IV The Ḳur-Án
The Muslim who reads the Ḳur-án is like the orange-fruit, whose smell and taste are sweet; and the Muslim who reads not the Ḳur-án is like the date, which hath no smell, but its taste is sweet; and the Hypocrite who reads not the Ḳur-án is like the colocynth, without a smell, and with a bitter taste; and the Hypocrite who reads it is like the sweet bazil, whose smell is sweet, but its taste bitter.
—Tradition.
It is an immense merit in the Ḳur-án that there is no doubt as to its genuineness. The ‘Word of the Lord’ came to Moḥammad, and he uttered it, and the people wrote it down or committed it to memory; and that very word we can now read with full confidence that it has remained unchanged through nearly thirteen hundred years.
The revelations came to Moḥammad in many ways and at all times, but never ‘in visions bright, transcendant, exalted. They came ghastly, weird, most horrible. After long solitary broodings, a something used to move Moḥammad, all of a sudden, with frightful vehemence. He “roared like a camel,” his eyes rolled and glowed like red coals, and on the coldest day terrible perspirations would break out all over his body. When the terror ceased, it seemed to him as if he had heard bells ringing, “the sound whereof seemed to rend him to pieces”—as if he had heard the voice of a man—as if he had seen Gabriel—or as if words had been written in his heart. Such was the agony he endured, that some of the verses revealed to him well-nigh made his hair turn white.’
No collection of these revelations was made during Moḥammad’s lifetime; at his death, the Ḳur-án existed only as scattered chaotically among the believers. But about a year later, the death in battle of some of the men who had specially committed passages of the Ḳur-án to memory, and the dread that the whole of Moḥammad’s teaching might vanish at the end of a generation or two, induced Aboo-Bekr to make the innovation from which every one shrank, and he gave orders to the Prophet’s secretary, Zeyd ibn Thábit, to collect the fragments of the Ḳur-án in one book. So Zeyd gathered the Ḳur-án from palm-leaves, skins, shoulder-blades, stones, and the hearts of men, arranged the chapters in a certain order, and presented Aboo-Bekr with a Ḳur-án which probably differed in no essential particular from the book we have now. All scholars are agreed that Zeyd did his work faithfully, and neither inserted nor omitted anything from party motives. But he seems to have occasionally mixed up fragments of very different date in one chapter—Moḥammad himself countenanced this—and may possibly have omitted some portions that were not found till afterwards.
Some twenty years later a second recension was ordered by the Khalif ´Othmán. Slight varieties of reading, mainly dialectal, had arisen; swords were near being drawn over them; and it was evident that a serious schism would come about if a uniform authorised text of the Ḳur-án were not provided. These slight dialectal differences were not sufficiently settled, it would seem, in Aboo-Bekr’s edition, so this new recension was made by Zeyd and three men of the Ḳureysh, for they would best know the original dialect of the Ḳur-án. The new edition followed the first one, apparently, both in order and in matter; definitely fixing, however, the true text in the dialect of the Ḳureysh, and possibly adding any verses that might have been discovered since Zeyd’s first edition. This second recension was conducted with the same careful fidelity and scrupulous impartiality as the first; and it was accepted by all the different parties that were then disputing the supremacy. Copies of this edition were then distributed to the principal cities of the empire, and the old copies and fragments were called-in and burned.
This edition of ´Othmán, made about a.d. 660, is the one that has ever since been the authorised and only version of the Ḳur-án throughout the Muslim world and in the studies of European linguists. The only differences that have since crept into the text are certain unimportant varieties in vocalisation and orthography and in the division of verses.
It was a singular system these early revisers went upon. They seem, indeed, to have established the authenticity of each saying satisfactorily; but in the arrangement of them they showed an extraordinary dulness. The tradition of the year when each revelation was spoken appears to have been lost even in the short time that had elapsed since it had been spoken. People remembered the words, but seldom the occasion of the words. Hence the revisers had to devise an artificial order; not according to subject, nor after the development of the style, but simply in order of length! They put the longest chapters first and the shortest last; that is to say, they inverted, roughly speaking, the true order, for the early soorahs were short and the later ones long.
Read in this order, the Ḳur-án is an unintelligible jumble. Carlyle may well say that ‘nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Ḳur-án.’ You can trace no development of mind or doctrine in the present arrangement; it is indeed a confused mass of ‘endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement, most crude, incondite.’ But scholars have long discovered certain signs of a true order—several kinds of evidence by which a chronological arrangement of the Ḳur-án may be attempted. These are—(1.) The references to historical events in the Ḳur-án, as identified by tradition. These, however, are but few, and occur chiefly in quite the latest soorahs; and tradition is apt to identify any reference with any event it chooses. A much more important test is (2.) the style; for a distinct development can be traced in the rime, in the length of verses, and in the words employed. And then there is (3.) the matter test, based on what we know of Moḥammad’s life, from which we can argue a certain change in his preaching at Mekka, and still more when, from addressing idolaters in his birthplace, he came to preach to Jews and Christians at Medina. The danger of this last test is that each man forms his own theory of Moḥammad’s mental and religious growth, and may arrange the soorahs in accordance with that theory. Even with these three tests, used by the most accomplished critics, it is impossible to arrive at an exact order, and to determine the precise chronological position of each soorah. But whilst it is admitted that an exact chronological arrangement of each individual chapter of the Ḳur-án is impossible, it is yet no less certain that the soorahs may be roughly grouped together, and that these groups can be definitely assigned to certain periods of Moḥammad’s career.
