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KORAN (or, to use a more exact transliteration, Qur'an) is the sacred Scripture of the religion of Islam. It consists of material given out as revelation by Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam, during the years of his mission among his people in seventh-century Arabia, and gathered together for publication by his followers not long after his death.

Mohammed (properly Muhammad) was the child of humble and poor though honourable citizens of Mecca, and lived most of his life in that pagan city which was ruled by the merchant aristocracy of the Koreish tribe. The date of his birth is not known. It seems that his father died before Mohammed was born and his weakly other not long thereafter, so that he was brought up by an uncle.

The latter's son Ali became one of the Prophet's earliest converts, the husband of Mohammed's daughter Fatima, and a prominent figure in early Islam, coming ultimately to be regarded as the first of the Shi'ite Imams as opposed to the Caliphs of orthodox Sunnite Islam.

In his youth Mohammed seems to have worked, at least for a time, as a herdsman, and he may have gone as an attendant on some of his uncle's caravan journeys with merchandise to the market towns in the northwest of Arabia. Most of the stories that have come down to us about his early years, however, belong to the realm of legend, not to that of fact.

Mecca's wealth came from its caravans, which moved annually to the north and to the south along the great Spice Road that had been travelled from antiquity. But Mecca possessed also a famous shrine of the old Arabian Mother Goddess, which made it a centre of pilgrimage where worshippers congregated annually from all parts of the country. Its shrine, the Kaaba, was said to contain idols reverenced by all the various tribes of Arabia. It was in the midst of this

merchant activity and pagan idolatry that the future Prophet grew up.

In his early manhood Mohammed was recommended to a wealthy widow among the Koreish (Quraish, to be precise) as a trusty man to direct her interests in the caravans to the north, and his success in this enterprise led to her meeting him and marrying him. This widow, Khadija, many years the Prophet's senior, was the mother of all his children save the son, Ibrahim, whom he had by the Coptic slave-girl Miriam. It was only after Khadija's death that Mohammed began to expand his harem. All his sons died in childhood, but daughters survived him.

Apparently Mohammed had been religiously inclined from youth. There is no reason to doubt his interest in the various seekers for monotheism in his contemporary Arab world, the men whom later tradition calls the Hanif. Nor is there any question that he was greatly impressed by what he saw, within and without Mecca, of the religion of the Jews and Christians, the People of the Book.

Somewhere around his fortieth year he went through a crisis of religious experience. From the vague references to it in the Koran and the confused accounts we have in tradition we can gain no clear idea of the nature of this experience save that it included a vision of, or from, his Lord. From it, however, he emerged with a tremendous conviction of the truth of the monotheism being preached all around him, and of his own call to preach to his people what he considered to be the essential message of the Scripture of these monotheistic People of the Book. From then on till his death, Mohammed's life was dedicated to the fulfilment of this mission.

At first the Meccans were only mildly amused by his preaching. His early pronouncements in rhymed prose were so like those of their own soothsayers that they called him a soothsayer, a crazed poet, one ensorcelled or jinn-possessed. His early converts were from his own domestic drek and friends, and then from certain of the poorer elements in the city. Mohammed seems to have had

great hopes that the Jews and Christians would recognize him and his claim to be in the prophetic succession. As his following grew and the Meccan leaders became more conscious of the threat to their position involved in his attacks on the idolatrous worship at their sanctuary and his championship of the underprivileged, they took steps to silence him. Pious legend later exaggerated greatly this "persecution" of the Prophet and his followers, but there undoubtedly was some persecution, as a consequence of which he urged certain of his followers to emigrate and seek refuge with the Christian ruler of Abyssinia, where they were kindly received.

