Qur'an

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

I. NAME

al-Qur'an derives from the root qr', which means "to read," "to declaim aloud." Qur'an therefore means in the first place "declamation," then "recitation" of passages of the revelation in a singsong manner, then those passages themselves or even the whole body of all the revelations of the prophet Muhammad, and finally the book that we call the Q. According to many scholars (F. Schwally, G. Wellhausen, Horovitz, etc.), in its particular acceptations it would be a borrowing from the Syriac qerjānā "lectio," from the same root. In the Q. itself the word qur'an is used as a technical term for the individual revelations and also (17, 107; 25, 34) in the sense of the revelation as a whole.

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

II. THE QUR'AN AS WORK OF GOD

All Muslims consider the Qur'ān to be the work not of Muhammad but directly of God, and, unlike what the Catholic Church, for example, teaches concerning the inspiration (v.) of the Scriptures, they hold that the Qur'ānic revelation "descended upon Muhammad" through the archangel Gabriel, who dictated it to him from a "well-guarded tablet" (al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ) preserved in heaven. Consequently everything in the Qur'ān is the direct word of God, and in citing any Qur'ānic passage one says: "God most high said...". The Qur'ān itself nevertheless admits that the celestial prototype descended in clear Arabic tongue upon the prophet Muhammad within a determined span of time, and that even the earlier revelations (Torah, Gospel, etc.), corrupted by Christians and Jews, likewise represent a version of the celestial book. In any case, little by little the distinction between the celestial prototype and the Qur'ān disappears. Muslim theologians have spilled rivers of ink especially over two questions concerning the Qur'ān. One is that of the inimitability of the sacred book (i'jāz). The Qur'ān is, according to the orthodox Sunni theory, the greatest miracle (mu'jizah) of the prophet, as is moreover stated explicitly in the Qur'ān itself: "even if men and jinn (jinn) were to unite to produce something like this Qur'ān, they could not, even if they helped one another" (27, 90; see also 11, 16). Nevertheless, in the religious history of Islam there is more than one case of impious men who wished to imitate the Qur'ān, as, for example, according to certain traditions, the famous poet al-Mutanabbī (d. 955), and the acute declaration attributed to the great sceptical poet Abū l-'Alā al-Ma'arrī (d. 1058) is well known, who is said to have remarked concerning a Qur'ān of his own: "let it be polished for four centuries by the tongues of men in the mosques, and then we shall speak of it again!". The Mu'tazilite an-Naẓẓām affirmed that the Qur'ān, even if it is [miraculous] in content, is not miraculous at all in its style, and that, theoretically, were it not for God's hindrance, men could very well have produced one equal to it in literary beauty. Naturally such an affirmation too is held to be heretical; and so also, with regard to the second question, is the affirmation, proper especially to the Mu'tazilites, that the Qur'ān is created, hence a body and, the opponents reason, theoretically transformable even into a man or an animal. On the contrary, according to the orthodox Sunni doctrine, the Qur'ān is "uncreated". The prince of Sunni theologians al-Ghazālī (v.) declares compendiously: "The Qur'ān is readable with the tongue, writable in volumes and preservable in hearts; yet nevertheless it is eternal, subsisting in the essence of God, nor is it susceptible of separation and division through its transfer into the memory of men and the pages of codices". "What lies between the two covers of the volume is the word of God", the most rigid orthodoxy will definitively declare.

