Composition of the Qu’ran (Nicolai Sinai)

The Qur’an (from Arabic qurʾān, ‘reading’ or ‘recitation’) is a relatively compact scripture: with c. 77,400 Arabic words, its length equals approximately 56 per cent of the Greek New Testament (138,020 words in total). It is composed in a language close to the idiom of early Arabic poetry, although both the lexicon and certain grammatical peculiarities of Qur’anic Arabic are distinct from poetic Arabic. Most importantly, the standard way of reciting the Qur’an displays the desinential (word-final) inflection of nouns and verbs (iʿrāb) that is a defining feature of classical Arabic.

Dramatis Personae

One core feature that unites most of the material compiled in the Qur’anic corpus is the fact that it is punctuated by a divine voice employing the first-person singular or plural. An example is provided by the opening verses of the second surah (Q 2: 2–3). Despite the foregoing qualifications, the sheer quantity of occurrences of the divine first person in the Qur’anic corpus means that the Qur’an styles itself fairly pervasively as divine speech. An overview of instances of divine first-person speech is given in Pohlmann, Die Entstehung, pp. 62–3. This divine voice has its natural counterpart in second-person addresses. They occur not only in the plural (for example, Q 37: 4: ‘Yourp God is one’), but also in the singular, as in Q 20: 2–3. It unmistakably refers to a specific individual who is cast as the recipient of divine revelations and charged with conveying them to a wider audience (for example, Q 17: 106, 20: 2–3, and 76: 23), who is defended and comforted in the face of resistance and polemical aspersions (Q 50: 29–49, 68: 2–6, 68: 44–52, and 76: 23–26), who can even be rebuked (Q 80: 1–10), and whose domestic circumstances and conflicts are sometimes commented on (Q 33: 28–34.37.53–55, and 66: 1–5).18 This individual must be identical with the ‘messenger’ (rasūl) of God whom the Qur’an’s audience is repeatedly commanded to obey (for example, Q 3: 32.132 and 4: 13.59.69). The Qur’anic Messenger is also given other titles, for instance, that of a ‘warner’ (nadhīr, mundhir; for example, Q 32: 3, 35: 24, and 79: 45), a ‘bearer of eschatological tidings’ (bashīr or mubashshir, for example, Q 11: 2 and 17: 105), and a ‘prophet’ (nabiyy; for example, throughout Q 33). Four verses call the Messenger ‘Muhammad’ (Q 3: 144, 33: 40, 47: 2, and 48: 29). Like God, the Messenger can be referred to in the third person, especially when the divine speaker turns directly to his audience, as in Q 81: 22: ‘Yourp companion is not possessed.’

Verses & Rhyme

Rhyme, however, or rather a periodically recurrent word-final assonance, is a feature of the Qur’an throughout, and it naturally partitions the surahs into a total of approximately 6,200 verses (āyāt). The importance of rhyme to the Qur’an’s literary fabric is most revealingly indicated by the fact that Qur’anic verse endings have frequent recourse to what may be described as poetic licence in the interest of maintaining rhyme. As Friedrun Müller and, more recently, Devin Stewart have shown, the text often substitutes an expected word X* that would have disrupted the respective passage’s rhyme by a variant form X that fits the rhyme but is morphologically unusual or has a slightly different meaning than required by the context. Claims to have detected a case of poetic licence are especially persuasive if the Qur’anic corpus contains at least one thematically or phraseologically parallel verse that employs X* rather than X at a position in the verse that is not affected by rhyme. For example, at the end of Q 95: 2 the text refers to Mount Sinai by the etymologically puzzling t .ūr sīnīn, rather than as t .ūr saynāʾ, which is the form of the name that occurs verse-internally in Q 23: 20. At Q 95: 2, the occurrence of t .ūr sīnīn, rather than t .ūr saynāʾ, obviously serves to generate a rhyme with the surrounding verses, ending with the words al-zaytūn (v. 1), al-amīn (v. 3), taqwīm (v. 4), sāfilīn (v. 5), and so on (Müller, Reimprosa, p. 137; Paret, Kommentar und Konkordanz, on Q 95: 20; Stewart, ‘Ibn al-S. āʾigh al-H. anafī’s Ih.kām’, pp. 39 and 41; Stewart, ‘Names of Hell’, p. 201)

