The Quran

The Quran (also written Qur’an or Koran) is the scripture of Islam. Muslims believe it is the literal word of God, conveyed by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad over roughly 23 years, from about 610 until his death in 632. Muhammad recited what he received, and his followers memorised it and wrote it down. Muslims regard it as the final revelation in a series that includes the Torah given to Moses, the Psalms given to David and the Gospel given to Jesus.

The word qurʾān comes from the Arabic root q-r-ʾ, “to read aloud” or “recite”, and the book calls itself by this name. It also calls itself al-kitāb, “the Book”, al-dhikr, “the Reminder”, and al-furqān, “the Criterion” that separates right from wrong.

The Quran is not arranged like a history book or a biography. It speaks directly, often in the voice of God addressing Muhammad or humanity, and moves between praise of God, warnings, stories of earlier prophets, laws and prayers. Readers therefore often rely on commentaries and on accounts of Muhammad’s life to understand the setting of particular passages.

This page explains the Quran as Muslims understand it and also describes what historians and textual scholars have learned about how it was written down and transmitted. These are different kinds of question, and both are presented here with respect.

Above all, the Quran is recited. Muslims recite passages in each of the five daily prayers, and the whole text is often recited over the month of Ramadan. Recitation follows a set of rules called tajwīd, which govern pronunciation, lengthening of vowels, pauses and nasal sounds. Great reciters are admired across the Muslim world, and recordings and broadcasts of recitation are part of daily life from Morocco to Indonesia.

Memorising the Quran is an old and living tradition. Children in Quran schools learn by repetition with a teacher, and many complete the whole text. Someone who has memorised it all is honoured with the title ḥāfiẓ. Muslim tradition emphasises that this oral chain, from teacher to student, has always accompanied the written text and helped to preserve it.

Written copies are treated with reverence. Many Muslims perform ritual washing before touching the Arabic text, keep it in a high, clean place, and never place other objects on top of it. The art of copying it gave rise to Islamic calligraphy and illumination, some of the finest achievements of Islamic art.

The Quran has 114 suras (chapters). Each has a traditional name, often taken from a striking word in it, such as al-Baqara (“the Cow”), Maryam (“Mary”) or al-Nahl (“the Bee”). Every sura except the ninth begins with the formula called the basmala: “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” Twenty-nine suras open with mysterious separate letters, such as alif lām mīm, whose meaning has been debated since early times.

The suras are made up of verses called āyāt (singular āya), a word that also means “signs”, as in the signs of God in nature. The most widely used count gives 6,236 verses, not counting the basmala; other traditional counting systems differ slightly because they divide some verses differently, not because the text differs.

The order of the suras is not chronological. After the short opening prayer, al-Fatiha, the suras are arranged roughly from longest to shortest. The second sura, al-Baqara, is the longest, with 286 verses; many of the shortest suras, which come at the end, are among the earliest in date and are the ones children usually learn first. For recitation, the text is also divided into thirty parts (juzʾ) and sixty smaller units.

Traditionally each sura is labelled Meccan or Medinan, according to whether it is believed to have been revealed before or after Muhammad’s emigration to Medina in 622. About two-thirds are Meccan. Some suras are thought to combine passages from different times.

The central theme is God: one, without partner, creator and sustainer of all things, merciful and just. The short sura al-Ikhlas (112) sums it up: “Say: He is God, One; God, the Eternal Refuge. He did not beget, nor was He begotten, and there is none comparable to Him.” The Quran invites reflection on the natural world, the alternation of night and day, rain and the growth of plants, as signs pointing to the Creator.

Many passages speak of the Last Day, resurrection, judgment and the reward of paradise or punishment of hell, often with vivid imagery. The ethical message links belief with action: prayer, almsgiving, honesty in trade, keeping promises, kindness to parents, and justice for orphans, widows, the poor and travellers.

The Quran retells and comments on stories of prophets known also from the Bible and other traditions: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, Jonah, Zechariah, John, Mary and Jesus, as well as Arabian prophets such as Hud and Salih. Sura 12 tells the story of Joseph at length; sura 19 is named after Mary, who is mentioned by name more often in the Quran than in the New Testament. The Quran presents these prophets as bringing the same essential message, and it addresses Jews and Christians as “People of the Book”, sometimes in praise, sometimes in criticism, for instance of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The Medinan suras contain most of the legal material: rules on prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, marriage, divorce, inheritance, contracts, food, and the conduct of war. Although these verses are a relatively small share of the whole, they became foundations of Islamic law (sharīʿa) as developed by later jurists together with the hadith.

