REL 137g 1st Edition Lecture 4 Current Lecture Muhammed 570 birth 610 call to prophet hood 622 time in Mecca 632 return to Medina and death Sine qua non That without with a thing cannot be For prophet hood revelation wahyu Qur an Koran Recitation An oral text Consumed primarily through the ear and not the eye For the predominantly illiterate society Mushaf Written record of the recitation Turns the Koran into a book now terms can be used interchangeably Divided into chapters Surahs 114 Revealed to Muhammed in different places Meccan 80 Shorter and more poetic Medinese 32 More technical i e about law marriage family rules etc Disputed unknown 12 Not of equal length Divided into verses Ayah 6 235 ayahs in the Koran 23 14 Chapter 23 verse 14 Koran is primarily rhymed prose Not exactly poetry Divided into 30 parts 1 30 recited at Ramadan by a leader or an Imam Extremely moving when heard aloud Because the form particularly is regarded as Muhammed s miracle Very poetic makes the content beautiful ismah Divine protection from error How Muhammed was able to preserve the text and a proper understanding of that text Verbatim word of God Actually spoken to Gabriel and then to Muhammed As Arabs spread out and outsiders come in the original language becomes point of contention Different dialects affect the language and create different meanings What is the real word of God This conflict leads to the rise of the impetus to write the Koran down Early recordings had no vowels Still fundamentally dependant on oral memory Uthman Third temporal successor to the prophet a kahlif Fixes a codex of the Koran orders that all other copies to be burned The Uthmanic Codex Chapters are not chronologically arranged Longest to shortest Believed to be absolutely authoritative and accurate Therefore distinctly different from the Hadith Sunna Muhammed s supplemental teachings tacit approvals Recorded in individual reports known as Hadith Because of the mode of transmission tawature diffuse congruence Vast numbers of people saying the same thing Therefore it cannot be false Also in contrast to Ahadi not tawature falsifiable Hadith A chain of people through which information passes isnad Single initial report from one person passed around Text is matn Meant to be verbatim transmission but that does not mean it s correct Still falsifiable
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