The Chronology of the Qur’ān: A Primer

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’ānic 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.

[2] Ibid. 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.

[4] The ordering is found in his famous Geschichte des Qorâns (1860).

[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.

[11] Richard Bell, Montgomery Watt, Bell’s introduction to the Qurʼān (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), 205-213.

[12] Regis Blachere, as quoted in G.S. Reynold’s “Le problème de la chronologie du Coran,” Arabica 58 (2011): 477-502.