The Quran is not poetry in the formal sense of Arabic metre, but much of it is written in rhymed, rhythmic prose (similar to what Arabs called sajʿ). Early Meccan suras are short, with brief, intense verses, oaths (“By the dawn! By the ten nights!”), and powerful images of the end of the world. Later Meccan suras tell longer stories, and Medinan suras have longer verses with legal and communal detail.

The text often shifts speaker and addressee: God may speak as “We”, “I” or “He” within a few verses; Muhammad is told “Say: …”; believers, unbelievers or all humanity are addressed in turn. Stories are frequently told allusively, as if the audience already knew them, focusing on their moral meaning rather than narrative detail.

Muslims hold that the Quran is inimitable (iʿjāz): its language surpasses anything a human could produce. The Quran itself challenges doubters to produce a sura like it. Classical scholars such as al-Baqillani and Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani wrote treatises on this inimitability, which in turn laid foundations of Arabic rhetoric and literary theory. The Quran also standardised Classical Arabic, fixing a model of the language for grammar, law and literature across the Islamic world.

According to Muslim tradition, during Muhammad’s lifetime the revelations were memorised by many companions and written by scribes, such as Zayd ibn Thabit, on whatever materials were available: parchment, palm-leaf stalks, flat stones and shoulder blades of camels. Tradition also holds that Gabriel reviewed the revealed text with Muhammad every Ramadan, and that the order of verses within suras was fixed by the Prophet’s instruction.

After Muhammad’s death, many memorisers were killed in the Battle of al-Yamama (c. 633). Fearing that parts of the Quran could be lost, Umar urged the caliph Abu Bakr to have the text collected. Zayd ibn Thabit gathered it from written pieces and from “the hearts of men” onto sheets (ṣuḥuf), which passed to Umar and then to his daughter Hafsa, one of Muhammad’s widows.

Under the third caliph, Uthman (r. 644–656), reports of disagreements over recitation among soldiers from different provinces led to a second project. A committee headed by Zayd produced a standard codex based on Hafsa’s sheets, in the dialect of Quraysh; copies were sent to the main cities, and other copies were ordered destroyed. Some companions had kept personal codices that differed in the order of suras and in some readings; the codex of Ibn Mas’ud reportedly lacked the first and last two suras, and that of Ubayy ibn Ka’b reportedly had two additional short prayers. The Uthmanic text became the basis for all later copies.

Sunni and Shia Muslims accept the same text of the Quran. Although some early Shia reports questioned whether the codex was complete, the mainstream position of Shia scholarship, like that of Sunni scholarship, is that the Quran in use is the complete revelation.

Early Arabic script wrote only the consonantal outline (rasm) of words, often without dots to distinguish letters of the same shape and without vowel signs. This outline could be read in more than one way, and the living oral tradition determined the recitation. Over the following two centuries, dots and vowel marks were added: early systems used coloured dots, traditionally credited to Abu al-Aswad al-Du’ali (d. 688); the system of vowel signs still used today is credited to al-Khalil ibn Ahmad (d. 786).

Variant ways of reciting the text, all within or close to the Uthmanic outline, were transmitted by famous readers in the main cities. In the 10th century the Baghdad scholar Ibn Mujahid (d. 936) defined seven readings as canonical; later, Ibn al-Jazari (d. 1429) established ten. Each reading is known through two principal transmitters. The differences concern mostly vowels, dots and pronunciation, and occasionally words; Muslim scholars relate them to a hadith saying the Quran was revealed in “seven aḥruf” (modes), a phrase interpreted in many ways.

Printing came late. An Arabic Quran was printed in Venice in the 1530s, and European orientalists produced several editions, but Muslim societies long preferred handwritten copies. The Cairo edition published in 1924 under the patronage of King Fuad I, following the reading of Hafs from Asim, became the global standard for print, and the King Fahd Complex in Medina has distributed many millions of copies since the 1980s. Editions in the reading of Warsh are standard in much of North and West Africa.

Commentary on the Quran, tafsīr, is one of the great scholarly traditions of Islam. It began with explanations attributed to Muhammad and his companions, especially his cousin Ibn Abbas. Al-Tabari (d. 923) compiled a monumental commentary gathering earlier opinions with their chains of transmission. Later classics include those of al-Zamakhshari, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, al-Qurtubi and Ibn Kathir, and the concise Tafsir al-Jalalayn used widely in teaching.

Commentators use tools such as the “occasions of revelation” (asbāb al-nuzūl), reports about the situations in which verses were revealed, and the doctrine of abrogation (naskh), according to which some later rulings replaced earlier ones. They also draw on grammar, rhetoric, law and theology. Shia commentaries give weight to the teachings of the Imams; Sufi commentators seek inner, mystical meanings beneath the literal sense.

