Origin and compilation

Whether or not the Qurʾān was divinely revealed is a question of religious belief that is not amenable to historical or philological confirmation or falsification. What does admit of scholarly scrutiny, however, is the text’s likely appearance in place and time. Islamic sources report that a complete written collection of the Qurʾānic revelations was produced only after the Prophet’s death, when a great number of those who knew the Qurʾān by heart were killed on the battlefield and the fear arose that knowledge of the Qurʾān might disappear. It was accordingly decided to collect the Qurʾānic revelations. These are said to have been recorded on materials as diverse as palm branches and stones as well as having been preserved in people’s memories. A companion of the Prophet, Zayd ibn Thābit, reportedly copied out on sheets of parchment whatever proclamations he could find and handed them over to the second caliph (leader of the Islamic community), ʿUmar (reigned 634–644 ce). After ʿUmar’s death the collection was inherited by his daughter Ḥafṣah. In order to forestall divergences in the recitation of the Qurʾān, the third caliph, ʿUthmān (reigned 644–656 ce), is reported to have ordered that copies of Zayd ibn Thābit’s recension be sent to the main garrison towns of the Islamic realm and that alternative versions of scripture be burned.

It bears emphasizing that ʿUthmān’s standardization is understood to have pertained only to the Qurʾān’s so-called rasm, its consonantal skeleton shorn of any auxiliary signs. Apart from lacking vowels, the rasm also includes a significant number of consonantal homographs. Incidentally, medieval Islamic scholarship readily acknowledges the resulting ambiguity by admitting more than one authoritative way of reading many Qurʾānic words as long as these readings are considered to have been transmitted from early authorities.

Although some scholars have conjectured that the final standardization of the Qurʾānic rasm might not have taken place until considerably later than is maintained by the Islamic tradition, the carbon dating of a number of early Qurʾānic manuscripts has produced results that are by and large consistent with the traditional view that the received text of the Qurʾān was in existence by about 650 ce. Other considerations—for instance, the fact that the Qurʾān is lacking in unequivocal references to any of the main events of Islamic history after the death of the Prophet—also support the assumption that the Qurʾānic corpus is to be dated to the first decades of the 7th century and really does comprise the prophetic proclamations of Muhammad (whose historical existence is confirmed by early non-Islamic sources). Nonetheless, on purely historical grounds, it is difficult to rule out that the Qurʾān could have undergone some amount of early post-prophetic editing, a possibility that remains to be assessed by future research.

According to Islamic tradition, the Qurʾān was revealed to Muhammad in separate passages that often consisted of isolated verses or verse groups. Islamic sources preserve a great number of reports about the occasions on which a certain sūrah or part of a sūrah was allegedly revealed. Thus, pre-modern Muslim exegetes envisaged the revelation of the Qurʾān as having been intimately connected with specific events in the life of the Prophet that are reported by extra-Qurʾānic literature. However, Western scholarship has gradually adopted a more cautious attitude toward the reliability of the relevant extra-scriptural material, which often cannot be traced back further than the 8th or at most the late 7th century ce. Recent research therefore exhibits a pronounced tendency to examine the Qurʾān’s theological and literary features in deliberate isolation from later accounts about the life of Muhammad. At the same time, current scholarship is marked by a renewed awareness of the very significant degree to which the Qurʾānic proclamations are in conversation with a rich array of postbiblical Jewish and Christian traditions that are preserved in non-Arabic (e.g., Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic) sources. It is important to emphasize that acknowledging such continuity does not entail reducing the Qurʾān to a mere replica of earlier stories and ideas. Instead, the acknowledgement is a precondition of fully appreciating the theological and literary innovativeness that can often be shown to characterize the Qurʾānic appropriation, recasting, and critique of prior traditions.

Working backward from the Qurʾān as a closed corpus that likely came into existence during the prophetic career of Muhammad, is it possible to discriminate between earlier and later layers of the Islamic scripture and to date the sūrahs, or parts thereof, relative to one another? The Islamic tradition distinguishes between Meccan and Medinan revelations, the watershed between the two being Muhammad’s emigration from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622. Relying on this traditional bifurcation, the German Orientalist scholars Gustav Weil (died 1889) and Theodor Nöldeke (died 1930) proposed that the Meccan texts could be further subdivided into three successive periods. The primary dating criterion they employed was verse length, with the operative assumption being that Qurʾānic verses tended to grow longer over time. It is of course by no means self-evident that it must be possible to rearrange the material collected in the Qurʾānic corpus into a linear series of temporally consecutive texts, but no alternative account of the Qurʾān’s composition has yet been worked out to a sufficient level of detail and explanatory power. If Weil and Nöldeke’s assumption of a gradual lengthening of verses over time is accepted, then most of the short sūrahs, which also tend to have short verses, emerge as belonging to the early period of Muhammad’s ministry, whereas sūrahs 2–5, for example, would date to a much later stage of the Qurʾān’s emergence. Such a chronology has important implications for understanding the development of Muhammad’s preaching. For instance, one consequence would be that the Qurʾānic proclamations did not begin to show a discernible interest in legal regulations until fairly late.