III. AUTHOR

For anyone who does not accept the Islamic dogma, it is evident that Muhammad (v.) is the author of the famous book, the object of veneration of nearly 400 million human beings. It is not equally easy to establish scientifically how, when, and to what extent Muhammad produced the Q. In the Q. itself, in two passages (7, 156 and 158), the mysterious adjective ummī is applied to Muhammad, which the majority of Muslim scholars interpret in the sense of "illiterate" before the divine revelation (for a good part of European scholars it would mean "lay", "popular"; for Nallino it means "national", "Arab"). Furthermore, in the C. itself there is talk of visions (43:5 ff.: vision of Gabriel at a distance of two bows; 81:23: Gabriel is seen on the "clear horizon") always accompanied by acoustic revelations: this predominance of the acoustic, of the "word" over the fantastic vision seems to be a characteristic of the Semitic religious spirit (compare the biblical theophanies, e.g., with the fantastic visions of Hindu legends). The tradition or ḥadīṯ that narrates the first revelation that descended upon Muhammad speaks of the great figure of the Archangel that remained persistent on the prophet's retina whichever part of the horizon he turned toward; while passages 72:1 and 73:1, with the related tradition that presents the prophet seized by attacks of fever and crying "cover me!", show the explicit and — it seems — sincere conviction of the prophet that it was not he who was inventing but an extraneous force suggesting the words to him (53:3-4; 75:16-18). All these data of Islamic tradition and of the C. itself suggest, at least for some parts of the book (all the passages cited above are Meccan), a sincere good faith of the prophet in considering himself not the author but the revealer of divine proclamations, the fact that Muhammad did not in any way write down what he proclaimed but preserved it in memory, and finally a fragmentariness in the revelations (17:107; 76:23; 25:34) confirmed by Islamic tradition, according to which the order of the revelations does not correspond to the current order of the book. From tradition one can moreover deduce fairly clearly that the passages of the C. were at least in part written by the prophet's secretaries on various materials (flat bones, palm leaves, etc.) and collected only after his death. Evident proof that in the earliest times everything was entrusted to memory is 87:6: "we shall make you recite and you shall not forget except what God wills"; while the reference to a ḥaṭṭ al-wahj ("writing of the revelation") in a poem by Muhammad's panegyrist Ḥassān b. Ṭābit seems to confirm precisely what has been said above. However, if it is certain that the C. is in its entirety and substantially the authentic work of Muhammad, it seems difficult to attribute to him himself the order of the verses in the longer chapters, not to speak of the general order of the chapters; just as it is quite possible that not all the content of the present C. derives literally from the mouth of the prophet. Already some bārišīti puritans (v.) wrongly denied the authenticity of ch. 12 (the sūrah of Joseph), for them too frivolous and profane; while the Shiites held that important passages had been made to disappear from the C., among them two entire chapters (the sūrah of the two lights or an-umrajīn and that al-walājah), though they currently use, for lack of anything better, the Sunni textus receptus. The attempts of Western scholars (De Sacy, Weil, etc.) to deny the authenticity of certain passages of the present C. also appear rather weak. More probable is that some authentic passage of Muhammad's revelations was not received for various reasons into the C. of 'Uṯmān (v. below; it seems strange, e.g., that the present C. contains no name of an adversary of Muhammad belonging to influential Meccan families later converted); but on the whole Muhammad can well be called the author of the C. Worthy of mention is the theory, current for centuries in Christian circles (St. Paschasius and others) and objectively refuted by Marracci, according to which the C. was the work of the not better identified Nestorian monk Sergius or Bahārā, who would have dictated it to the young shepherd Muhammad for the purpose of harming Catholicism. This theory was not new because the C. itself tells us (16:105; 25:3) that similar accusations were made by the unbelievers at the time of the prophet himself. Abandoned instead by the most serious modern scholars is the idea, shared by Marracci, of a diabolical inspiration of the C.: the Englishman Muir was one of its last most authoritative representatives. As regards the period of composition of the book, nothing prevents us from granting prono modo to Muslim tradition, which places it in the twenty-three years that elapse between the first revelation (placed in 609: the first revealed passage would have been 96:1-5 or 74:1 ff.) and the death of the prophet (632). The apparent contradiction with passage 97:1, which confines the revelation of the C. to the famous and mysterious "night of qadr", is easily avoided by Muslim tradition, which explains that on that night the Arabic C. descended from the celestial "well-guarded tablet" to the lowest of the heavens (as-tanā' ad-dunjā), from which it was gradually revealed to the prophet by Gabriel.

