Structure · a Light

Some chapters are built as a ring around a centre

Hamiduddin Farahi, an Indian scholar who died in 1930, argued that each chapter of the Qur'an has a single organising theme and a deliberate shape, and his student Amin Ahsan Islahi worked the idea through the whole book in an Urdu commentary. Later scholars, among them Michel Cuypers on Surah al-Ma'ida and Raymond Farrin on al-Baqarah, have described the pattern as ring composition: sections mirror each other outward from a middle, so that the first answers the last and the pivot sits at the centre. The approach is one reading among several and is contested. What it does is treat the jumps between subjects as a shape to be found rather than a defect to be explained.

Farahi, Islahi, Cuypers, Farrin