Have you ever stopped to think about how the
Qur 'an is actually arranged? Is it a story from
beginning to end? Or something very different?
Christian scholar John Gilchrist, in his book
Jam al -Qur 'an, draws heavily on respected Islamic
sources to explain this. One of his key references
is Jalal al -Din al -Suyuti's work Al -Itqan
Fi Ulum al -Qur 'an. There, Muslim scholars themselves
acknowledge that the surahs of the Qur 'an were
not compiled in the order in which they were
revealed. According to these Islamic reports,
Muhammad and his companions did not keep a detailed
chronological record of when each passage came
down. Instead, as individual passages were gradually
collected into surahs, no consistent thought
was given to maintaining a clear theme or a strict
order of revelation. Suyuti records that as time
went on, Muhammad would simply say things like,
put this passage in the surah where so -and -so
is mentioned, or put it in such -and -such a
place, as reported in Al -Itqan Fi Ulum Al -Qur
'an, page 141. This means that many surahs, especially
the longer ones, are composite texts, made up
of different passages from different times and
contexts that are not necessarily linked in a
clear sequence. Now, why does this matter so
much? because we have already seen that Islam
uses the doctrine of abrogation. Later verses
can cancel earlier ones, but if you cannot easily
tell which verse came first and which came later,
how can you know which command is binding today?
Think about verses that call for patience and
peaceful coexistence alongside verses that command
fighting and harsh measures. Which should a Muslim
follow? If you need to know which verse abrogates
which, Then you must know the chronological order
of revelation. But the Quran in its current arrangement
does not give you that order. The chapters are
mostly arranged by length, not by time. So where
do Muslims turn for help? You might think they
could use the hadith collections. But even here
there is a problem. The hadith are mostly grouped
by topic, not by date. The well -known Western
scholar William Montgomery Watt points this out
clearly. He says that hadith reports do not normally
give any indication of chronology, and that there
is no such thing as a fully chronological hadith
collection. In his analysis, hadith cannot be
used to arrange events or sayings in a reliable
time order. If the Quran is not arranged chronologically,
and the hadith do not reliably supply that timeline,
then how can anyone systematically figure out
which verses abrogate others? Without a clear
chronology, you cannot build a consistent theology
from the Qur 'an alone. You are left with commands
that pull in different directions, but no internal
roadmap telling you which one has the final word.
This is why the biography of Muhammad, known
as the Sirat, becomes so crucial for Islamic
scholarship. Works like Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasulallah,
as edited by Ibn Hisham and expanded by Al -Tabari,
are used to reconstruct the life of Muhammad
in sequence. Only by using these biographies
can scholars attempt to place Quranic passages
into a rough historical timeline. So here is
the key question. If Islam claims to be a religion
based on a clear final revelation, why does it
depend so heavily on later biographical reconstructions
to make sense of which verses apply and which
do not? And if the Quran and Hadith by themselves
do not give a usable chronology, does that not
show that the system is far more dependent on
human interpretation and later historical work
than many Muslims assume?