IV. REDACTION

The present recension of the Q. is therefore, both according to Muslim tradition and according to the most common opinion of Western scholars, later than the death of the prophet (632). According to the most widespread tradition it was Abū Bakr, the first caliph, on the advice of 'Omar, who ordered Zajd b. Ṭābit, Muhammad's secretary, to gather together everything of the sacred book that was found written or entrusted to memory. Zajd arranged the chapters in order of length, and these, at the death of Abū Bakr, were entrusted to Ḥafṣah, one of the prophet's wives. When copies had been sent to various provinces and the text had become somewhat corrupted, the third caliph 'Uṯmān (644-55), in order to avoid disputes over the authenticity of the various texts, is said to have commissioned four scholars, among them Zajd himself, to write out a certain number of authorized copies and to destroy all the others. According to information provided by Muslim texts (the Filhīr of an-Nadīm and the Itqān of Sujūṭī), the pre-'Uṯmānic redaction of Ibn Mas'ūd lacked the first and the last two chapters, while that of Ubajj had two small ones in addition: the suras added or removed are all eulogies and prayers that have nothing specifically Islamic about them. Both recensions differed considerably from the 'Uṯmānic one in the order of the suras. It also seems that, at the time of the collection, there existed small groups of chapters already felt to be units. The hypothesis of Casanova and of A. Mingana, according to which the Q. would have found its present arrangement only through the work of al-Ḥaqqāq in the time of the Umayyad caliph 'Abd al-Malik (685-705), is not generally accepted, though it appears that a revision and fixing of the text did occur in that period. Nevertheless, for various reasons (imperfections of the Arabic script of that time, negligence of copyists, etc.) variants continued and continue to exist in the sacred text, mostly, but not always, of slight importance. Orthodoxy resolves the question, in agreement with a not very clear tradition according to which the Q. would have been revealed in seven aḥruf ("letters"), a term to which the meaning of "versions" was attributed, declaring equally orthodox the readings first of ten and then of seven famous scholars chosen arbitrarily. At present the two authorized versions in use are the Kufan one, used in Egypt and in the countries to the east of it, and the Medinan one used in the rest of the Muslim world.

V. CONTENT

Regarding the content of the Q., one may well repeat what Marracci wrote in the 17th century: «Vix dici potest quid determinate contineat Alcoranus: est enim miscella et farrago innumerarum rerum» (Prodr., I, Rome 1691, 225). It is interesting to note that in the Q. itself (3:5) it is admitted that in the book «there are verses firmly established which are the foundation of the book and others ambiguous», and those inclined to evil are accused of giving more importance to the ambiguous ones, although these too were revealed by God. This is one of the first distinctions that Muslims make within the content of the Q.: mutakābih, «ambiguous», and mutakākhim, «solid». The material is for the most part divided by them into aḥkām («judgments», the juridical and normative part), qīṣaṣ («stories», the legendary part) and mawā'īz («parenesis», «exhortations»), all of it often inextricably mixed together. Among the aḥkām there are, but in a disconnected form that would later give commentators much trouble, precepts on prayer, on fasting, on pilgrimage, on marriage, on the division of inheritance, on criminal law, etc. The legendary part contains, besides biblical accounts sometimes distorted (for example, Mary the mother of Jesus is confused with Mary the sister of Aaron), legends of Talmudic or Christian-apocryphal origin (for example, the seven sleepers of Ephesus) and profane legends (the legend of Alexander the Great and of the mysterious Ḥidr); the parenetic part has passages perhaps among the most beautiful of the Q., in the oldest chapters, exhorting to monotheism, to penance, and depicting the horrors of the «striking hour», that is, of the end of the world and the universal judgment. The protagonist of the text also varies very often: now God speaks in the first person, now Muhammad speaks, now Gabriel converses with the prophet, now criticisms are put into the mouths of his adversaries. Particularly interesting is the fact that the Muslims themselves, beginning with the prophet, noticed genuine contradictions between one passage and another of the sacred book and remedied this by applying their concept, somewhat anthropomorphic but robustly personalist, of the divinity, and by affirming (2:100; 16:103) that God can abrogate one or more verses. Entire treatises exist on this question, called that of the «abrogating and the abrogated» (an-nāsīh wa 'l-manṣūḥ). A typical example of progressive evolution in the precepts of Allah is that of the prohibition of wine. In 16:69 it is still permitted, indeed cited 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 in a state of drunkenness; in 5:92 wine is an abomination and a work of Satan. A glance at these citations is enough to render vividly the chronological disorder of the current redaction of the Q. A disorder in which a Muslim commentator such as ar-Rāzī discerns a coherence of superhuman origin (let us not forget the profound Islamic sense of the personal arbitrariness of the Divine). Moreover, in the study of the Q. one must strip oneself of one's own mentality as modern Europeans: probably we would have found an ordering not much better in a Q. redacted personally by Muhammad.

