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Quran

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The Qur'an, commonly spelled Koran in the west, is the Islamic holy book of Allah (God). Practioners of Islam called muslims, believe that it is the eternal, literal word of God, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad over a period of 22 years. The Qur'an consists of 114 suras (chapters) and 6,228 ayats (verses).

Much of the content in the Qur'an makes reference back to parts of the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Well-known Biblical characters such as Abraham, Noah, and Jesus are mentioned. Detractors of the Qur'an and Muhammad have claimed that Muhammad was merely taking older religious documents and stories and embellishing them. Muslims maintain that this could not be the case. They claim that modern science has identified many factual errors and internal inconsistencies in the Bible, and that the Qur'an has none and, and that in those cases where Biblical stories reappear in very similar form in the Qur'an, that the stories are always changed in such a way that the scientific inaccuracies and inconsistencies are gone. This, they claim, is proof that the Qur'an comes from God.

Muslims believe that the wording of Qur'anic text that we have today is identical to that spoken by Muhammad himself. Muhammad only delivered the Qur'an in spoken form during his lifetime; the word "Qur'an", in fact, means "the recitation". To ensure they remembered the text thoroughly, the faithful were required to (and many still do) memorize passages perfectly, down to the last syllable, and recite them frequently. Shortly after his death in 632 CE, Muhammad's disciples began recording all the Suras in written form. Thus, two different mechanisms were in place -- oral and written -- to help ensure that no corruption of the text took place over time. There is almost no dispute among Islamic clerics that the text today is as it was when it was first written down. However, translations of the Qur'an from Arabic to other languages are not considered by Muslims to be actual copies of the Qu'ran, but rather are considered to be interpretive translations of the Qu'ran.

Contemporary Scholarship and the Qur'an

Just as higher biblical criticism revolutionzed Judaism and Christianity by calling into question long held assumptions about the origins of the Bible, similar studies have done the same for the Qur'an. Parts of the Qur'an are based on stories of the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible], the New Testament of the Christian Bible and other non-canonical Christian works. Differences of the biblical to the quranic versions indicate that these stories were not taken directly from written texts but seem rather to have been part of the oral traditions of the Arab peninsula at Mohammed's time.

Islamic history records that Uthman collected all variants of the Qur'an and destroyed those that he did not approve of. Beside the known earlier versions from Abdallah Ibn Masud and Ubay Ibn Ka'b, there exist also some dubious reports about a shiite version which was allegedly compiled by Ali, Mohammeds son in law which he gave up in favor of Uthman?s collection. Modern researchers assume that the differences between the versions consisted mostly of orthographical and lexicalic variants and differing count of verses.

Since Uthman's version contained no diacritical marks and could be read in various ways, around the year 700 started the development of a vocalized version. Today the Qur'an is published in fully vocalized versions.

The Hadith repesents the authoritative Muslim understanding of the Qur'an and Islamic law. (It is roughly equivalent to Judaism's oral law in the Mishna and Talmuds.) In detail it gives information about which suras are to be regarded as abrogated by later ones, an important question for the Islamic law. It explicitly refers to chapters [suras] in the Qur'an that are no longer extant. Moreover the Hadith often give an account about the situation when specific sura were revealed, which was also an important aspect for interpretation.

The interpretation of the Qur'an soon developed into its own science, the ilm at-tafsir. Famous commentators were at-Tabari, az-Zamahshari, at-Tirmidhi. While these commentaries mention all common and accepted interpretations, modern fundamentalist commentaries like the one of Sayyed Qutb show tendencies to stick to only on possible interpretation.

Today seven canonical readings of the Qur'an and several uncanonical exist. This sevener-system was laid down by Ibn Mugahid who tried to find the special characteristics of each reading and thus derived common rules by analogical reasoning (qiyas).

Robert of Ketton was the first to translate it into Latin in 1143.

The proper rules (laws?) governing the translation and publication of the Qur'an state that when the book is published, it must never simply be entitled "The Qur'an." The title must always include a defining adjective, which is why all available editions of the Qur'an are titled The Glorious Qur'an, The Noble Qur'an, and other similar titles..

Literature

  • engl. translation by A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, London 1961
  • Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari, Jami al-bayan an ta'wil ay al-Qur'an, Cairo 1955-69, engl. translation ed. J. Cooper, Commentaries on the Qur'an, Oxford 1987

The Noble Quran
http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/

The Quran Browser
http://www.stg.brown.edu/webs/quran_browser/pqeasy.shtml

Textual Variants of the Qur'an
http://answering-islam.org/Quran/Text/

What is the Koran?
http://theatlantic.com/issues/99jan/koran.htm

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