It is true that the present day Qur’an is not in accordance with order of the revelations. It may or may not be true that Hadhrat Ali, the great Caliph and Imam had arranged it in the order of the revelations. But it is also true that

1. The Qur’an is the same everywhere today and all the sects agree on it including the Shiites;
2. Hadhrat Ali did not object to the order in which Qur’an was arranged; and he did never show to anybody the Qur’an he collected if he really did. He did not show it even in the days of his khilafah. It is clear that if he had any other collection, he did not think it right to show it, and he was fully convinced about the order of the verses of the authorised version of Qur’an;
3. While revelation of Quranic verses was in accordance with the requirement of that particular time and suitability according to that timing; it is not necessary that the same order would suit the readers of the posterity. A writer can write different chapters at different times but when he compiles it in the end, the sequence of his writings is normally not the same in which he wrote;
4. The revelation of course began to people who were illiterate and had been following false gods and false beliefs. Most of them were pagans of Mecca. So their false beliefs had to be challenged first; in Medinah after 13 years period, for the first time the Quranic messages reached a large population of Jews and Christians (In Mecca only few of the ahl-e kitaab had received it.) But the readers of the Post-Muhammad Era were to be first the Muslims; then People of the Book and then the Polytheists. So the verses that remind Muslims of their common relationship with the People of the Book, and to the People of the Book the need to accept the latest revelations of God were put first.
5. I may ask those who challenge the current order of Qur’an whether Surah Fatiha deserves to be tat the beginning of the Qur’an or somewhere in the middle of Qur’an, in accordance with the timing of its revelation;
6. Suran Fatiha begins with the verse Al-Hamdulillahi rabbil aalameen which I translate as “Acknowledgment is for God the Supreme Guardian of the Universe”. This verse is in fact the first and foremost law of the existence of the universe, which I have discussed in detail in my coming book, “Principles of Physics derived from Qur’an. “ At the end of about a 400 page work, I have said that “the whole discussion of the book is in fact an attempted commentary on the first verse of the Qur’an.” I have argued that it is the combination of the supply of Provision/energy (Rabubiyyat of God) and the Acknowledgement (Hamd) by the Universe (by way of spinning relative to God) that sustains the universe. The day the God stops the supply and the universe stops moving, Qiyamat (Halt) will come.

To try to create doubts by raising the question of the order is nothing more than an attempt to keep Muslims engaged in unnecessary debates. Muslims must not get entrapped in it and must be ready to wage a full-fledged campaign against the so-called New World Order, which is based on negation of God and commercialisation of evils.

Dr Javed Jamil

Chief Editor