ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE QURAN pdf download

Encyclopedia of the Quran, vol. 1 – General Editor  Jane Dammen McAuliffe

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE QURAN

From the Book

For those with little previous exposure to the Qur’an, it may be helpful simply to describe this book. In the library of world scriptures, the Qur’an stands as one of the shorter entries.

When a textual tradition like the Buddhist canon of Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese scriptures is compared to the Qur’an, the size differences are significant.

Even the Hebrew Bible or the Chris- tian canon of Old and New Testaments comprise much larger collections.

In contrast, the Qur’an is a fairly compact text of 114 sections. These sections or chapters, virtually all of which begin with the introductory formula “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” are called suras.

The suras, in turn, are composed of verses or, in Arabic, ayat (sing. aya). Individual suras can contain just a few verses or a few hundred.

This variation in length is noteworthy because the Qur’an uses length as an organizing principle.

The canonical text is arranged by roughly descending order of sura length. In other words, the longer suras appear earlier in the text, the very shortest ones toward the end. The contents of the Qur’an are varied and not easily categorized.

Nor are they ordered in a manner that systematic modern minds might prefer.

You will not, for example, find separate suras devoted to theological pronouncements, to rules for social and personal behavior, to prayers and liturgical specifications, to narratives about past prophets, to warnings about the last judgment and descriptions of heaven and hell, or too polemical challenges directed toward