Modern interpreters have addressed new questions: Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida stressed reason and reform; Sayyid Qutb wrote a highly influential commentary about building a society based on the Quran; others have developed readings focused on social justice, gender or the environment. Interpretation has always been plural, and debates over how to read the text remain lively within Muslim communities.

Because the Arabic wording itself is regarded as revelation, Muslims have long held that a translation is not the Quran but an interpretation of its meaning; ritual prayer is performed in Arabic by Muslims of every language. Still, interlinear and full translations into Persian and other languages appeared early, and today there are translations into almost every major language, many by Muslim scholars.

The first Latin translation, Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete, was made in 1143 by Robert of Ketton for Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, with polemical aims. George Sale’s English translation of 1734 was widely read in the Enlightenment. Modern English versions include those of Marmaduke Pickthall (1930), Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934–1937) and M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (2004). Korean translations began in the late 20th century.

Beyond its religious role, the Quran has shaped the languages, literatures, law and visual arts of societies from West Africa to Southeast Asia. Arabic words and phrases from it are part of everyday speech for Muslims worldwide, such as in shā’ Allāh (“if God wills”) and bismillāh (“in the name of God”).

The earliest Quran manuscripts are written in a slanting script called Hijazi, on parchment, usually in vertical format, with few diacritical dots and no vowel signs. Many survive only as scattered leaves now held in different libraries. The Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, divided between Paris, St Petersburg, the Vatican and elsewhere, is one of the best-studied examples.

In 2015 the University of Birmingham announced that radiocarbon analysis at Oxford had dated the parchment of two leaves in its Mingana collection (Mingana 1572a), containing passages from suras 18–20, to between 568 and 645 CE with 95.4 per cent probability. The leaves turned out to belong with folios of the Paris codex. The result drew wide attention, but scholars caution that radiocarbon dates the death of the animal whose skin was used, not the writing, and that some features of the leaves, such as decorated sura dividers and verse markers, are debated.

The Sanaa manuscript, found in 1972 in a sealed space in the Great Mosque of Sanaa in Yemen among thousands of fragments, is a palimpsest: its upper text follows the Uthmanic standard, but an erased lower text, recovered with ultraviolet and digital imaging, differs from it in wording and in the order of suras. One leaf has been radiocarbon-dated to 578–669 CE. Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi (2012) argued that the lower text belongs to a non-Uthmanic textual tradition of the companions’ era; Asma Hilali and Éléonore Cellard have studied it from other angles, including as a possible teaching or practice text. Its variants are mostly small, yet it is the clearest material witness to textual diversity before or alongside Uthmanic standardisation.

Large research projects now catalogue and compare early manuscripts. The Corpus Coranicum project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2007–2024) built databases of manuscripts (Manuscripta Coranica), variant readings, and Late Antique texts relevant to the Quran, and commissioned radiocarbon analyses of dozens of manuscripts.

Academic study of the Quran in Europe took modern form in the 19th century. Gustav Weil and above all Theodor Nöldeke, in Geschichte des Qorāns (1860; revised and expanded by Friedrich Schwally, Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl in the early 20th century), proposed a chronology dividing the suras into early, middle and late Meccan and Medinan periods based on style and content. This scheme, which partly builds on the Muslim Meccan/Medinan classification, remains a common reference point, though scholars disagree over its details and over whether whole suras can be dated as units.

In the 1970s John Wansbrough, in Quranic Studies (1977), argued that the Quran was assembled over a long period in a sectarian milieu, perhaps as late as around 800, and that the traditional compilation stories were later creations. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook similarly questioned the traditional chronology. Such late-dating theories are now widely considered to be ruled out by the manuscript evidence, and Crone herself later accepted that most of the Quran goes back in some form to Muhammad. More speculative proposals, such as a pseudonymous scholar’s attempt to read many passages through Syriac, have been largely rejected by specialists.

Current debates are more focused. Some scholars accept an early fixation of the consonantal text under Uthman, as the tradition says; others suggest that standardisation may have been completed or enforced under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik and his governor al-Hajjaj around the 690s–700s, when the script was also being reformed. Scholars such as Angelika Neuwirth read the Quran as a Late Antique text in dialogue with Jewish, Christian and Arabian traditions, attending to its oral and liturgical character and to the unfolding of its community. Others study its relationship to biblical and post-biblical literature, its rhetoric, and its place in the history of the Arabic language.

Many Muslim scholars engage critically with these methods, some rejecting assumptions they see as alien to the Quran’s nature as revelation, others adapting them. Believers and historians thus approach the text with different premises, but they share an interest in its early history, and the discovery and dating of manuscripts in recent decades has brought their questions into closer conversation.