The Quran ‘And if all the trees on earth were pens and the ocean were ink with seven oceans behind it to add to its supply, yet would not the words of Allah be exhausted in the writing.’ (Quran, chapter , verse ) The Quran is a book in Arabic divided into chapters ( suras ) and arranged in descending order of length, the shortest being the last. The only exception to this is the first sura which is a short prayer ( al-fatiha or opening). According to Muslim tradition, the Quran is a collection of messages (revelations) which God sent to the Prophet Muhammad between and , first in Mecca and then in Medina. The task of compiling these revelations was completed some time in .
The oldest complete Quran we have today dates from the ninth century. There are many fragments which are older, the earliest being the verses engraved on the Dome of the Rock and on coins in the seventh century. The use of the Quran as a source material for the history of early Islam has posed some problems. The first is that it is a scripture, a text vested with religious authority.
Theologians generally believed that as the speech of God ( kalam allah ), it has to be understood literally, but rationalists among them gave wider interpretations to the Quran. In , the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun imposed the view (in a trial of faith or mihna ) that the Quran is God’s creation rather than His speech. The second problem is that the Quran very often speaks in metaphors and, unlike the Old Testament ( Tawrit ), it does not narrate events but only refers to them. Medieval Islamic scholars thus had to make sense of many verses with the help of hadith.
Many hadith were written to help the reading of the Quran. Page from a Quran written on vellum in the ninth century. It is the beginning of Sura , ‘al-Kahf’ (The Cave) which refers to Moses, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and Alexander (Zulqar Nayn). The angular Kufi