The following
is some information that I collected on the chronology of the Qur’ān. Hopefully
some of my readers will find the overview and references useful.
The version of
the Qur’ān that we have now is an ʻUthmānic recension of the Qur’ān—it is the version
of the Qur’ān that was standardized by the third “rightly guided” Caliph ʻUthmān
ibn ʻAffān (r. 644 - 656). This ʻUthmānic recension contains 114 chapters that
are generally ordered from lengthiest to shortest. They are not ordered
in a chronological fashion.
Disputes about
the chronological ordering of the chapters of the Qur’ān (sūras) trace all the
way back to within the first century of Islam.[1] Muslim
scholars disputed which sūras should be considered to be Meccan, and which
should be considered to be Medinan (Meccan sūras
denote those chapters written prior to Muhammad's hijra to the city of
Medina (formerly Yathrib) in 622 A.D, whereas Medinan sūras denote those sūras that were written after the Hijra) . However, the traditional chronology which
is attributed to Ibn-Abbas, a paternal cousin and companion of Muhammad, became
widely accepted amongst Muslims and was adopted by the Egyptian standard
edition of the Qur’ān (1924).[2] The chart below illustrates the temporal
chronology adopted by the Egyptian standard edition.[3] It
should be read from left to right. So chp. 96 in the ʻUthmānic recension is
chronologically the first chapter to be revealed; Chp. 93 is the 11th
chapter to be revealed, and chp. 110 is the final chapter to be revealed.
The above chronology
of the Qur’ān is the chronology bequeathed to us by Islamic tradition. But
Western scholars since the 1840s have proposed their own chronologies. No
consensus has been reached yet, although Theodor Nöldeke’s (1836-1930 A.D)
ordering has gained the most widespread acceptance amongst Western scholars. [4] Furthermore,
there is more agreement on the position of (probably) ‘Medinan’ chapters, than
there is on the position of (probably) Meccan chapters; this is because the later
Medinan sūras (chapters), unlike the Meccan sūras, not infrequently mention
significant cotemporaneous events that can be independently verified.[5] The following
are relevant scholarly quotes on the issue of the chronology of the Qur’ān:
Orientalist
efforts to uncover the original chronological reordering of the Muslim sacred
text started in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the publication of
Gustav Weil’s Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den Koran in 1844. Of the four
other Orientalist chronological arrangements of the Qur’ān which followed,[6]
that of Theodor Nöldeke in his Geschichte des Qorâns (1860) was soon to become
authoritative. As such, it was deemed to deserve a full revision, begun in 1909
by Nöldeke’s student Friedrich Schwally, which resulted in a three volume
edition and secured its seminal status. In the first half of the twentieth
century, the chronological reading of the Qur’ān, mostly based on the
Geschichte des Qorâns’ reordering, appeared to acquire a heuristic monopoly in
Western research on the Qur’ān.[7]
Gerhard
Bowering, professor of Islam studies at Yale since 1984, says the following:
From
the mid-ninteenth century Western scholars began to engage in serious literary
research on the Qur’ān, linking the established conclusions of traditional Muslim
scholarship with the philological and text-critical methods that biblical scholarship
was developing in Europe. An intensive scholarly attempt was made to create a chronological
order of Qur’ānic chapters and passages that could be correlated with the
situations and varying circumstances of Muhammad’s life and career. This
Western chronological approach to the construction of the Qur’ān reached full
elaboration in the work of Theodore Nöldeke,[8] a
conclusion that was then challenged by Richard Bell[9]…The
most radical chronological rearrangement of the sūras and verses of the Qur’ān
was undertaken by Richard Bell…None of the systems of chronological sequencing
of Qur’ānic chapters and verses has achieved universal acceptance in
contemporary scholarship. Nöldeke’s sequencing and its refinements have
provided a rule of thumb for the approximate chronological order of the sūras.[10]
Richard Bell
(1876-1952), in his An Introduction to the Qur’ān, has provided a chart
listing the chronology of the traditional Muslim version (adopted by the 1924
Egyptian Standard Qur’ān), as well as the ordering of three Western
scholars—viz., William Muir, Thedor Nöldeke, and Hubert Grimme. The following
is the chart given by his student, Montgomery Watt, in his edited version of
Bell’s Introduction (click on the images to maximize):[11]
Note that William Muir
and Hubert Grimme believe that Sūra 9, the chapter famous for containing violent ‘sword verses’, was the last chapter to be ‘revealed’ (the
114th chapter), whereas Thedor Nöldeke and the traditional Islamic
account put it as the second to last chapter (the 113th chapter). Nöldeke
puts chapter 5, Al-Ma’ida (one of the longer sūras (which contains 120
verses)), as the last chapter, whereas the traditional Islamic account puts
chapter 110 (which only contains 3 verses) last. All four chronologies are in
agreement with respect to the lateness of chapter 9 relative to the other
chapters—it was at least the second to last chapter to be ‘revealed’.
