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.