ABSTRACT
According to traditional Islamic belief, the Quran records the divine revelations that were communicated to the prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina prior to his death in 632 CE. This chapter provides a basic introduction to the form and content of the Quranic corpus and to some of the scholarly debates surrounding it. It focuses on the stock of the text's principal literary and structural characteristics, mostly without reliance on substantial historical commitments. The chapter considers two issues that loom large in recent scholarship: the Quran's putative date of closure and the question of where one should locate its milieu of emergence. The Quranic corpus is a collection of 114 textual units commonly understood to be composed in desinentially inflected Arabic. These units, the so-called surahs, are of extremely discrepant length. They are subdivided into a total of 6,200 verses, traditionally called ayat.
