Unit 17 · Recitation as Art, and Capstone

The Qur’an says a striking thing about itself. In Surah 2 (Al-Baqarah, The Cow), ayah 23, it addresses people who doubt that the book comes from God and tells them to produce one surah like it, calling on any helpers they wish. Surah 17 (Al-Isra, The Night Journey), ayah 88, widens the dare: even if all humans and jinn (unseen beings the Qur’an says God created from fire) joined together, they could not produce the like of this Qur’an. Similar passages appear in 10:38, 11:13 and 52:33–34. Scholars call these the challenge verses, in Arabic tahaddi.

Muslims read these verses as more than a boast. They became the seed of a doctrine called i'jaz, from an Arabic root meaning to make someone unable. The idea is that the Qur’an cannot be imitated, and that its inimitability is itself a sign that it comes from God. In the traditional account, the Prophet’s Meccan opponents were master poets, and the fact that none of them met the challenge is treated as evidence. Muslims hold this as a matter of faith; historians describe it as a claim the text makes and a tradition built around it.

Notice what the challenge asks for and what it does not. It does not say the book is the longest or the oldest. It asks for something "like it," which leaves open the question of what the likeness would be. Is it the sound? The meaning? The knowledge in it? The arrangement of words? For a thousand years Muslim scholars have argued about exactly this, and their answers are the subject of the next lesson. For now the key point is that the Qur’an itself invites a comparison, and that invitation shaped how Muslims listen to it and look at it.

By the 900s the doctrine of i’jaz had a shelf of books devoted to it. Al-Baqillani (d. 1013), a theologian in Baghdad, wrote a work called I’jaz al-Qur’an. He compared the Qur’an with the most admired Arabic poems and argued that the book’s language stood apart from every human style. Around the same time, al-Rummani and al-Khattabi wrote short treatises listing the features of Qur’anic speech. Their method was literary: they read the Qur’an the way a critic reads a poem, and then argued that no poet could have written it.

The most influential answer came from ’Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. c. 1078), a grammarian from Gorgan in Persia. In his book Dala’il al-I’jaz (The Proofs of Inimitability) he argued that the miracle lies in nazm, the arrangement of the words. Single words, he said, are shared by everyone; what no one could match is the way the Qur’an’s words fit together so that each carries exactly the meaning the sentence needs. Later rhetoric in Arabic grew out of his ideas, and modern literary readers of the Qur’an still cite him.

Not every scholar agreed. Some early theologians of the Mu'tazila school, such as al-Nazzam (d. c. 845), proposed a different theory called sarfa, "turning away." On this view, humans could in principle write something like the Qur’an, but God turned their minds away from doing so. Most later scholars rejected sarfa, because it seemed to locate the miracle outside the text. Others pointed to the Qur’an’s predictions, or to its knowledge of past prophets that an unlettered man in Mecca could not have had. These are Muslim arguments; a public-school class describes them and compares them rather than deciding among them.

The word Qur'an comes from the Arabic root q-r-’, to recite or read aloud. The first word Muslims believe was revealed, in Surah 96 (Al-’Alaq, The Clot), is from that same root: "Read," or "Recite." For its first twenty years the Qur’an existed mainly as sound. Muslims memorized it and recited it in prayer. Written notes on bone, leather and palm stalks were aids to memory, not a book. Tradition says the complete written copy, the mushaf, was gathered after the Prophet’s death, and that the sound came first.

Arabic of the 600s was a culture of the ear. Tribes competed through poets, and audiences memorized long odes. The Qur’an entered that world, and its early listeners judged it, tradition says, by how it sounded. Its sentences often end in rhyme or near-rhyme, a pattern called saj', and its short Meccan surahs move in quick, pulsing lines. Later Muslim scholars pointed to this sound as part of i’jaz. Modern scholars of Arabic literature, Muslim and not, describe the same features without deciding what they prove.

This is why, in Muslim practice, a person who has never studied Arabic can still be moved by the Qur’an. A Bosnian grandmother, a Nigerian schoolboy and an Indonesian shopkeeper all hear the same Arabic sounds in prayer. Each reads the meaning in a different language. Muslims say that a translation is not the Qur’an but an explanation of it, because the sound of the Arabic belongs to the revelation. For a student in a public school this is a fact about how the book is used. It explains why the rest of this chapter is about sound and sight as much as about words.