Rumour that Mohammed had weakened and made a compromise with the Meccan leaders, brought many of these emigrants back home. The Prophet was conscious, however, that his position in Mecca was becoming impossible, and he seems to have made unsuccessful attempts to find a more promising locale for his mission at Ta'if and other places. Some citizens of Yathrib, a place on the Spice Road some miles north of Mecca, who had come to the city for the annual pilgrimage ceremonies at the Kaaba, took notice of him, and on their return home suggested to various leaders there that Mohammed might be the solution for their local problem. Yathrib was a city with a large and important Jewish population, where the people were fairly well acquainted with the kind of Biblical doctrine Mohammed was preaching. They were, however, plagued by a long-standing community conflict between their two main Arab groups, a conflict which had reached an impasse. It is clear that the visitors from Yathrib must have discerned the political sagacity of the Prophet, a sagacity which showed up remarkably in years, and at the next pilgrimage season a group from Yathrib extended to him an invitation to come and make their city the centre of his mission. As the opposition in Mecca became sharper, Mohammed in 622 made his famous "Flight," of Hegira (more

accurately hijra), from Mecca to Yathrib, which thus became "the Prophet's city" (Madinat an-Nabi), familiar to us as Medina.

In Medina there were from then on three main parties: the Ansar, or helpers, who had invited the Prophet and pledged them-selves to stand by him; the Arabs who had to accept his position as leader there but more or less resented it, and whom he calls the Munafiqun, or hypocrites; and the People of the Book, who in this city were mainly Jews. Numbers of his followers now emigrated from Mecca to join him in Medina, and these emigrants (Muhajirin) took their place alongside the Ansar.

From now on, Mohammed's mission reflects his growing concern with elaborating his religion and developing his community, and with maintaining his claims against those-among both the pagans and the People of the Book-who rejected his prophetic pretensions. To provide for his impoverished followers, and also to weaken his Meccan enemies, he organized from Medina raids on their caravans. This led to the famous battle of Badr in 624 (or 2 AH.; A.H.-Anno Hegirae), which he won; the battle of Uhud in 3 A.H., which he lost; the battle of the Ditch in 5 A.H., when the Meccans vainly attempted to besiege Medina; the Truce of Hudaibiyya in 6 A.H.3 and the battle of Hunain in 8 A.H.

At Hudoibiyya he had secured a truce with the Meccans, but it quickly became apparent to Mohammed that he must be master of Mecca. In the first place his alliances with various surrounding Arab tribes, and even his position in Medina, were insecure so long as the Koreish held that key city. That was the political factor. Secondly, his failure to win acceptance by the Jews and Christians had led him to out manoeuvre their position by claiming to be the restorer of the religion of Abraham from which both Judaism and Christianity had sprung. Centuries earlier than his time the idea had spread in Arabia that the Arabs were descended from Ishmael. Mohammed now therefore claimed Abraham as a Hanif, and linked

the Abraham and Ishmael story with the Kaaba at Mecca, which made it religiously necessary for him to be master of that city. A technical breach of the treaty was the pretext for attack, and in 8 A.H. Mecca had to submit.

Once he was master of Mecca the Prophet's major concern was legislation for his growing community. There were still expeditions to be organized and sent, there was still controversy with his opponents, but he was more and more occupied with problems of organizing the cult, regulating prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, issuing rules for guidance on questions of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and similar matters of importance for a community which looked to him for instruction. He continued to live in Medina, where he finally succeeded in crushing and then expelling the Jews, and where he received delegations from the Arab tribes now coming in to acknowledge the undoubted master of Arabia. The chieftains in the north, however, many of whom were Christianized and under Byzantine influence, remained obdurate. Mohammed was busy with plans for subduing them when he sickened and died in the house of his girl-wife Ayesha (A'ishah) in 10 A.H.=632 A.D.

