all times, which would have been collected with religious care and more or less great precision by the listeners. Each sūrah has a name, not original, except perhaps for a few exceptions, from the Prophet himself; the name is an allusion to something, an event, or a significant word contained in the sūrah. Less important, late, and variable according to the countries, are the broader divisions of the Qur’an into 30 juz’ and 60 ḥizb for chanting recitation; the rules of the adornment are not a «science» but an auxiliary art. From the point of view of the place where they were revealed, the sūrahs were distinguished from ancient times into Meccan, i.e., revealed or «descended» during the Meccan period of the Prophet’s activity (609–22), and Medinan, revealed after the Hijrah (622–32). Islamic treatises on chronology already provide a rudimentary critical method of distinction: where it says «O you who believe!», it is a Medinan sūrah; Meccan are those in which the Prophet addresses his interlocutors with the words «O people!». Many other often external and mechanical divisions are found in Muslim treatises (sūrahs or verses revealed during a journey, by day, by night, etc.), on which it is not worth dwelling. The treatises also provide a more or less reliable list of the titles of the sūrahs in chronological order: the first, Meccan, ones being generally shorter, are found toward the end of the book. The best, though not absolutely certain, chronological arrangement of the Qur’anic sūrahs is that resulting from the patient and acute investigations of T. Nöldeke in his Geschichte des Qor'ans. It should be noted that even the longest sūrahs often do not form a chronological unity.

VII. LANGUAGE

The language of the Qur’an is ‘arabiyy mubīn, clear Arabic (26:195), a language which the Prophet seems to have possessed perfectly in all its richness. Scholars have debated and continue to debate, having discarded the idea that Muḥammad «composed» the Qur’an in a popular dialect distinct from the literary Arabic koinē, the relationship of the language of the Qur’an to that of pre-Islamic classical poetry.

The Qur’an, a unique work in Arabic literature, is among the most untranslatable books in world literature. Like many great artists, Muḥammad abhorred professional poets, those beings who «roam through every valley and say what they do not do» (26:225–26), and was particularly sensitive to the accusations of being «a mad poet» (37:35) repeatedly leveled against him by the Meccans. Nevertheless, with his work of enthusiastic renewal of the spiritual life of the people, he was a true «revolutionary artist», delivering a mortal blow to the closed and elaborate verbal classicism of pre-Islamic poetry and leaving in the rhythmic prose of the Meccan sūrahs’ minor passages perhaps the only monument of «romantic art» (the word must be taken cum grano salis) of the literatures of the East. Unique, because the Qur’anic style found no imitators due to the sacred character of the book. Despite this, the enthusiasm and pathos of the Qur’an—which, as the Indian Muslim modernist Sir Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) well wrote, accentuates action rather than idea even when transposed onto a purely religious plane—were among the most important components in the development of the various Islamic literatures.

The style of the Qur’ān varies considerably according to the periods: a clear distinction, even perceived by those who read it in translation, can be made between the Meccan and the Medinan style. The form of the oldest Meccan sūras seems to reflect the influence of the oracles of the pre-Islamic Arab soothsayers (kāhīn). They are brief, impassioned passages in more or less regular rhymed prose (sajʿ), sometimes preceded by strange oaths such as “By the fig and the olive! By the advancing morning! By the night when it departs! By the double and the single! By the night-comer!” The expression is extremely dynamic; continuous narrative passages are rare. Typical of the Medinan sūras, on the other hand, is the greater length of the verses, in which rhyme becomes a purely external and mechanical means of connection; the expression is calm and at times awkward, and legal norms abound. Among the worst literary passages of the Qur’ān are those full of repetitions and naïve arguments, though some of them possess a certain majestic solemnity, as in the well-known “Throne Verse” (2:256) and others. The transition between the two styles evidently occurs through intermediate stages: the sūras of the second Meccan period, rich in stories of the prophets, already differ from those of the first. Comparisons are fairly frequent throughout the Qur’ān, some of them very fine (cf. e.g. 77:30–33); in many of these, God speaks of natural phenomena as means of imparting moral teachings. Isolated for its mystical symbolism is the singular “Light Verse” (24:35). Despite all this, even on a first reading one cannot fail to notice that a single personal imprint pervades the entire book. One might well say that the best proof—not certainly of its divinity but—of the authenticity of the Qur’ān is the substantial unity and uniqueness of its style. The influence of the Qur’ān’s style, read, reread, and meditated upon daily in Arabic by all Muslims, has been incalculable, though not exactly measurable, in all cultural manifestations of the Islamic peoples, who, even those most distant from the Arabs, have been strongly Semitized by II.

VIII. COMMENTARIES, TEXT, TRANSLATIONS

The Qur’ān, as one can easily imagine, possesses an enormous quantity of commentaries, known as tafsīr, among which the most celebrated are those of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), orthodox and traditionalist, in no less than thirty volumes; of al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1144), tending toward Muʿtazilite views (cf. above); of al-Rāzī (d. 1209); of al-Bayḍāwī (d. 1286); and, finally, more manageable and widely used, the “Commentary of the Two Jalāls” (tafsīr al-jalālayn) by al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) and al-Maḥallī (d. 1459).

An excellent introduction to Muslim “Qur’ānic sciences” is al-Suyūṭī’s own Iqānu fī ʿulūm al-Qur’ān.

A very good and elegant Arabic text of the Qur’ān is that printed in Egypt by order of King Fuʾād (Cairo 1923). Universally used in Europe is the edition by Flügel (Leipzig 1841, and frequently reprinted in stereotype), reproduced by L. Bonelli in Il Corano arabo con tavole di concordanza..., Milan 1937.

Orthodoxy generally forbids translations of the Qur’ān into foreign languages. In recent (1925) discussions in Egypt and Turkey, some attenuation of this prohibition was noted, though it rests only on certain traditions. The first European translation was that of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny (1092–1156), published only in 1543 by the Swiss humanist T. Buchmann (Bibliae). Among recent Western translations, perhaps the best from a scholarly standpoint is the Italian one by Bonelli (1st ed., Milan 1929; 2nd improved ed. 1940). The best French translation is that of M. Kasimirski (Paris 1840, and subsequently reprinted). A new one, with the sūras arranged chronologically, is in preparation by R. Blachère. Excellent is the English translation by E. H. Palmer (Oxford 1880, then 1900 and 1928). Good is the German one by Henning (Leipzig 1901).

Nor should the great work of L. Marracci (Alcorani textus universus, Padua 1698) in two large volumes be forgotten. The second contains the Arabic text and Latin translation, the first the Prodromus ad Refutationem Alcorani, very rich in accurate citations of Arab authors (a more correct edition of the Prodromus alone is the earlier one in four volumes, Rome 1691). Marracci’s translation, though outdated in various points, can still be consulted with profit.

A useful Qur’ānic anthology for those who do not feel prepared to tackle a full reading is V. Vacca, Antologia del Corano, Florence 1944.