Surah 73 (Al-Muzzammil, The Enshrouded One), ayah 4, tells the Prophet to recite the Qur’an slowly and in measure. From that command, Muslims developed tajwid, a word meaning to make good or beautiful. Tajwid is not a melody. It is a set of rules for pronouncing each letter from its correct point in the mouth and throat, for how long a vowel is stretched, and for where a reciter may pause. A reciter who sings beautifully but breaks these rules is judged to have recited badly.

The rules have names. Madd governs the lengthening of vowels: some are held for two counts, some for four or five, some for six. Ghunnah is a nasal hum on certain letters, held for about two counts. Qalqalah is a slight bounce given to five letters when they close a syllable. Idgham merges one letter into the next. A student learns these not from a chart but from a teacher, repeating an ayah until the teacher approves and gives an ijazah, a certificate that links the student in a chain of teachers reaching back, Muslims say, to the Prophet.

Because tajwid was passed on by ear, the written rules came later than the practice. Scholars in Baghdad and elsewhere wrote them down in the 900s and after; Ibn al-Jazari (d. 1429) composed a short poem of rules that students still memorize. Tajwid explains something the visitor at the beginning of this chapter noticed: the reciter held a vowel for exactly as long as the rule allowed and no longer. In Muslim understanding, beauty in recitation comes from obeying the rule precisely, not from escaping it.

Listen to a recording from Cairo and one from Morocco and you will hear small differences: a vowel that is long in one and short in the other, a word pronounced with a slight variation. These are the qira'at, the accepted readings. Muslim tradition holds that the Prophet recited the Qur’an in more than one way and that his companions carried these ways to the cities they settled. In Baghdad in the early 900s the scholar Ibn Mujahid (d. 936) selected seven readings as authoritative, each named after a master reciter of the 700s. Later scholars accepted three more, making ten.

Each reading is transmitted through two named students of its master, so a full name looks like "Hafs from ’Asim" or "Warsh from Nafi’." The reading of Hafs from ’Asim of Kufa became the basis of the Cairo edition printed in 1924. It is the one heard across most of the Muslim world today. The reading of Warsh from Nafi’ of Medina is common in North and West Africa. The differences are real but limited: pronunciation, some vowels, a few word endings. Muslim scholars say the readings all go back to the Prophet. Historians study them as evidence of how the text was transmitted by voice.

Why does this matter for an art chapter? Because a reciter chooses a reading the way a musician chooses an instrument. Some master reciters are famous for performing the same passage in several readings in one sitting, and listeners who know the readings hear the shift. It also matters for study. When two printed Qur’ans seem to disagree on a word, the answer is often that they follow different readings. A careful student names the reading, just as a careful student names the translation.

Two words describe how the Qur’an is performed. Murattal is measured recitation: steady, clear, at a reading pace, the style used in daily prayer and in teaching. Mujawwad is slow, melodic and ornamented, the style of the concert hall and the radio broadcast, in which a reciter may repeat an ayah several times, exploring it in different melodic modes. Both follow tajwid. The difference is in pace and ornament, not in rules. A third term, hadr, names quick recitation used for review.

Twentieth-century Egypt produced the reciters whose voices define these styles for most Muslims. Mohamed Siddiq El-Minshawi (1920–1969) was known for a grave, sorrowful tone. Mahmoud Khalil al-Husary (1917–1980) was chosen to record the complete Qur’an in murattal, a recording used for teaching around the world. Abdul Basit Abdus-Samad (1927–1988) had a voice of unusual range and was invited to recite in mosques across the Muslim world; his mujawwad recordings remain among the most played. Mustafa Ismail (1905–1978) was admired for daring melodic choices. Egyptian state radio, which began broadcasting recitation in the 1930s, carried their voices far beyond Cairo.

Mujawwad reciters draw on the maqam system, the melodic modes of Arabic music, with names such as Bayati, Rast, Hijaz and Saba. A reciter does not sing in the sense of following a written tune; he improvises within a mode, matching its mood to the meaning of the verse. Muslim scholars have long debated how much melody is proper. Most accept it within the bounds of tajwid; some warn against turning the Qur’an into entertainment. Music historians study these recitations as one of the great vocal traditions of the world, while noting that reciters themselves usually do not call it music.

