The Quran's very name means recitation, and it is still learned by heart
Qur'an comes from an Arabic verb for reading aloud or reciting. Fittingly, Muslims believe it arrived orally, delivered to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel over about 23 years. Worshippers recite it only in Arabic during prayer, and someone who memorises the entire text earns the honoured title hafiz.
Islam's central scripture is arranged in 114 chapters called surahs, each made of verses known as ayahs. Beyond its religious authority, it is widely considered the high point of Arabic literature and has shaped the language profoundly. Muslims regard it as God's own speech and as Muhammad's greatest miracle, the last in a line of revelations that includes the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel. That belief sparked a fierce theological argument over whether the Quran was created or eternal.
Tradition dates the first revelation to 610 CE, in the Cave of Hira on the Night of Power, when Muhammad was 40. The last verse is placed in 10 AH, roughly February or March 632, following his sermon at Ghadir Khumm. Hadith reports describe revelation sometimes arriving like the ringing of a bell, and Aisha recalled seeing sweat on his brow on a cold day as inspiration ended.
Companions acted as scribes, and soon after Muhammad's death the first caliph, Abu Bakr, ordered the scattered written and memorised portions collected. Caliph Uthman later fixed a standard text, the Uthmanic codex, generally seen as the model for today's copies. Canonical variant readings, the qira'at, still circulate orally with small differences of wording. Some researchers argue that manuscripts such as the Sanaa palimpsest point to a slower, more complex path to a settled text.
The Quran calls itself a guide for humanity and refers to many stories also found in biblical and apocryphal writings, yet never quotes them at length; it retells them, sometimes in different versions, with the moral in focus. That allusive style created a large tradition of commentary called tafsir. The word qur'an appears around 70 times inside the text, and alongside it come other self-descriptions such as al-furqan, the discernment, and umm al-kitab, the mother book. During Ramadan, some Muslims recite the complete text across the nightly tarawih prayers.
Source: Quran
