IV.— The Contents of the Qurʾān and the Chronological Arrangement of its Chapters

In the Arabic Qurʾān, the Sūrahs are placed as they were arranged by Zaid ibn S̤ābit, who seems to have put them together regardle of any chronological sequence. The initial, or opening prayer, stands first, and then the longest chapters. But the Muḥammadan commentators admit that the Qurʾān is not chronologically arranged; and Jalālu ʾd-dīn, in his Itqān , has given a list of them as they are supposed to have been revealed. This list will be found under the Divisions of the Qurʾān in the present article. And, what is still more confusing, all Muḥammadan doctors allow that in some of the Sūrahs there are verses which belong to a different date from that of other portions of the chapter; for example, in the Sūratu ʾl-ʿAlaq, the first five verses belong to a much earlier date than the others; and in Sūratu ʾl-Baqarah, verse 234 is acknowledged by all commentators to have been revealed after verse 240 , which it abrogates. If we arrange the Sūrahs or Chapters according to the order given in Suyūt̤ī’s Itqān , or by Sir William Muir, or by Mr Rodwell, we cannot fail to mark the gradual development of Muḥammad’s mind from that of a mere moral teacher and reformer to that of a prophet and warrior-chief. The contrast between the earlier, middle, and later Sūrahs is very instructive and interesting. In the earlier Sūrahs we observe a predominance of a poetical element, a deep appreciation of the beauty of natural objects, fragmentary and impa ioned utterances; denunciation of woe and punishment being expre ed in these earlier Sūrahs with extreme brevity. “With a change, however, in the position of Muḥammad when he openly a umes the office of ‘public warner,’ the Sūrahs begin to wear a more prosaic and didactic tone, though the poetical ornament of rhyme is preserved throughout. We lose the poet in the mi ionary aiming to convert, and in the warm a erter of dogmatic truths; the descriptions of natural objects, of the Judgment, of Heaven and Hell, make way for gradually increasing historical statements, first from Jewish, and subsequently from Christian histories; while in the twenty-nine (thirty?) Sūrahs revealed at Medina we no longer listen to vague words, often, as it would seem, without definite aim, but to the earnest disputant with the opponents of the new faith, the Apostle pleading the cause of what he believes to be the truth of God. He who at Mecca is the admonisher and persuader, at Medina is the legislator and the warrior dictating obedience, and who uses other weapons than the pen of the poet and the scribe; while we are startled by finding obedience to God and the Apostle, God’s gifts and the Apostle’s, God’s pleasure and the Apostle’s, spoken of in the same breath, and epithets and attributes elsewhere applied to Allah openly applied to himself. ‘Whoso obeyeth the Apostle obeyeth Allah.’ “The Suras, viewed as a whole, will thus appear to be the work of one who began his career as a thoughtful inquirer after truth, and as an earnest a erter of it in such rhetorical and poetical forms as he deemed most likely to win and attract his countrymen, but who gradually proceeded from the dogmatic teacher to the political founder of a system for which laws and regulations had to be provided as occasions arose. And of all the Suras, it must be remarked that they were intended not only for readers but for hearers—that they were all promulgated by public recital—and that much was left, as the imperfect sentences show, to the manner and suggestive action of the reciter.” (Rodwell’s Preface to the Qurʾān .) The absence of the historical element from the Qurʾān, as regards the details of Muḥammad’s daily life, may be judged of by the fact that only two of his contemporaries (Abū Lahab and Zaid) are mentioned in the entire volume, and that Muḥammad’s name occurs but five times, although he is all the way through addre ed by the angel Gabriel as the recipient of the divine revelations, with the word “Say.” Perhaps also such pa ages as Sūrah ii ., verses 5, 246, and 274, and the constant mention of guidance, direction, wandering, may have been suggested by reminiscences of his mercantile journeys in his earlier years. Sir William Muir has very skilfully arranged the Sūrahs into six periods. (See Corân , S.P.C.K. ed.), and although they are not precisely in the chronological order given by Jalālu ʾd-Dīn in his Itqān , the arrangement seems to be fully borne out by internal evidence. With the a istance of Prof. Palmer’s “Table of Contents” slightly altered ( The Qurʾān , Oxford ed. 1880), we shall arrange the contents of the Qurʾān according to these periods.