A hafiz (feminine hafiza) is a person who has memorized the entire Qur’an, about 6,200 ayahs, and can recite any passage on request. Muslim tradition honors the hafiz because memory was the first way the book was preserved. Many children begin memorizing at five or six and finish by their early teens; others complete it as adults. Memorization is taught by repetition with a teacher, a page or a few lines a day, with constant review so that older passages do not fade.

In the twentieth century, states began to hold competitions. Malaysia’s international recitation competition in Kuala Lumpur dates from 1961 and is among the oldest. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Dubai (whose international award began in 1997) hold others, and competitors travel from dozens of countries. Judges score memory, tajwid, voice and the handling of pauses. A judge may stop a reciter mid-verse and ask for a passage from another part of the book. Prizes can be large, and winners become known at home. The 2011 documentary Koran by Heart followed three ten-year-olds at the Cairo competition, including a girl from the Maldives and a boy from Tajikistan who knew little Arabic beyond the text he had memorized.

The competitions raise a question that Muslims themselves discuss. Is recitation a performance to be scored, or an act of worship that should not be? Supporters say the events encourage children and preserve tajwid. Critics worry that prizes and cameras change the purpose. A student in a public school does not need to settle that debate; the point is to see how a religious community argues about its own art. Chicago’s Muslim communities hold local competitions in the same spirit, and many mosques in the area run memorization classes for children.

The oldest surviving Qur’an leaves are written on parchment, prepared animal skin, in a tall, slanting script that scholars call Hijazi, after the region of Mecca and Medina. The letters lean to the right, the lines are uneven, and there are few marks for short vowels. Two such leaves in the University of Birmingham library were radiocarbon-dated in 2015 to between about 568 and 645 CE with high probability. The dating is of the skin, not the ink. Scholars debate how soon after preparation the writing was done. Still, the leaves are among the earliest witnesses to the text.

By the 700s a new script took over: Kufic, named after the city of Kufa in Iraq, though it was used far more widely. Kufic is angular and horizontal. Its letters stretch along the line, its verticals are short, and its pages are often wider than they are tall. Scribes ruled the parchment carefully and placed a fixed number of lines on each page, so that a Kufic Qur’an looks as ordered as a building. Red dots marked vowels; gold rosettes marked the ends of verses. The text now had a visual rhythm to match its spoken one.

The most famous Kufic manuscript is the Blue Qur'an, made around the 800s or 900s, probably in North Africa. Its pages are dyed deep indigo and its Kufic letters are written in gold, fifteen lines to a page. Only scattered leaves survive, in museums from Tunis to New York. No one is sure who ordered it; some scholars link it to the Fatimid court, others to earlier rulers. What is certain is that by then the written Qur’an had become a work of art, made to be seen as well as read, and that its beauty was meant to honor the words rather than decorate them.

In Baghdad in the early 900s a vizier and calligrapher named Ibn Muqla (d. 940) worked out a system of proportion for Arabic letters. Every letter was measured against the diamond-shaped dot made by the pen’s tip and the height of the letter alif. With this system, rounded scripts could be as disciplined as Kufic. A generation later Ibn al-Bawwab (d. 1022) refined the method, and a Qur’an he copied in Baghdad in the year 1000 or 1001, now in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, is the earliest surviving complete Qur’an in the rounded Naskh script.

Naskh, whose name means "copying," is clear, even and quick to write. It became the everyday script of Qur’ans and remains the model for printed Arabic. Thuluth, meaning "one third," is larger and more sweeping, with tall verticals and deep curves, and it is used for headings and for inscriptions on buildings. Together with Muhaqqaq, Rayhan, Tawqi’ and Riqa’, these make up the Six Pens, the classical rounded scripts, which the calligrapher Yaqut al-Musta’simi (d. 1298) is credited with perfecting in Baghdad. Other regions kept their own hands: Maghribi in North Africa and Spain, with its rounded loops below the line, and Bihari in India.

The Ottoman Turks made calligraphy a court art. Sheikh Hamdullah (d. 1520) set the Ottoman style of Naskh, and Hafiz Osman (d. 1698) copied Qur’ans that later scribes imitated for centuries. A calligrapher trained for years under a master and, like a reciter, received an ijazah before signing work. The finest mushafs were also illuminated: the opening pages framed in gold and lapis blue, verse markers picked out in color, surah titles in gold on ornamented panels. Figures of people and animals never appear in a Qur’an; the art is the letter itself. In 2021 UNESCO placed Arabic calligraphy on its list of intangible cultural heritage.