Professor Th. Nöldeke’s Geschichte des Qorâns has established his right to the first place in this science of Ḳur-án arrangement, and his order of soorahs may fairly be accepted as authoritative. Of this order Mr. Rodwell’s English version of the Ḳur-án is an example, except that a few of the earliest soorahs are transposed. Nöldeke has two great divisions of the soorahs: those revealed at Mekka, and those revealed during the Medina period. Further, he divides the Mekkan division into three groups.23
| Mekka | I. | a.d. 612-617 (Rodwell, pp. 1-64)—To the Abyssinian exile (fifth year). | |
| II. | a.d. 617-619 (Rodwell, pp. 64-192)—Fifth and sixth Mekka years of Moḥammad’s mission. | ||
| III. | a.d. 619-622 (Rodwell, pp. 193-366)—From the seventh year to the Flight. | ||
| Medina | a.d. 622-633 (Rodwell, pp. 366-555)—At Medina. |
Read in this order the Ḳur-án becomes intelligible. It is still confused in its progression and strangely mixed in its contents; but the development of Moḥammad’s faith can be traced in it, and we can see dimly into the workings of his mind, as it struggles with the deep things of God, wrestles with the doubts which echoed the cavils of the unbelievers, soars upwards on the wings of ecstatic faith, till at last it gains the repose of fruition. Studied thus, the Ḳur-án is no longer dull reading to one who cares to look upon the working of a passionate troubled human soul, and who can enter into its trials and share in the joy of its triumphs.
In the soorahs revealed at Mekka, Moḥammad has but one theme—God; and one object—to draw his people away from their idols and bring them to the feet of that God. He tells them of Him in glowing language, that comes from the heart’s white heat. He points to the glories of nature, and tells them these are God’s works. With all the brilliant imagery of the Arab, he tries to show them what God is, to convince them of His power and His wisdom and His justice. The soorahs of this period are short, for they are pitched in too high a key to be long sustained. The language has the ring of poetry, though no part of the Ḳur-án complies with the demands of Arab metre. The sentences are short and full of half-restrained energy, yet with a musical cadence. The thought is often only half expressed; one feels the speaker has essayed a thing beyond words, and has suddenly discovered the impotence of language, and broken off with the sentence unfinished. There is the fascination of true poetry about these earliest soorahs; as we read them we understand the enthusiasm of the Prophet’s followers, though we cannot fully realise the beauty and the power, inasmuch as we cannot hear them hurled forth with Moḥammad’s fiery eloquence. From first to last the Ḳur-án is essentially a book to be heard, not read, but this is especially the case with the earliest chapters.
In the soorahs of the second period of Mekka we begin to trace the decline of the Prophet’s eloquence. There are still the same earnest appeals to the people, the same gorgeous pictures of the Last Day and the world to come; but the language begins to approach the quiet of prose, the sentences become longer, the same words and phrases are frequently repeated, and the wearisome stories of the Jewish prophets and patriarchs, which fill so large a place in the later portion of the Ḳur-án, now make their appearance. The fierce passion of the earliest soorahs, that could not out save in short burning verses, gives place to a calmer more argumentative style. Moḥammad appeals less to the works of God as proofs of his teaching, and more to the history of former teachers, and the punishments of the people who would not hear them. And the characteristic oaths of the first period, when Moḥammad swears by all the varied sights of nature as they mirrored themselves in his imagination, have gone, and in their place we find only the weaker oath ‘by the Ḳur-án.’ And this declension is carried still further in the last group of the soorahs revealed at Mekka. The style becomes more involved and the sentences longer, and though the old enthusiasm bursts forth ever and anon, it is rather an echo of former things than a new and present intoxication of faith. The fables and repetitions become more and more dreary, and but for the rich eloquence of the old Arabic tongue, which gives some charm even to inextricable sentences and dull stories, the Ḳur-án at this period would be unreadable. As it is, we feel we have fallen the whole depth from poetry to prose, and the matter of the prose is not so superlative as to give us amends for the loss of the poetic thought of the earlier time and the musical fall of the sentences.
In the soorahs of the Medina period these faults reach their climax. We read a singularly varied collection of criminal laws, social regulations, orders for battle, harangues to the Jews, first conciliatory, then denunciatory, and exhortations to spread the faith, and such-like heterogeneous matters. Happily the Jewish stories disappear in the latest soorahs, but their place is filled by scarcely more palatable materials. The chapters of this period are interesting chiefly as containing the laws which have guided every Muslim state, regulated every Muslim society, and directed in their smallest acts every Mohammadan man and woman in all parts of the world from the Prophet’s time till now. The Medina part of the Ḳur-án is the most important part for Islám, considered as a scheme of ritual and a system of manners; the earliest Mekka revelations are those which contain what is highest in a great religion and what was purest in a great man.