But it's not even clear that such specific chronologies of the Qur’ān can be plausibly reconstructed. Gabriel Reynolds, one of the leading scholars of early Islam, has published a French article entitled "Le problème de la chronologie du Coran" in Arabica criticizing the very method that scholars use to arrive at these chronologies. These chronologies are arrived at by scholars essentially taking the asbab al-nuzul or "circumstances of revelation" that our late Islamic sources relate at face value. But, Reynolds argues, these late stories from which scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, infer a chronology seem to be invented, or at the very least heavily embellished, interpretive glosses of the earlier Qur’ān, and thus cannot serve as firm guides for constructing elaborate chronologies. On Reynold's view, many orientalists have adopted this optimistic attitude vis-a-vis the chronology of the Qur’ān out of sheer convenience. A tidy chronology is, after all, very useful for the historian of Early Islam, and makes him feel like his feet are planted in firm ground. But, according to Reynolds, the ground is not so firm: the Sira literature is unreliable, and many of the stories are haggadic expansions of the Qur’ānic corpus. And Reynolds is not the first to make this point. Fr. Henri Lammens (1862 - 1937) was the first orientalist to argue that much of the traditional Sira is haggadic-like commentary on the Qur’ān. The twentieth-century orientalist Regis Blachere (1900 - 1973), influenced by Lammens, would go on to make the following comment on the use of the Sira for reconstructing Qur’ānic chronologies: "On est dans un cercle vicieux. On part du Coran pour établir une ‘vie’ du Prophète et on utilise à son tour celle-ci pour définir la chronologie du Coran."[12] I'm not sure about the charge of vicious circularity, but it does seem like a lot of the inferences that are used to establish some of the Qur'anic chronology are weak.
But it's not even clear that such specific chronologies of the Qur’ān can be plausibly reconstructed. Gabriel Reynolds, one of the leading scholars of early Islam, has published a French article entitled "Le problème de la chronologie du Coran" in Arabica criticizing the very method that scholars use to arrive at these chronologies. These chronologies are arrived at by scholars essentially taking the asbab al-nuzul or "circumstances of revelation" that our late Islamic sources relate at face value. But, Reynolds argues, these late stories from which scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, infer a chronology seem to be invented, or at the very least heavily embellished, interpretive glosses of the earlier Qur’ān, and thus cannot serve as firm guides for constructing elaborate chronologies. On Reynold's view, many orientalists have adopted this optimistic attitude vis-a-vis the chronology of the Qur’ān out of sheer convenience. A tidy chronology is, after all, very useful for the historian of Early Islam, and makes him feel like his feet are planted in firm ground. But, according to Reynolds, the ground is not so firm: the Sira literature is unreliable, and many of the stories are haggadic expansions of the Qur’ānic corpus. And Reynolds is not the first to make this point. Fr. Henri Lammens (1862 - 1937) was the first orientalist to argue that much of the traditional Sira is haggadic-like commentary on the Qur’ān. The twentieth-century orientalist Regis Blachere (1900 - 1973), influenced by Lammens, would go on to make the following comment on the use of the Sira for reconstructing Qur’ānic chronologies: "On est dans un cercle vicieux. On part du Coran pour établir une ‘vie’ du Prophète et on utilise à son tour celle-ci pour définir la chronologie du Coran."[12] I'm not sure about the charge of vicious circularity, but it does seem like a lot of the inferences that are used to establish some of the Qur'anic chronology are weak.
[1] Gerhard
Bowering, “Chronology and the Quran” in Encylopedia of the Quran: Volume 1, ed.
Jane D. McAuliffe (Leiden:Brill, 2001), 322.
[3] The
numbers in the chart are the chapter numbers as found in the ʻUthmānic
recension. The shaded part represents
the Meccan Suras, and the unshaded part, the Medinan Suras.
[5]
Richard Bell, An Introduction to the Quran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1953), 100, 108, 113.
[6]
The four different chronologies are found in the following:
1. William Muir, The Life of Mahomet: With Introductory Chapters on
the Original Sources for the Biography of Mahomet, and on the Pre-Islamite
History of Arabia (4 vols. London: Society For Promoting Christian Knowledge,
1858–61);
2. Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorâns (Göttingen: Dieterich,
1860);
3. Hubert Grimme, Mohammed (2 vols. Münster: Druck und Verlag der Aschendorffschen
Buchhandlung, 1892–5), vol. 1 = Das Leben, nach den Quellen, vol. 2 =
Einleitung in den Koran: System der koranischen Theologie;
4. Hartwig Hirschfeld, New Researches into the Composition and
Exegesis of the Qoran, Asiatic Monographs, 3 (London: Royal Asiatic Society,
1902).
[7] Emmanuelle
Stefanidis. “The Qur’an Made Linear: A Study of the Geschichte des Qorâns’ Chronological
Reordering.” The Journal of Quranic Studies (2008): 1.
[8] Bowering here cites the first
edition of Theodore Nöldeke’s Geschichte des Qorans (Gottingen:
Verlagder Dieterichschen Buchhandlung, 1860.)—i.e., The History of the Quran.
From what I have read, it seems that the importance of Nöldeke’s Geschichte
des Qorans in modern Quranic studies is analogous to the importance of
Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus in modern historical
Jesus studies. The first complete English translation of the near 700 page work
(the work expanded upon by his students) only came out in 2013.
[9]
This chronology is found in Richard Bell, The Qur’an. Translated with a
Critical Re-arrangement of the Suras (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1937). I have not yet looked into Bell’s unique and ‘radical’
chronology; but it does not seem to be widely accepted.
[10] Gerhard Bowering, “Recent Research on the
Construction of the Qur’an,” in The Quran in its Historical Context, ed.
Gabriel S. Reynolds (London: Routledge, 2008), 71-73.