Walk into almost any mosque and you will see writing where a church might have pictures. Bands of Thuluth run around the base of the dome; Kufic frames the doorway; a roundel over the prayer niche carries a single verse. The choice of verse is deliberate. The Throne Verse (2:255) is common because it speaks of God’s power and care. Surah 112 (Al-Ikhlas, Sincerity), which declares God’s oneness, appears on countless walls. The Light Verse (24:35) often surrounds a lamp or a window, since it compares God’s light to a lamp in a niche.

The oldest surviving example is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691 or 692 under the Umayyad caliph ’Abd al-Malik. A mosaic inscription about 240 meters long runs around the inner arcade. It includes Surah 112 and passages about Jesus (’Isa) such as 4:171. Historians note that these were addressed to the largely Christian city around it. The Taj Mahal in Agra, built in the 1630s and 1640s, carries whole surahs in black stone inlaid into white marble. They include Surah 36 (Ya Sin), often recited for the dead. The calligrapher Amanat Khan signed his work on the building. Each year a new kiswa, the black cloth covering the Kaaba in Mecca, is embroidered with verses in gold and silver thread.

Historians read these inscriptions as evidence. A verse chosen for a building tells what its patron wanted said and to whom, and the script tells the date and region. Art historians also note that Qur’anic writing on buildings is rarely placed where it can be read easily; a band under a dome is far above the eye. The writing works as presence as much as message. Muslims say the text sanctifies the space. A visitor to one of Chicago’s mosques can see the same tradition in newer form: Thuluth bands over the prayer hall, often made by calligraphers trained in Turkey, Egypt or Pakistan.

Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273), a scholar and Sufi teacher who lived in Konya in what is now Turkey, wrote a vast Persian poem called the Masnavi. It is made of stories, some funny, some strange. Nearly every one turns on a Qur’anic verse. Rumi quotes the Arabic, then unfolds it in Persian. A later Persian poet is often credited with calling the Masnavi "the Qur’an in the Persian tongue." Rumi himself, in the Sufi way, read the Qur’an as having layers. There is an outer meaning for everyone and inner meanings for those who search.

Hafez of Shiraz (d. c. 1390) took his pen name from the word hafiz; in his own verses he says he knew the Qur’an by heart. His ghazals, short lyric poems about wine, love and the beloved, are read by Muslims in at least two ways. Some hear them as songs about earthly love and pleasure. Others hear the wine as a symbol of God’s love, in the Sufi manner. Iranian families keep a volume of Hafez beside the Qur’an and open it for guidance, a practice called fal-e Hafez. The debate over how to read him mirrors the debate over how to read the Qur’an itself: literally, or for a hidden sense.

In 1819 the German poet Goethe published the West-östlicher Divan, a book of poems written in answer to Hafez, whom he had read in translation. Goethe also read the Qur’an in German and Latin versions. He copied out passages in his notebooks. Through Hafez and Goethe, Qur’anic ideas traveled into world literature. Later, translations of Rumi became bestsellers in the United States. A student reading Rumi in English today may not notice that a line is a verse of the Qur’an. Part of the work of this course is to learn to hear it.

The best-known film about the Qur’an’s origins is The Message, released in 1976 and directed by Moustapha Akkad, a Syrian-born filmmaker who worked in Hollywood. It tells the story of Muhammad’s mission from the first revelation to the return to Mecca. Following long Muslim custom, the Prophet is never shown or heard; the camera takes his point of view, and other characters speak to him. Akkad shot the film twice, once with an English-speaking cast and once with an Arabic one. Some Muslim authorities objected before release; today the film is widely shown in Muslim countries.

Documentaries have taken a different route, filming the Qur’an’s readers rather than its story. Koran by Heart (2011) followed children at the Cairo recitation competition. Other films have recorded calligraphers at work and reciters in performance. Novelists, too, have written about people who live with the book. Leila Aboulela, born in Sudan, writes in English about Muslim characters whose faith is part of ordinary life; her novel The Translator (1999) is one example. Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) follows a Syrian American girl growing up in Indiana, with Qur’anic verses woven into her story.

These works matter for a student of the Qur’an because they show reception: how the text lives in the minds of readers. They also show limits. A film cannot recite for you; a novel cannot show calligraphy. And both filmmakers and novelists must decide how to handle a text that many of their audience hold sacred. Some avoid quoting it, some quote it reverently, and a few use it critically. Reading how each artist made that choice is itself a way of studying the Qur’an’s place in the world.

