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93 The Nature of the Quraanic Text Structure The Quraan is a relatively short book (just over half the length of the New Testament). It is divided into 114 chapters,or suras,and each of these suras is divided into verses.According to Islamic tradition, the division into suras was revealed by God to the Prophet; the angel Gabriel taught Muhammad how to form suras from the pieces of revelation given to him by God. At the end of each year, Gabriel would visit Muhammad in order to review the suras that had thus far been compiled. (Gabriel had It is He who shows you the lightning, for fear and hope, and produces the heavy clouds; * the thunder proclaims His praise, and the angels, in awe of Him. He looses the thunderbolts , and smites with them whomsoever He will; yet they dispute about God, who is mighty in power. * To Him is the call of truth; and those upon whom they call, apart from Him, answer them nothing, but it is as a man who stretches out his hands to water that it may reach his mouth, and it reaches it not. The prayer of the unbelievers goes only astray. (Q 13:12-14) Chapter 4 The Quraan and Its Message v The Emergence of islam 94 Muhammad review the suras twice during the last year of his life, which Muhammad took as a sign that his death was near.) The division into verses, however, was not revealed by God but was developed by later generations after the death of the Prophet. In fact, before the standardization of the Quraan in the early twentieth century, a good deal of variation in verse numbering existed. All but two suras of the Quraan are preceded by the invocation, “In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate.” In al-Fatiha, the first sura of the Quaran, these words become part of the sura (verse 1); they are missing altogether in sura 9. Each sura also has a name, a feature similarly understood to be the work of Islamic tradition (on this, too, a good deal of variation existed).The traditional names are not like those of biblical books. The first book of the Bible is known to Christians as Genesis because it tells the story of origins, and to Jews as Be-reshit (“In the beginning ...”) because it opens with these words. However, the names of the suras, for the most part, are neither their first words nor their main topics . Instead, they appear simply to be labels by which one sura might be distinguished from others. The first sura of the Quraan is known as al-Fatiha, “The Opening,” because it is the first sura. The second sura is known as “The Cow” not because it is about a cow but only because it refers briefly (verse 67) to a story in which Moses instructs his followers to touch a murdered man with the flesh of a sacrificed cow (that he may come to life and, presumably , accuse his murderer; a story with connections to Num. 19:1-10 and Deut. 21:1-9). The Quraan’s 114 suras are organized, for the most part, in decreasing order of length (an ordering principle that has a precedent in the arrangement of Paul’s letters in the New Testament). This principle is not applied precisely , however. Sura 2, and not sura 1, is the longest chapter of the Quraan; the shortest sura (with only three verses) is 108, not 114. In fact, the exceptions to this principle are telling. For the most part, the Quraan speaks in the voice of God, like the sections of the Pentateuch or the Old Testament prophetic books in which God is quoted. However, the first sura—which has only seven verses— seems to be a prayer, the words of a believer speaking to God. The last two suras of the Quraan—sometime called “charm suras” because they seem to be incantations against evil—also seem to be in the voice of a believer (although they begin with the command “Say!” and thus are understood as the words of God, who is telling humans how to pray). It is sometimes argued that these suras at the beginning and end of the Quraan were initially prayers, and only later were added to the text, and became scripture. Meanwhile, in the middle of the text, the ordering principle of the suras seems to be broken in order to keep...

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