ABSTRACT

Muhammad started his mission when he was forty years old and continued preaching until his death at the age of sixty-three. The inspirations (revelations) which formed Muhammad’s preaching discourse over the twenty-three-year period constitute the Qur’an, which means ‘the recital’ or the proclamation. Muhammad’s additional expositions of some aspects of the Qur’anic discourse for various groups, which were collected separately much later under the title of ‘Hadeeth’, are not treated here. The Qur’an is essentially made up of units arranged in chapters (surahs). A unit may be composed of several sentences. A sentence may be a simple or a very complex one. Some chapters are very short, composed of a single unit; others are very long, made up of many units strung or interwoven together. There are many chapters of intermediate length.