This chapter has moved from sound to script to poetry and film. One idea runs through all of it. In Muslim practice, the Qur’an is not only read for information; it is heard, seen, memorized and inscribed. A hadith recorded by Abu Dawud has the Prophet tell his followers to beautify the Qur’an with their voices, and another, in al-Bukhari’s collection, praises the person who learns the Qur’an and teaches it. Sufi writers speak of sama', listening, as a discipline of the heart. Muslims describe these as ways of drawing near to the text; historians describe them as ways a community has kept a text alive for fourteen centuries.

A student can borrow the habit without borrowing the belief. Listening to a recording of Surah 1 in the Hafs reading, even without Arabic, teaches you where the pauses fall and which sounds repeat. Looking at a Kufic page teaches you how early readers divided verses and marked vowels. Comparing a Thuluth inscription with the printed text shows which verses a community chose to display. None of this replaces reading the words in translation. It adds context: the setting in which the words have been received.

This is also good practice for the capstone that follows. When you choose a verse to study, you will ask what it says, but also how it sounds in recitation, where it has been inscribed, and which poets or artists have taken it up. Those are all forms of evidence about how a text has been read. The habit of asking them transfers to any text you will meet: a poem, a speech, a law. Sound and beauty are not a distraction from meaning. In this tradition, Muslims would say, they are part of it.

Every project in this unit begins the same way: with a single ayah (verse) or a very short surah and a question about it. Short is a strength. Surah 103 (Al-’Asr, The Declining Day) has three ayat. Surah 112 (Al-Ikhlas, Sincerity) has four. A single ayah such as 2:256 or 49:13 can fill an essay. A student who picks all of Surah 2, with its 286 ayat, will only skim.

The question matters as much as the verse. A weak question asks for a fact: "What surah is 2:256 in?" A strong question asks what the words mean and how readers have taken them: "Does 2:256, ’There is no compulsion in religion,’ describe a rule for rulers, a fact about belief, or both, and how have commentators decided?" A strong question has more than one serious answer. That is what makes it a research question.

Choose a passage you can study fairly. The goal is to describe what the text says and how Muslims and scholars have read it, not to prove the Qur’an true or false. A good test is this: could a Muslim classmate and a non-Muslim classmate both read your finished essay and say it described the text and its readers accurately? If yes, the question is a good one for a public school.

Every English Qur’an is a translation, and Muslims widely hold that a translation is an interpretation of the meaning, not the Qur’an itself. That is why Pickthall called his 1930 book The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. For the capstone, you read your verse in at least two translations, and at least one must be public domain so you can quote it exactly. Pickthall (1930) is this course’s text. J. M. Rodwell (1861), E. H. Palmer (1880) and George Sale (1734) are older public-domain choices.

Put the two versions next to each other and mark every place they differ. Sometimes the difference is only old or new English: "thee" and "you." Sometimes it is a real choice. One translator may add words in brackets to explain; another may leave the Arabic spare. One may render a word as "religion," another as "faith" or "way of life." Each difference is a clue about what the Arabic allows.

Modern translations such as Yusuf Ali (1934), Arberry (1955), Muhammad Asad (1980) and The Study Quran (2015) are still under copyright. You may describe how they render a phrase, and you may paraphrase their notes, but you do not quote them at length. Cite every translation by translator and year, so a reader can check your work.

Arabic builds most words from a root of three consonants. The root k-t-b carries the idea of writing: kitab (book), katib (writer), maktab (office or school). The root s-l-m carries the idea of wholeness and peace: salam (peace), islam (submission or surrender to God), muslim (one who submits). When a translator meets a word in an ayah, the root shows its family of meanings.

Take the key word of 2:256, din, rendered "religion" by Pickthall. Classical dictionaries list a range for it: religion, obedience, custom, and judgment or requital, as in yawm al-din, the Day of Judgment, in 1:4. The word translated "compulsion," ikrah, comes from a root about dislike and forcing someone against their will. Knowing that range helps a student see why commentators could read the ayah in more than one way.

You do not need to read Arabic to do this well. Edward William Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon (1863–1893) is public domain and lists roots with their classical meanings and examples. Many online Qur’an tools also show each word’s root. Record the root, the range of meanings, and which meaning each of your translators chose. Say plainly that you are working from a lexicon, not from your own reading of the Arabic.

