Have you ever noticed that many Muslims today
not only believe the words of the Quran are inspired,
but also believe that the very order of the chapters
is divinely arranged? That raises an important
question. Did the earliest Muslims always see
the order of the surahs that way? One of the
most revealing reports on this comes from Sahih
al -Bukhari. In Sahih al -Bukhari, Book of Funeral
Rites, hadith narrated by Yusuf ibn Maq from
Aisha, the mother of the believers, We are given
a fascinating conversation. A man from Iraq came
to Aisha and first asked her what kind of burial
shroud was best. She responded by saying, May
Allah be merciful to you. What does it really
matter? Then he asked her to show him her personal
copy of the Quran. When she asked why, he said
that he wanted to arrange and compile the Quran
according to her copy because people were reciting
the surahs in what he called an improper order.
Now listen carefully to how Aisha answered. She
replied, What does it matter which part of it
you read first? She then explained that the first
material revealed from the Quran was a surah
from the section known as Al -Mufasol, and that
this early surah focused on paradise and the
fire. In other words, the earliest revelation
emphasized ultimate realities, heaven and hell,
rather than detailed laws. Aisha goes on to say,
that only after people had embraced Islam did
the verses dealing with lawful and unlawful things,
the legal commands and prohibitions, begin to
be revealed. Then she gives a very insightful
example. She says that if the very first revelation
had been a command such as, Do not drink alcoholic
drinks, people would have said, We will never
give up drinking. And if the first verses had
been, Do not commit illegal sexual intercourse,
they would have said, We will never give up that
practice. She adds that when she herself was
a young girl of playing age, a verse was revealed
in Mecca that said, Nay, but the hour is their
appointed time, and the hour will be more grievous
and more bitter. This is a reference to an early
Meccan passage warning about the Day of Judgment.
Then she notes that Surat al -Baqarah, meaning
the cow, and Surat an -Nisa, meaning the women,
were revealed later on. after she was already
living with the prophet in Medina. These two
surahs contain many legal rulings and regulations.
At the end of this report, Aisha takes out her
copy of the Qur 'an and dictates the verses of
the surahs to the man in what she considered
to be their proper order, meaning the order of
revelation, not necessarily the order found in
the standard codex. This entire narration appears
in Sahih al -Bukhari. commonly cited as Sahih
al -Bukhari, Volume 6, Book 60, often under Hadith
number 201, or in that range depending on the
edition. So what does this tell us? First, Aisha
clearly thought that knowing which material came
first in time was important for understanding
how people responded to revelation. Second, she
did not consider the specific sequence in which
surahs are recited or arranged in a codex to
be crucial for piety. She even said, What does
it matter which part you read first? For her,
the chronological unfolding of content, from
warnings about the hereafter to later legal rulings,
mattered more than the fixed order of chapters
in a bound volume. That raises a key question
for us. If one of Muhammad's own wives and a
major transmitter of hadith did not treat the
current surah order as sacred or essential, On
what basis do many modern Muslims insist that
the exact arrangement in today's Mushaf is divinely
set and unchangeable? And if Aisha herself appealed
to the order of revelation rather than the printed
order, does this not reinforce the point that
understanding the Quran requires attention to
history and chronology, not just to the present
layout of the text?