39 - The Qurʾān and the Bible

Summary

The Qurʾānic text transmitted to us betrays a peculiar composition, essentially different from that of both the Hebrew Bible – which relates salvation history through a roughly chronological sequence of events – and the Gospels, which narrate the life of Christ and the emergence of the earliest Christian community. The Qurʾān does not present a continuous narrative of the past, but, in its early texts, conjures the future (the imminent day of judgement), while later entering into a debate with various interlocutors about the implementation of monotheist scripture in the present. It consists of 114 text units, known as suras, which vary in length from two-sentence statements to lengthy polythematic communications. These suras are arranged roughly according to their length; the longest suras are placed first, with the shorter ones generally following in order of decreasing length.

Though we possess manuscript evidence only from the last third of the seventh century, the most plausible hypothesis is that the texts in the transmitted Qurʾānic corpus do reflect, more or less faithfully, the wording of communications that were actually pronounced by the Prophet during his ministry in Mecca (610–22 ce) and subsequently Medina (622–32). The strikingly mechanical composition of the corpus betrays both a conservative and a theologically disinterested attitude on the part of the redactors, which fits best with a very early date of redaction. Though the view upheld in Islamic tradition – that the Prophet's recitations were fixed already some twenty-five years after his death by the third caliph, ʿUthmān (644–56), thereby forming the corpus we have before us – cannot be positively proven, there is no evidence to contradict it.