A verse read alone can mislead. Scholars call the verses around it the siyaq, the context in the text. Ayah 2:256 comes right after 2:255, the Throne Verse, which describes God’s knowledge and power over all things. Right after it, 2:257 contrasts those who follow God into light with those led into darkness. Many readers see 2:256 as a hinge: after describing God’s greatness, the passage says belief cannot be forced.

Next, place the surah. Standard Egyptian editions of the Qur’an, printed from 1924 on, label each surah Meccan or Medinan, following Muslim tradition about when it was revealed. Most counts give 86 Meccan and 28 Medinan surahs, though scholars differ on a few. Al-Baqarah is Medinan, from the years the early Muslim community lived as a small city society after the hijra of 622. Short Meccan surahs like 103 and 112 tend to focus on God’s oneness, the Last Day and right action.

Then sketch the surah’s shape. Some modern scholars, among them Neal Robinson and Raymond Farrin, argue that long surahs such as Al-Baqarah are built in a ring, with matching parts around a center. Others read the surahs as linked blocks of themes. You do not need to settle that debate. Just show where your ayah sits and what comes before and after it.

Muslim scholars gathered reports about the moments that prompted particular verses. These are the asbab al-nuzul, the occasions of revelation. Al-Wahidi of Nishapur (died 1075) wrote a well-known book of them. Not every verse has one, and for some verses the reports disagree. Scholars also debated whether a verse applies only to its occasion or to everyone. A common principle holds that the general wording counts, not the particular cause.

For 2:256, al-Tabari (died 923) records several reports. The best known, also found in the hadith collection of Abu Dawud, tells of women in Medina whose children had not survived. They vowed that if a child lived, they would raise it among the Jews. When the Jewish tribe of Banu al-Nadir was expelled from Medina, some of those children were among them. Their Muslim relatives said, "We will not leave our sons," and the verse is reported to have come then. The children were not forced.

Historians handle these reports with care. They were written down generations later, and more than one occasion is often given for the same verse. So a strong essay says "al-Tabari reports" or "according to al-Wahidi," not "this is what happened." Treat the occasion as one context among several, alongside the words, the surah and the long history of reading.

A common principle of tafsir (commentary) holds that the Qur’an explains itself. Ibn Taymiyya (died 1328) wrote that the best method is to explain the Qur’an by the Qur’an, then by the Prophet’s sayings, then by the words of his Companions. Scholars call this tafsir al-Qur’an bi’l-Qur’an. In practice it means finding other verses that use the same word or treat the same theme.

For 2:256 a student might gather 10:99, where God asks the Prophet whether he would compel people to believe, and 18:29, which says the truth is from your Lord, so let whoever will believe and whoever will disbelieve. A student might also read 9:5 and 9:29, verses about fighting. Some classical scholars held that those later verses limited or abrogated 2:256. Others, like Ibn Kathir (died 1373), read 2:256 as a lasting principle that no one is forced to enter Islam.

Laying verses side by side is how the commentators themselves worked. It is also where their disagreements come from. When you trace your key word through the Qur’an, record every verse you use with surah name and number. Then report which scholars connected which verses, and what each concluded.

Long before modern scholarship, Muslim scholars wrote verse-by-verse commentaries. Al-Tabari (died 923) gathered the reports of earlier generations and often weighed them. Al-Zamakhshari (died 1144) focused on grammar and style. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (died 1210) wrote a vast commentary full of philosophy and theology. Al-Qurtubi (died 1273) drew out legal rulings. Ibn Kathir (died 1373) explained verses by other verses and by hadith.

Shia scholars wrote major commentaries too. Al-Tusi (died 1067) and al-Tabrisi (died 1153) wrote classical works. In the 20th century, Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i (died 1981) wrote al-Mizan, which reads the Qur’an by the Qur’an. Sufi commentators such as al-Qushayri (died 1072) looked for inner, spiritual meanings. A strong capstone uses at least two classical voices and, where it fits, notes Sunni, Shia or Sufi readings without ranking them.

Most of these works are in Arabic, but parts of several are in English, and The Study Quran (2015) summarizes many of them in its notes. When you use a summary, say so: "according to The Study Quran’s note on al-Razi." Your job is to report what each commentator said and why, in your own words, with the name and the verse.

