The Qurʾān

The Qurʾān is the sacred scripture of Islam, understood by Muslims to be the literal word of God revealed to Muḥammad ﷺ over some twenty-three years.

At a glance

For Muslims the Qurʾān is not a book about God but the very speech of God, delivered through the angel Gabriel to Muḥammad ﷺ across roughly two decades in Mecca and Medina and recited by him to his followers. Its name means “the recitation,” and it was preserved first in memory and oral performance before being gathered into writing. The Meccan chapters tend toward the themes of God's oneness, the resurrection and moral warning; the Medinan chapters turn more to law, community and the ordering of a society.

The text is arranged into 114 chapters (sūras), ordered broadly from longest to shortest rather than by the sequence of revelation, and holding 6,236 verses (āyāt). Islamic tradition holds that the scattered records were collected under the first caliphs and standardised into a single authoritative codex under the third caliph, ʿUthmān, which remains the received text. As the word of God in Arabic, the Qurʾān is regarded as inimitable, and its recitation is itself an act of worship.

From the earliest period the community produced a vast literature of interpretation (tafsīr) to draw out the meaning of the text, and its language, imagery and law have shaped Arabic and the whole of Islamic civilisation. Chronicle carries the full Qurʾān with translations, word-by-word morphology and classical commentary in its reader.

Related in Chronicle

Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.