I’ve not read the Koran, but I recently learned that the chapters are ordered by length, longest to shortest, rather than chronologically. Does anyone know why that is?
Apparently no one knows: Surah - Wikipedia
I just read an annotated Koran (along with five other translations I’ve picked up over the years) cover-to-cover last year. It took me a year to do so. Some of the translations actually re-order the surahs for some reason – usually to try to duplicate what they thin is the historical order of the chapters, although there’s not complete agreement on what that is.
The “traditional” order isn’t strictly by length. that is, they’re not in order by longest to shortest. it very nearly is that way, but they bent that rule a bit in order to group together some surahs that appear to be related by subject matter, or were obviously written at the same time. So you’re going along and one chapter breaks the trend by being longer than the preceding one.
I don’t think there’s anything more to it than that.
Editing is revision. Even if you include all of the raw material, decisions made as to the order in which they are presented imposes a narrative structure. If you choose to put one section directly after another, you imply that there’s a connection. Or choosing to put a work in the first or last place in a collection, which implies those works are more important than the middle works.
Devout Muslims believe that they should not revise Allah’s words, which included imposing a narrative order on them. So arranging them by length is the equivalent of alphabetical order.
But wouldn’t even that be editing, of a sort? To arrange them by length, or alphabetically, or whatever, involves decision-making on the part of the editor (the decision as to what method of arranging them to use, if no other). It seems to me that ordering them chronologically would be the way of least editing. It would be, in the eyes of the devout Muslim, the order in which Allah actually spoke them.
As a side note, Paul’s epistles in the New Testament are also arranged from longest to shortest, except for Hebrews, which was historically regarded as Paul’s work, but which most scholars today (even conservative ones) agree was written by someone else who was influenced by Paul’s theology.