Readers in the last two centuries brought new questions to the text. Muhammad Abduh (died 1905) of Egypt urged fresh reasoning and taught a commentary later completed by his student Rashid Rida. Sayyid Qutb (died 1966) wrote In the Shade of the Qur’an, a political and spiritual commentary. Muhammad Asad (died 1992) added full notes to his translation, The Message of the Qur’an (1980). Fazlur Rahman (died 1988), who taught at the University of Chicago, argued for reading verses by the moral aims behind them.

Modern readers often disagree with each other as much as with the classical scholars. On 2:256, many modern writers read the ayah as a charter of religious freedom for all people. Others stay closer to the classical debate on who it covers. Some women scholars, such as amina wadud in Qur’an and Woman (1992), reread verses on gender by looking at the Qur’an’s wider principles.

For the capstone, choose one modern reader who actually wrote about your verse or its theme. Describe the reading in your own words, since modern works are under copyright. Then place it beside your classical voices. Does the modern reader agree, build on them or break from them? Say which, and give the reason the modern reader offers.

Every serious reader of a verse knows other readers disagree. Classical commentators often listed several views and then said which they preferred. Al-Tabari regularly wrote that people of interpretation differed and gave each view. A capstone should do the same. This part of an essay is sometimes called the counterargument, but here it is not about winning. It is about describing the whole conversation.

Describe the other reading at its best, in words its holders would accept. If you argue that 2:256 is read by most modern commentators as a general principle, say plainly that many classical scholars held it was limited or abrogated, and give their reason: they read it together with later verses on fighting. Then explain why others disagreed. Do not call a reading ignorant or extreme without showing where scholars answered it.

One more kind of difference matters. Muslims read the Qur’an as the word of God. Many historians and scholars of religion study it as a text in history. Your essay does not choose between those views. It can report both: how believers have read a verse, and what historians say about its setting. That is what describing the text fairly means.

A thesis is the one-sentence claim your whole essay supports. In this course, a thesis is not about whether the Qur’an is true. It is about the text and its readers. Here is an example: "Classical commentators such as al-Tabari tied 2:256 to a specific moment in Medina and debated its reach, while many modern readers treat it as a general principle of religious freedom; both readings build on the verse’s context in Surah 2."

Look at what makes it work. It names the verse. It names readers. It makes a claim someone could dispute, since another student might argue the classical and modern readings are closer than this. And every part can be checked: a reader can open al-Tabari, a modern commentary and Surah 2 and see whether the thesis holds.

Build the essay from the thesis. A useful order is: the verse in two translations; its place in the surah; its occasion, if reports exist; two classical readings; one modern reading; other readings you do not follow; and your conclusion. Each paragraph should begin by saying which of these it covers.

Cite the Qur’an by surah name and number and by ayah: Al-Baqarah 2:256. Name the translator and year every time you quote: Pickthall, 1930. Cite commentators by name, work and verse: al-Tabari, Jami’ al-Bayan, on 2:256. If you used a summary, name it. Hadith are cited by collection, such as Sahih al-Bukhari or Sunan Abu Dawud. Put your sources in a list at the end.

The capstone also has a short presentation, about five minutes. Show the verse in two translations on one slide. Show where it sits in the surah. Then give the two or three readings and your thesis. If you play a recording of the ayah recited, say so beforehand, and keep it short. Listeners should leave knowing what the verse says and how people have read it.

A rubric tells you how the work will be judged before you start. The one below gives the most weight to accurate description of the text and its readers, and to fair treatment of readings you do not follow. Clear writing and correct citations count too. Nothing on the rubric asks what you believe.

In 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Abington School District v. Schempp. It ruled that public schools may not lead students in devotional Bible reading or prayer. In the same decision, the Court said schools may teach about religion. Justice Tom Clark wrote that the Bible may be studied for its literary and historical qualities when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education.

That is the line this whole course has walked. You have learned what the Qur’an says, how it was written down and recited, and how Sunni, Shia, Sufi and modern readers have understood it. You have not been asked to believe or disbelieve. Many Muslim students recite the Qur’an at home or at a mosque; many classmates have never opened it. An academic course gives both a shared way to talk about it.

Take a moment to reflect. What did you learn from reading one verse so closely? What surprised you about how many ways careful people have read it? How did it feel to describe a view you do not hold in words its holders would accept? Those skills reach well beyond the Qur’an. They help with any text people care deeply about, and with any neighbor who reads it differently.