In Mohammed's preaching his early utterances were apparently hardly to be distinguished from those of the local Arabian sooth-sayers. They were delivered in a rhythmical, rhymed prose, in short and at times obscure sentences, with a fondness for strange words. What distinguished them was their subject matter, which was concerned with the power and wonder of God in His creation, the wickedness and perversity of man, and the imminence of the dreadful Day of Doom. As his mission progresses the ethical content of the Prophet's message increases; but though he knows about and is interested in the religion of the People of the Book, he knows but little of their Scripture, and is mostly impressed by the stories of past peoples who rejected the messengers sent to them and on whom fell awful disaster

His acquaintance with the content of Scripture increased gradually, so that material therefrom comes to be woven more and more into his discourses, though he cannot distinguish genuine Scriptural material from that of Midrash and apocryphal legend, and he feels able to claim that he is setting forth in plain Arabic the essential message of the older religions. This is why the Western reader meets in the Koran so many familiar figures - Adam and Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph and Job, Moses and Aaron, David and Solomon, Jesus and John the Baptist-and finds so much there about familiar religious concepts, about God and man, about angels and demons, about sin and salvation, about Paradise and Hell.

Mohammed called his messages Qur'an, which is an adaptation of the Syriac word for a Scripture lesson. Sura, as he uses it, means practically the same thing. In his later years he was engaged in preparing much of this material to be used as a Book (Kitab) which would be for his community what the old Testament (which he called the Torah) was for the Jews, and the New Testament (which he called the Injil) was for the Christians. on the basis of Sura 7, where he refers to himself as an ummi Prophet, Moslem orthodoxy has insisted that Mohammed could neither read nor write. Western scholarship has always doubted this, there being too many little indications in the Koran itself that he could write, and in recent years both Bell of Edinburgh and Torrey of Yale have independently seen that by the application of the principles of "Higher Criticism" to the Koran it becomes quite evident that Mohammed had been gathering, recasting, and revising in written form the material he planned to issue as his Book. Early tradition says that the Prophet's public utterances were for the most part quite short, seldom more than five to ten verses, and it is remarkable how this "Higher Criticism" as may be seen in Bell's translation, shows that the material being worked up for the Book consisted for the most part of small pieces fitted together.

The Prophet, however, died before he had issued that Book. The early community does no seem at first to have felt the need of it, but as those who knew by heart much of what they had learned thereof from the Prophet began to die off; the need for collecting the material became urgent. Several individuals made personal collections in codex form, but it was the Caliph Uthman (23-35 A.H.) who made the official recension of the material that has come down to us as the Koran.

The form in which we have it - comprising one hundred and eleven Suras arranged with the longest first and the shortest last, preceded by an opening prayer and concluded by two little charms-is that given it by the Committee to whom Uthman committed the task of making a recension. Doubtless they used the Prophet's own collection of material as a basis, though arranging it as they saw best, and adding other material that came to them where it seemed appropriate. That this recension contains all the pronouncements of the Prophet may be doubted, for many passages are obviously but fragments whose context is now lost. That all it contains is genuinely from the Prophet is fairly certain, for very few passages are of doubtful authenticity. That it contains a good deal that the Prophet himself would not have included had he lived to issue his Book is also certain. We are thankful, however, that Uthman's Committee had such reverence for the Prophet's words that they omitted nothing they were sure came from him. Mohammed's own theory of Scripture was derived from legendary ideas common among the Jews and Christians of those days, which held that there was a heavenly archetype of Scripture from which portions were delivered to various Prophets by angelic messengers. So we find him referring to the "Mother of the Book,"to the sending down of revelation from Allah through the angel Gabriel, and to the idea that, since all Scripture is from the same heavenly original, his message will be found also in the Books of the jews and

the Christians. When Moslems later came to know the contents of the Old and New Testaments, and found that they by no means agreed with Mohammed's message, this was proof to them that the Jews and the Christians had altered their Scriptures. The Prophet seems also to have learned, perhaps from some Gnostic source, the idea that there had been a regular succession ofProphets from Adam onwards, and so was able to think of himself, as Mani had done at an earlier time, as the promised successor to Jesus.

Moslem orthodoxy has developed its own doctrine of Scripture, according to which each Prophet in turn had revealed to him by Gabriel from the heavenly archetype such material as was necessary for his situation in his generation. When a new Prophet was sent, his revelation abrogated that of his predecessor, though all that was still relevant and useful in that previous revelation was continued in the new revelation of God's mind and will and purpose for mankind.