VI. DIVISIONS

The present Qur'an is, externally speaking, divided into 114 chapters (sūrah, pl. suwar, a term whose etymology is disputed) of very varying length (from 3 to 286 verses), arranged, as has been said, in approximate order of length, except for the first sūrah, a brief and beautiful prayer. Each sūrah is divided into a certain number of more or less long verses called djah, pl. djat (literally "signs", "miracles", cf. Heb. 'āth), whose division and numbering vary according to the schools. At the beginning is found the formula Bismi 'llāhi 'r-raḥmāni 'r-raḥm ("in the name of God, the merciful and compassionate"); the ninth sūrah is an exception, probably because it was originally joined to the eighth. In 29 sūrahs, immediately after the aforementioned formula, numerous letters are read, such as, for example, khj's, etc. Neither Muslim nor Western scholars have succeeded, despite clever efforts, in giving a definitive explanation of them. Among the few hypotheses that have not been proposed is that — not entirely improbable if one admits the paranormal state of the prophet at the moment of the revelations — they are meaningless voices or cries, similar to those of glossolalists 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 in some cases, from the prophet himself, a name that is an allusion to something or to an event or to a significant word contained in the sūrah itself. Less important, late and variable according to countries, are the broader divisions of the Qur'an into 30 guz' and 60 hizb for psalmody recitation, the rules of which form an auxiliary "science". From the point of view of the place where they were revealed, the sūrahs were distinguished since ancient times into Meccan, that is, revealed or "sent down" in the Meccan period of the prophet's activity (609-22), and Medinan, revealed after the Hegira (622-32). Islamic treatises on Qur'anology already provide a rudimentary critical method of distinction: where it says "O you who have believed!" it is a Medinan sūrah; Meccan are those in which the prophet addresses his interlocutors with the words "O people!". Many other divisions, often external and mechanical, are found in Muslim treatises (sūrahs or verses revealed while traveling, by day, by night, etc.), on which it is not worth dwelling. The treatises also give 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, even if not absolutely certain, chronological ordering of the Qur'anic sūrahs is that which is the fruit of the patient and acute investigations of T. Nöldeke in his Geschichte des Qur'an. It should be observed that even the longest sūrahs themselves often do not form a chronological unity.

VII. LANGUAGE

The language of the Q. is 'arabī mubīn, clear Arabic (26, 195), a language that the Prophet seems to have possessed perfectly in all its richness. Scholars have discussed and still discuss, having discarded the idea that Muhammad "composed" the Q. in a popular dialect later accommodated to literary Arabic hoinē, the relations of the language of the Q. to that of pre-Islamic classical poetry.

The Q., a unique work in Arabic literature, is among the most untranslatable books of world literature. Like many great artists, Muhammad 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 hurled at him by the Meccans. Nevertheless, with his work of enthusiastic renewal of the spiritual life of the people, he was a true "revolutionary artist," dealing a mortal blow to the closed and elaborate verbal classicism of pre-Islamic poetry and leaving in the rhythmic prose of the best passages of the Meccan sūras perhaps the only monument of "romantic art" (the word must be taken cum grano salis) of the literatures of the East. Unique, because the Quranic style found no imitators, given the book's character of sacredness. Despite this, the enthusiasm and the pathos of the Q., 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 at play in the development of the various Islamic literatures.

