Throbert McGee

Starting this thread because I noticed that the Islam section of the BC&H FAQ is woefully short, and doesn't yet have a thread link for these basic definitional questions.

My brief, far from expert answers to the questions -- obviously corrections and expansion are welcome:

1. The Qur'an

1.a The Qur'an is the Holy Scripture of Islam, regarded by believers as "divinely inspired" and thus properly termed analogous to the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Muslim tradition holds that the Qur'an was delivered piecemeal to Muhammad by angelic messengers over many years, and that it is a verbatim transcript of the original Arabic version that has eternally existed in Heaven.

1.b The Qur'an consists of 114 chapters or "suras" (Arabic plural: suwar, singular: sura), with a standardized sequence that arranges them roughly from longest to shortest. (Except for Sura 1, which is almost as short as Sura 114.) Each sura is further divided into numbered verses, and the accepted practice in citing passages from the Qur'an is simply to use the number of the sura followed by the verse number: e.g., Q 3:12-15 means the 12th-15th verses of the 3rd sura.

1.c Although the suras are arranged purely by length, there is general consensus on their relative chronology, with most suras being assigned either to the "Meccan period" early in Muhammad's career, or the later "Medinan period." As a rough generalization, the Meccan suras tend to be more tolerant in their language, and Medinan suras less tolerant, but this is not invariably the case.

1.d The Qur'an is rather less varied in its literary stylings than the Judeo-Christian Bible, supporting the idea that it was composed and/or redacted by a relatively small number of people over a relatively short timespan. Its contents include long catalogs of law as in Leviticus, hymns of praise to Allah analogous to Psalms, and wisdom sayings as in Proverbs. Notably absent from the Qur'an are narrative tales similar to those in Genesis or the Gospels or Acts, describing the earthly adventures of Muhammad or other figures.

1.e Finally, the Latinized spellings Qur'an or Quran are often preferred by scholars of Arabic for reasons of consistency in transliteration, but from a linguistics standpoint, the widely used spelling Koran is neither "less correct" nor "disrespectful."

2. The ahadith

2.a The ahadith are post-Quranic -- thus, non-Scriptural -- narrative stories about the deeds and sayings of Muhammad, ascribed by Muslim tradition to Muhammad's contemporaries. (Ahadith is an Arabic plural form that can be correctly anglicized as "hadiths," while the singular form is "hadith" in both Arabic and English.) Since the Quran itself contains almost nothing in the way of biographical information about Muhammad, the hadiths are the primary source for Muslims and infidels alike on the matters of Muhammad's military conquests and his personal life.

2.b While the hadiths resemble the Christian Gospels in their narrative form and "biographical" content, in contrast to the Gospels the hadiths are not considered the product of divine inspiration, and thus should not properly be referred to as "Islamic Scripture." Nonetheless, many of the hadiths are almost universally accepted by Muslim believers as authoritative, and historically reliable.

S.C.Carlson

Is it appropriate to refer to non-Muslims as "infidels" in a FAQ?

Throbert McGee

Good point; also, in 2.b, I should've written for clarity "the hadiths are not considered by believers to be divinely inspired." (As is, it makes it sound as though I'm asserting divine inspiration for the Christian Gospels.)

Throbert McGee

Aargh, I also omitted from 1.c: dating of suras as either "Meccan" or "Medinan" is based mainly on textual analysis, similar to the way that scholars attempt to distinguish the various source documents for the Pentateuch.

S.C.Carlson

Thanks. Would it be too controversial to mention the work of Christoph Luxenberg (pseud.) on the origin of the Qur'an?