Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

94 t CHAPTER FOUR
either by selecting passages deemed suitable for special occasions
or in a monthly cycle. For this latter purpose, the standard edition
of the Quran is divided, just as the Hebrew Bible is for an annual
reading cycle, into thirty sequential “portions” of roughly equal
length—they are generally marked in the printed text—to be recited
as an act of piety, half a portion at the morning, half at the
evening prayer, over the course of a month. But some Muslims
were interested in the historical order of the revelation—even the
original editors had affixed “Mecca” or “Medina” at the head of
the suras. These were chiefly lawyers and exegetes for whom it was
important to establish the context of each revelation, the so-called
“occasions of revelation,” so that the exact legal implications of
each enactment might be understood. As we shall also see, there
was the doctrine of “abrogation” that held that a later verse of the
Quran might nullify an earlier one, a view that obviously puts the
historical order of the suras, and even their verses, in play. Finally,
later historians desired to provide a biography of Muhammad, for
which the Quran was an important if elusive source.
The Muslims had, then, good reason to attempt to arrange the
suras in their chronological order—though never to publish the
Quran in that form, as is sometimes done in the West. The standard
edition of the Quran, the present version of the book, has
become in effect almost as canonical as the Book itself. Non-Muslims
embarked on the enterprise of rearranging the suras only in
the mid–nineteenth century as part of the general Enlightenment
project to treat even sacred books, whether Bible, Gospels, or
Quran, as documents rather than as Holy Writ. The results were
not very different from what medieval Muslim scholars themselves
arrived at: the Meccan suras can be divided into “early,” “middle,”
and “late,” whereas the long suras dating from the Medina
period of the Prophet’s activity, many of which are composite, defy
much further categorization.
With these admittedly tentative results in hand, we can begin to
trace the trajectory of Muhammad’s ministry. Many of the suras
that appear to be early show a manner and an elevation of style
not unlike that of the Jewish prophets, as they admonish men to
reform, or warn of the judgment of eternity. The later suras are