Many cases of verse-final poetic licence exhibit a technique that Devin Stewart has termed ‘cognate substitution’, whereby an expected expression is replaced by a word derived from the same consonantal root but conforming to a different morphological pattern. Thus, Q 105: 2 – ‘Did He [namely, God] not cause their plot to go astray?’ – employs the word tad. līl (‘leading astray’) in the sense of the cognate expression d. alāl (‘going astray’) (Müller, Reimprosa, pp. 46–50; Stewart, ‘Names of Hell’, pp. 215–16. On cognate substitution in general, see Stewart, ‘Ibn al-S. āʾigh al-H. anafī’s Ih.kām’, pp. 20–9). In other cases, Qur’anic verse endings secure the requisite rhyme by means of an unusual word order or by replacing a verb in the perfect tense by one in the imperfect. For two compelling examples where rhyme has affected word order, see Stewart, ‘Ibn al-S. āʾigh al-H. anafī’s Ih.kām’, p. 3, arguing that iyyāka naʿbudu wa-iyyāka nastaʿīn at Q 1: 5 simply stands for naʿbuduka wa-nastaʿīnuka (‘We worship You and we seek Your help’), and that wa-lam yakun lahu kufuwan ah. ad at Q 112: 4 stands for wa-lam yakun ah. ad kufuwan lahu (‘No one is equal to Him’). See also ibid., pp. 17–18, 33, and 41–2. For the use of the imperfect taqtulūn instead of the perfect qataltum (Q 2: 81), see ibid., pp. 7, 39, and 46 Qur’anic rhyme normally presupposes that the final short vowels of verbs and nouns, including the indeterminate nominal endings -un and -in, are dropped at the end of a verse, while final -an is lengthened to -ā. Most Qur’anic rhyme words are thus to be read in their pausal form, although there are occasional exceptions. For a more detailed explanation of pausal forms in Arabic, see Fischer, Grammar, pp. 32–4. One example where pausal pronunciation would undermine the rhyme is provided by Q 84: 14: given that vv. 11–13 and 15 end in -ūrā/-īrā, the last word of v. 14 (written yah. ūra in the Cairo edition) must clearly be pronounced yah. ūrā rather than yah. Ūr. First, whereas Arabic poetry normally adheres to the same rhyme throughout a given poem, many Qur’anic surahs feature changes in rhyme, which is likewise a trait of sajʿ prose (Stewart, ‘Sajʿ in the Qurʾān’, pp. 120–1). Secondly, the Qur’an goes further than Arabic poetry in permitting different vowels and consonants to be substituted for one another without breaking the rhyme. Like poetry, the short vowels a, i, and u as well as the long vowels ī and ū are freely interchanged, but unlike poetry, Qur’anic verse endings can also alternate the long vowels ī/ū with ā, or can even switch back and forth between different consonants, especially phonetically similar ones like l, m, n, and r.

By way of an example, let us consider verses 2–11 of surah 3, a passage for which the Damascene rather than the Kufan verse divisions seem superior (See Spitaler, Verszählung, p. 34). Below is an overview of the verse-final syllables yielded by the Damascene partitioning of the text. All of these verse-final syllables carry an accentual stress by virtue of being what is called ‘overlong’ (i.e., consisting of a long vowel in between two consonants). We encounter two kinds of rhyme shifts here. On the one hand, the passage alternates between verses that have the long vowel ā in the final syllable and those that have ī/ū, while on the other hand it alternates between different final consonants (mostly m, n, and b, but occasionally switching to the glottal stop as well as to d and r). To introduce convenient abbreviations, the passage is dominated by the rhyme scheme C (designating a discretionary consonant) + ā + m/n/b, with the occasional variants C + ī/ū + m and C + ā + ʾ/d/r. It does not seem likely that the sporadic occurrence of such variants is to be construed as a proper change in rhyme, since the shifts in questions are confined to one or two verses, after which the text reverts to the pattern C + ā + m/n/b. Nor do vv. 9–10, for instance, form a thematically or structurally self-contained textual unit. Consequently, the opening passage of surah 3 is best seen as exhibiting only a generic verse-final assonance, consisting in a discretionary consonant followed by any one of the three long vowels, followed by another discretionary consonant (C + ī/ū/ā + C), with a certain predominance of the vowel ā and the phonetically similar final consonants b, d, m, and n.

Here, there are unmistakable and compositionally meaningful rhyme changes between vv. 3 and 4 and then again between vv. 5 and 6, as a result of which vv. 4 and 5 are clearly set off from the preceding and from the following. In order to convey the phonetic quality of the text, the following translation includes a transliteration of the original Arabic, with rhyme changes indicated by horizontal lines. Note that here, too, I depart from the prevailing Kufan verse division in counting vv. 6–7 and 8–9 as one verse each, in line with the Basran and Damascene counting systems. Once again, we find that the rules underlying Qur’anic rhyme appear to permit the substitution of different consonants within the same rhyme section. It deserves to be noted, however, that unlike the opening verses of surah 3, vv. 4 and 5 of surah 101 limit themselves to interchanging consonants that share a similar manner of articulation: both th and sh are fricatives. After v. 5, the surah shifts back to the rhyme pattern ā + C + iyah. This is maintained throughout the remainder of the text. A final observation to be made is that surah 101 affords two further illustrations of the phenomenon of cognate substitution: ʿīshatin rād. iyah at the end of v. 7, literally ‘an approving life’, must be understood in the sense of ʿīshatin mard. iyyah, ‘an approved life’, while hāwiyah at the end of v. 9 would appear to do duty for one of the more common Arabic words huwwah or mahwā, meaning ‘pit’ or ‘abyss’.

