Koran

Koran (Arabic) “The Recitation.” According to Islamic tradition, the Koran is the word of God as revealed to the Prophet Mohammad and the first Sharia source of law. For twenty years, the Prophet received messages that he passed on orally to his congregation.  The revelations were memorized by his students and scratched in part onto slips of paper, shoulder bones and stones.  The oral and written testimonies were first collected, ordered, and systematically recorded by length (Mushaf) after he died.  According to Islamic tradition, the process of canonization took about 30 years, but modern scientific findings suggest it was probably closer to one hundred years.