The Quran

Muslims believe the Quran is the speech of God, given word for word in Arabic to Muhammad, peace be upon him, through the angel Gabriel over roughly twenty-three years, and that it is the last scripture that will be sent. The word quran means recitation, which is a useful clue: this is a book that was heard before it was written, and Muslims still learn it by ear.

It is not a long book. The text runs to 114 chapters, called surahs, holding 6,236 verses between them. The chapters are not in the order they were revealed and they are not arranged as a story. Roughly speaking, the longest sit near the front and the shortest near the back, so a reader starting at page one meets the 286 verses of Al-Baqarah early and the three-verse Al-Kawthar much later. Inside, the material moves between law, argument, prayer, warning, consolation, and accounts of earlier prophets, often within a single passage. People used to a narrative scripture usually find the first read disorienting, and that is worth knowing in advance.

How it was kept

Muslims hold that God undertook to preserve this text, and they point to two parallel chains for how that worked in practice. One is memory. Companions of Muhammad ﷺ committed passages to heart as they were revealed, and the practice never stopped; people today still memorise the whole text, with an unbroken teaching lineage behind them. The other is writing. Scribes recorded revelation as it came, on whatever was to hand, including flat stone, bark, bone and hide, under Muhammad’s ﷺ own supervision. Within a generation the material was gathered into a single standard copy under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, and copies were sent out across the Muslim world. Two very early manuscripts held in Turkey and Uzbekistan are traditionally identified with that project.

The challenge

There is a specific claim the Quran makes about itself that shaped a great deal of Arabic literary history. It challenges anyone who doubts its origin to produce something like it, and it narrows the challenge in stages: the whole book, then ten chapters, then a single chapter, and the shortest chapter is three short lines. Seventh-century Mecca prized poetry above almost everything and had strong reasons to discredit Muhammad ﷺ, and Muslim writers argue that the failure of his opponents to meet so small a demand is itself evidence. Whether you find that persuasive is your own business. What is not in dispute is the effect the sound of the text has on Arabic speakers, believing or not.

Reading it in your own language

A translation of the Quran is not, in Muslim understanding, the Quran itself. Translators render meaning, and every translation is one reader’s judgement about a text with layers in it, so published versions are usually titled as translations of the meanings rather than of the book. That is not a warning to stay away. It is a reason to read more than one version where you can, and to treat any single English wording as an approach rather than the last word. The sources listed on this site link to translations in a range of languages, published with their translators named.