When Mohammed was called to his mission, Gabriel, over some twenty and more years, revealed to him piecemeal what was to be his Book. As soon as any portion was revealed, Mohammed had his amanuenses write it down, and once a year Gabriel would come and collate with him this written material, comparing it with the heavenly original to see that it was quite correct. On the last year of the Prophet's life they so collated it twice. Thus when the Prophet died the whole of the material was written out in its final form, properly collated, and ready for publication. The first Caliph, Abu Bakr, made a first recension of this. Then the third Caliph, Uthman, made a second and final recension, and all that has been added to the text since then has been the pointing, vowelling, punctuation, and aids to reading, about which there are small differences among the Schools. This, naturally, is not a doctrine likely to find favour with critical scholarship, which can see clearly the growth of the material in Mohammed's mind,

knows something about the various recensions which preceded Uthmans, and is conscious of the textual problems presented by the Koran as we have it. What is of the greatest importance, however, is that this orthodox theory, taking the material as literally the words of Allah, of which Mohammed was only the mouthpiece, has developed a doctrine of I'jaz, i.e. of the miraculous nature of the Koran, a doctrine which has influenced profoundly every branch of Islamic learning.

One consequence of this doctrine is the strongly entrenched notion that the Koran cannot be translated. Since it was dictated to the Prophet in Arabic it follows that Arabic must be the heavenly language, so the Book must always be recited in that language, and must inevitably lose something when translated into any other tongue. There has thus been very strong opposition in orthodox circles to the appearance of translations. Translations have been made by Moslems into Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and other eastern languages, and in more recent times also into some western languages, but almost always accompanied by the Arabic text, and frequently not called translations but rather paraphrases of the meaning. Even to these there has been vigorous opposition. Serious objection was raised to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's official Turkish translation, and when an enlightened Rector of the Azhar in Egypt appointed a Committee to plan translations of the Koran into modern western languages he was met by a storm of bitter denunciation in the Arabic press. Translations by non-Moslems, it goes without saying, are anathema.

We hear of Latin translations being made as early as the twelfth century, and today translations are available in all the major European languages. The earliest English translation was made in 1649 by Alexander Ross from the French of André du Ryer, who had been French Consul in Alexandria and in 1647 produced his version at Paris. Ross's work, being an indifferent translation of an inadequate

version, had little to recommend it, yet it went through several editions and was reprinted in America in 1806:

Ross's attitude to his subject is evident from his "Needful Caveat" addressed by the translator to the Christian reader:

The most famous of all the English translations is that made by George Sale in 1734, which has gone through some thirty editions in England (the latest, edited by Sir Denison Ross, in 1929) and several in America, beginning with that printed by Thomas Wardle at Philadelphia in 1833. It was Sale's version which, with explanatory notes by Fred Myron Cooper, was issued in the Home Library at Boston in 1900. It was translated into German by Theodor Arnold (Lemgo, 1746), into Russian by Kolmakov (St.

Petersburg, 1792), and into Bulgarian by Litza (Philippopolis, 1902). Sale was largely dependent on the Latin version of Ludovico Marrucci (Patavii, 1698), and prefaced his translation by a "Preliminary Discourse" which still repays reading, and which, indeed, has been reprinted as a separate work, and translated into Dutch (Amsterdam, 1742), French (Geneva, 1751; Algiers, 1846), Swedish (Stockholm, 1814), and Arabic (Cairo, 1891). Rodwell's translation, so well known because of its issue in Every-man s Library, was first published in 1861. A new translation was made by E. H. Palmer in 1880 for Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East, and in 1928 this was reissued in the World's Classics. In some ways Palmer preserves better than his predecessors the flavour and the crudeness of the Arabic original, but his work was done in great haste and is disfigured by numerous oversights and omissions.

