Structure · a Light

The first words revealed sit at chapter ninety six

The Qur'an is not arranged in the order it came down. Its 114 chapters run roughly from longest to shortest, with al-Baqarah at 286 verses near the front and the three verse al-Kawthar near the back. The passage identified as the first revelation, five verses opening with the command to read, sits at chapter 96, close to the end of the book. Some of the last material revealed is found in the middle. The effect is that a reader meets the material by theme rather than by date, and anyone who wants the historical sequence has to reconstruct it, which is what the science of the occasions of revelation was built to do.

114 chapters, ordered by length

Source · Scholars differ over whether the order of the chapters was fixed by the Prophet ﷺ or settled by the companions at the compilation; the order