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.