There have been many translations into English by Indian Moslems, notably by Abdul Hakim Khan (Patiala, 1905), Mirza Abu'l-Fazl (Allahabad, 1911), Muhammad Ali (Lahore, 1916), Ghulam Sarwar (Singapore, 1930), Yusuf Ali (Lohore, 1934), and by the English convert to Islam, Marmaduke Pickthall (London, 1930). This latter, unfortunately, has been reprinted in a cheap edition in this country and widely circulated. It, like the Indian translations, is a tendentious propaganda work which should be avoided. More recently have appeared The Qur'an Interpreted, (2 vols. London, 1955), by A. J. Arberry, and The Koran, a New Translation by N.J. Dawood (London, 1956) in the Penguin Classics. The most satisfactory translation in English, from the point of view of modern scholarship, is Richard Bell's The Qur'an, Translated with a Critical Rearrangement of the Surahs (2 vols., Eainburgh, 1937-39). For readers of French there is the even more up-to-date work of Régis Blachère, Le Coran, Traduction Nouvelle (2 vols., Paris, 1949-50).

Since the initiation of modern critical study of the Koran by

Gustav Weil's Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den Koran (Bielefeld, 1844; 2nd ed., 1872), and Theodor Nöldeke epoch making Geschichte des Qorans (Göttingen, 1860), it has been customary to recognize four periods in the composition of the Koran, and to mark out passages which belong to the Early Meccan, Middle Meccan, Late Meccan, and Medinan periods. Nöldeke gave in detail the criteria by which it is possible to distinguish material coming from each of these periods, and gave a list of the Suras to be assigned to each. This chronological arrangement has been followed for the most part by Rodwell in his translation.

The difficulty, however, is that almost all the Suras as we have them are composite. The Moslem exegetes themselves were well aware that both Meccan and Medinan material was included in many Suras, and note this fact. Recent investigation has shown that we must advance beyond the position of Nöldeke and recognize that much that had been classified as Meccan is really Medinan, and that a good deal of the Meccan material was worked over by the Prophet during the Medinan period.

In presenting this selection of material from the Koran for The Heritage Press, it seemed appropriate to select passages illustrating Mohammed's teaching as it developed from the rhapsodic style of his pronouncements in the Early Meccan period, when he was primarily a preacher, through the Middle and Late Meccan periods, where the poetic fire gradually dies down, to the prosaic legislative material of the Medinan period. Objections can, of course, always be brought against any selection that may be made, but it is hoped that the selections here offered present a fair sampling of the material and give the reader an adequate understanding of the message of the Book. To this end it has been necessary in translating to make at times a compromise between what critical scholarship would regard as the correct meaning of a passage, and what Moslem orthodoxy takes the passage to mean. As the translator worked over the whole

of this material in detail with Dr. Bell in Edinburgh in the 1920s, it was inevitable that this work should be in many places influenced by that fine scholar's interpretation and renderings. As for English style, it has seemed wiser to sacrifice it in an attempt to convey some feeling of the Prophet's awkwardness of expression.

The notes to the translation have been reduced to the barest minimum, and are perhaps too few, for to readers unacquainted with the background of Oriental religions the bare rendering of a text into English is often quite inadequate. Words have been added to the original where necessary to make readable English sentences. Explanatory additions within the text are marked off by square brackets: [ ]. Biblical names are given in their familiar forms; and the eighteenth-century spellings of the better-known Arabic names are retained, despite their inaccuracy, in order not to dismay the casual reader. Other Arabic names are transliterated.

Most renderings of the Koran preserve the original verse form, which grew out of the rhythm of the Arabic language but becomes meaningless in translation. In this edition, for the sake of ease in reading, the verse form has been dropped; we have, however, retained the capital letter which marked the beginning of each verse.

Arabic, being an Oriental language, has a phonetic system very different from ours, and for that reason scholarly works use diacritical marks to indicate as accurately as possible the pronunciation of the words. It is very important, for example, to distinguish between long and short vowels, and so we find a, i, u, used beside a, i, u. Moreover Arabic has more consonants than we have in our language, and so ' and ' are used to represent the Hamza and the 'Ain, while a distinction is kept between s and s, z and z, t and t, d and d, h and h. These diacritical marks have been omitted here, not as a slighting of scholarship, but to ease matters in a work intended for the general reader.

ARTHUR JEFFERY