The word Ḳur-án means the crying, reciting, reading, and is applied not only to the whole book, but to any chapter or section of it. The Ḳur-án is also called El-Furḳán, ‘the Distinguisher,’ and El-Muṣḥaf, ‘the Volume,’ and El-Kitáb, ‘the Book,’ and Edh-Dhikr, ‘the Admonition.’ The Ḳur-án contains, in its ordinary form, 114 chapters (soorahs), 6616 verses (áyát, literally ‘signs’ or ‘wonders’), 77,934 words, and 323,671 letters, according to the estimates of laborious Muslim divines, which differ, however, in a slight manner in consequence of the various divisions of verses. After the first chapter, which is a short prayer (the Fátiḥah), the soorahs gradually decrease in length from 289 verses in the second to from three to six in the ten concluding chapters. Each chapter is headed by a title, taken from same prominent word in it (as the ‘Chapter of the Striking,’ ‘of the Cow,’ &c.); beneath which is noted whether it was promulgated (according to tradition) at Mekka or Medina, and the number of its verses. Then follow the words:—‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful;’ after which the chapter begins. To twenty-nine chapters are prefixed certain letters (e.g., ch. ii. on p. 4), or a single letter, which have never been successfully interpreted. The Muslims believe them to conceal profound mysteries. In Soorah 55 a refrain is found, and traces of a like imitation in Soorahs 54 and 17. It is probable that the Ḳur-án was originally chanted in somewhat the same manner as it is in the present day.
The Ḳur-án is also divided in thirty sections, and these are again subdivided; and from this division rather than from chapter and verse do the Muslims generally quote.
‘The Muslims absolutely deny that the Ḳur-án was composed by their Prophet himself, or by any other for him; it being their general and orthodox belief that it is of divine original; nay, that it is eternal and uncreated, remaining, as some express it, in the very essence of God; that the first transcript has been from everlasting by God’s throne, written on a tablet of vast size, called the Preserved Tablet, in which are also recorded the divine decrees, past and future; that a copy from this tablet, in one volume on paper, was, by the ministry of the angel Gabriel, sent down to the lowest heaven, in the month of Ramaḍán, on the Night of Power;24 whence Gabriel revealed it to Moḥammad by parcels, some at Mekka, and some at Medina, at different times during the space of twenty-three years, as the exigency of affairs required; giving him, however, the consolation to show him the whole (which they tell us was bound in silk, and adorned with gold and precious stones of Paradise) once a year; but in the last year of his life he had the favour to see it twice. They say that few chapters were delivered entire, the most part being revealed piecemeal, and written down from time to time by the Prophet’s amanuensis, in such or such a part of such or such a chapter, till they were completed, according to the directions of the angel. The first parcel that was revealed is generally agreed to have been the first five verses of the ninety-sixth chapter. After the new revealed passages had been from the Prophet’s mouth taken down in writing by his scribe, they were published to his followers, several of whom took copies for their private use; but the far greater number got them by heart. The originals, when returned, were put promiscuously into a chest, without regard to any order of time, for which reason it is uncertain when many passages were revealed.
‘The Ḳur-án being the Muslims’ rule of faith and practice, it is no wonder its expositors and commentators are so very numerous; and it may not be amiss to take notice of the rules they observe in expounding it.
‘One of the most learned commentators distinguishes the contents of the Ḳur-án into allegorical and literal. The former comprehends the more obscure, parabolical, and enigmatical passages, and such as are repealed or abrogated; the latter, those which are plain, perspicuous, liable to no doubt, and in full force.
‘To explain these severally in a right manner, it is necessary, from tradition and study, to know the time when each passage was revealed, its circumstances, state, and history, and the reasons or particular emergencies for the sake of which it was revealed. Or, more explicitly, whether the passage was revealed at Mekka or at Medina; whether it be abrogated, or does itself abrogate any other passage; whether it be anticipated in order of time or postponed; whether it be distinct from the context or depend thereon; whether it be particular or general; and lastly, whether it be implicit by intention, or explicit in words.
‘By what has been said, the reader may easily believe that this book is held by the Muslims in the greatest reverence and esteem. The more strict among them dare not touch it without being first washed or legally purified; which lest they should do by inadvertence, they sometimes write these words of the book itself on the cover or label, “None shall touch it but they who are purified.” They read it with great care and respect, never holding it below their girdles. They swear by it, consult it in their weighty occasions, carry it with them to war, inscribe sentences from it on their banners, sometimes adorn it with gold and precious stones, and knowingly suffer it not to be in the possession of any person of a different persuasion. It is the foundation of their education; and the children in the schools are taught to chant it, and commit the whole of it to memory.