1. Verses and stich
2. Verse length in Q2 & Q80 In Q 2: 1–5, by contrast, each verse except for the opening letter sequence occupying v. 1 comprises two or three clauses or clause-like phrases. Thus, verses here naturally divide up into two or three units of delivery that are best allocated separate lines, even though the rhyme (marked by a slash below) only recurs at the end of every verse. The fact that long Qur’anic verses tend to fall into such recitation phrases was noted already by the theologian Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013), who described them by the Arabic term kalimah (Since Q 99: 1–4 is an obvious example of Qur’anic sajʿ, each of its verses also qualifies as a sajʿah, or sajʿ phrase (Stewart, ‘Sajʿ in the Qurʾān’, pp. 117–8). Western scholars have termed the units in question ‘cola’ (singular ‘colon’) or ‘members’ The subdivision of verses into ‘cola’ is treated in Neuwirth, Studien, pp. 117–74, and Edzard, ‘Perspektiven’. On the term ‘member’, see Cuypers, Composition, pp. 26–9. Note that Cuypers will sometimes combine two short Qur’anic verses to form a single member, whereas Neuwirth and Edzard will always consider a verse, no matter how short, to amount to at least one colon. See Sinai, ‘Going Round in Circles’. Linguistically, the most straightforward examples of a Qur’anic stich would be a main clause, such as ‘those are guided by their Lord’ (Q 2: 5a), or one of various types of subordinate clauses. However, in many cases a word group not amounting to a complete clause may also carry enough weight to merit being deemed a self-standing stich, while in other cases very short clauses may not be considered to form an independent stich. Introducing the concept of a stich will enable us to describe Qur’anic verses not only in terms of their number of transcription letters, but also in terms of the number of component units that they contain. Thus, Q 99: 1–4 can be characterised as a sequence of four monostichs, whereas Q 2: 1–5 is composed of a monostich and four polystichs, more particularly, three tristichs and a final distichs.

The arrangement of the Qur’anic corpus

The corpus is opened by a brief prayer formulated in the firstperson plural, called ‘the Opening’ (al-Fātih. ah), and closes with a monotheistic creed (Q 112) and two brief invocations in the first-person singular (Q 113 and 114, jointly labelled ‘the Protective Incantations’, al-Muʿawwidhatān). Like the opening surah, Q 112–114 are evidently intended as prayers to be uttered by humans rather than as divine addresses, although the introductory imperative ‘Say: …’ (qul) serves to transpose them into the divine register that generally dominates the Qur’anic corpus, a feature that we do not see replicated in Q 1. Following Q 1, the order of the surahs appears to be partly determined by decreasing length, a principle that perhaps underlies the arrangement of the Pauline epistles in the New Testament as well (Robinson, Discovering, pp. 258–60). 8 If, as I shall go on to argue in Chapter 5, the longest surahs belong to a relatively late stage of the Qur’an, ordering the surahs by decreasing length may have recommended itself as a way of ensuring that chronologically earlier surahs were placed after, and were thus interpretively governed by, texts that reflected the theological state of development of the late Qur’an.

Total length of surahs 1 to 65:

Total length of surahs 44 to 114:

1. Textual
2. These seven readings were influentially codified in Ibn Mujāhid’s (d. 936) Book of the Seven Readings (Kitāb al-sabʿah fī l-qirāʾāt), even though other compilations of variant readings were authored before (Leemhuis, ‘Readings’; Melchert, ‘Ibn Mujāhid’; Shah, ‘Early Arabic Grammarians’; Gilliot, ‘Creation of a Fixed Text’; Stewart, ‘Consensus’, pp. 156–7 and 167–9). Many of the variant readings that Islamic sources transmit for a given verse of the received rasm are exclusively phonetic and do not affect meaning. For a more detailed survey of the types of variants reported by Islamic sources, with copious examples, see Dutton, ‘Orality’, pp. 8–12. For a convenient listing of reading variants for a particular verse, one may consult ʿUmar and Makram, Muʿjam, with references to the primary sources (against which the Muʿjam ought to be checked). An even larger collection of reading variants is al-Khat.īb, Muʿjam. Thus, some of the eponymous Qur’anic readers are reported to have pronounced the word al-tawrāta (‘the Torah’ in the accusative) at Q 3: 3 as al-tawrēta, or al-nār (‘the Fire’, scil. of hell) at Q 3: 10 as al-nēr. Likewise of a phonetic nature are variants contracting two identical consonants by omitting an intervening vowel (so that, for example, yaʿlamu mā, ‘he knows what …’ at Q 2: 77 or 3: 29 becomes yaʿlammā), a phenomenon known as ‘major assimilation’ (al-idghām al-kabīr).