quran+Quran
Qur??n, (Arabic: “Recitation”) also spelled Quran and Koran, the sacred scripture of Islam. According to conventional Islamic belief, the Quran was revealed by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad in the West Arabian towns Mecca and Medina beginning in 610 and ending with Muhammad’s death in 632 CE. The word qur??n, which occurs already within the Islamic scripture itself (e.g., 9:111 and 75:17–18), is derived from the verb qara?a—“to read,” “to recite”—but there is probably also some connection with the Syriac qery?n?, “reading,” used for the recitation of scriptural readings during church services. The Qur??nic corpus, composed in an early form of Classical Arabic, is traditionally believed to be a literal transcript of God’s speech and to constitute the earthly reproduction of an uncreated and eternal heavenly original, according to the general view referred to in the Qur??n itself as “the well-preserved tablet” (al-law? al-mahf??; Qur??n 85:22).
Form And Content
The Qur??n is markedly shorter than even the New Testament, let alone the Hebrew Bible. It is subdivided into 114 chapterlike units called “s?rahs,” a word used within the Qur??n to designate revelatory passages of an unspecific length (e.g., 9:64). With the exception of the short opening s?rah, recited during each of the five daily Islamic prayers, the s?rahs are ordered roughly according to decreasing length, although this general rule is frequently interrupted. The second s?rah is by far the longest one. All s?rahs are traditionally known by names—many of them by more than one—which appear to have emerged only after the death of the Prophet. S?rah names are usually derived from some conspicuous word in the respective text, such as “The Cow” (the second) or “The Poets” (the 26th), though they do not necessarily identify a text’s main theme. Each s?rah, apart from the ninth, is preceded by the so-called basmalah, the formulaic invocation “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” Many s?rahs (e.g., the second) are opened by detached Arabic letters, the meaning of which has not yet been satisfactorily explained.