The style of the Q. varies considerably according to the periods: a clear distinction, perceptible even to one who reads it in translation, can be made between the Meccan style and the Medinan one. The form of the oldest Meccan sūras seems to bear the influence of the divinations of the pre-Islamic Arab soothsayers (kāhin). They are brief, moving passages in more or less regular rhymed prose (saq'), sometimes preceded by strange oaths such as "By the fig and the olive! By the advancing morning! By the night when it falls! By the double and the single! By the coming of night!" The expression is extremely dynamic, passages continuously narrative are rare. Typical of the Medinan sūras is instead the greater length of the verses, in which rhyme becomes a purely external and mechanical means of connection; the expression is calm and sometimes clumsy, legal norms abound. They are among the literarily worst passages of the Q., full of repetitions and naive arguments, though a certain majestic solemnity is not lacking in some of them, as in the well-known "verse of the Throne" (2, 256) and others. The transition between the two styles evidently occurs through intermediate degrees: the sūras of the second Meccan period, abounding in stories of prophets, are already different from those of the first. Comparisons are quite frequent throughout the Q., some very beautiful (see e.g. 77, 30-32); in many of them God speaks of the phenomena of nature as means for imparting moral teachings: the singular "verse of light" (24, 35) stands isolated for its mystical symbolism. Despite everything, even at a first reading, one cannot fail to notice that a single personal imprint pervades the whole book. It could well be said that the best proof not certainly of the divinity but of the authenticity of the Q. is the substantial unity and the uniqueness of its style. The influence of the style of the Q., read, reread and meditated upon daily in Arabic by all the most [devout] Muslims, has been incalculable, though not exactly measurable, in all the cultural manifestations of the Islamic peoples, who, even the most distant from the Arabs, have been strongly Semitized by it.

VIII. COMMENTARIES, TEXT, TRANSLATIONS

The Qur'an possesses, as is easy to imagine, an enormous quantity of commentaries, called tafsīr, among which are most celebrated those of Tabarī (d. 923), orthodox and traditionalist, in no fewer than 30 vols.; of Zamahārāt (d. 1144), tending toward Mu'tazilism (v. above); of ar-Rāzī (d. 1209); of al-Bajdāwī (d. 1291), al'ash'arite; finally, more manageable and very widely used, that "of the two Ġalāl" (tafsīr al-šaldāh), that is, of Sujūṭī (d. 1505) and of Mahallī (d. 1459).

An excellent introduction to the Muslim "Qur'anic sciences" is the Itqān fī 'ulūm al-Qur'ān of Sujūṭī himself.

A very good and elegant Arabic text of the Qur'an is the one printed in Egypt by order of King Fu'ād (Cairo 1923). Universally used in Europe is the edition of Flügel (Leipzig 1841 and several times stereotyped), reproduced by L. Bonelli in Il C. arabo con tavole di concordanza..., Milan 1937.

Orthodoxy generally forbids translations of the Qur'an into foreign languages. In recent (1925) discussions in Egypt and Turkey a relaxation of this prohibition was noted, a prohibition moreover based 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 (Bibliander). Among recent Western translations perhaps the best scientifically is the Italian one by Bonelli (1st ed., Milan 1929; 2nd ed. improved, ibid. 1940). The best French one is that of M. Kasimiraki (Paris 1840 and then reprinted). One is currently in preparation, with the sūras arranged chronologically, by R. Blachère. Excellent is the English translation of E. H. Palmer (Oxford 1880, then 1900 and 1928). Good is the German one of Henning (Leipzig 1901).

Furthermore, the great work of L. Marracci (Alcorani textus universus, Padua 1698) in two large volumes must not be forgotten. The second contains the text and the Latin translation, the first the Prodromus ad Refutationem Alcorani, very rich in accurate citations of Arabic authors (the more correct edition of the Prodromus alone being the earlier one of Rome, 4 vols., 1691). Marracci's translation, although in various points superseded, can still be consulted usefully.

A useful Qur'anic anthology for those who do not feel up to undertaking a complete reading is V. Vacca, Antologia del C., Florence 1944.

Alessandro Bausani