One thing I’ve recently learned about (and I thought would be important to note) is that the Qur’an hasn’t always had the versing we see in the edition we currently use. The current edition of the Qur’an was only published in 1924 in Egypt (and minor changes were made to it later in 1924 and then again in 1936). That’s when Qur’anic versing in Islam was first standardized. Gabriel Reynolds, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame provides a short summary of how the current Arabic edition of the Qur’an came to be;

I am not fully satisfied with this presentation, inasmuch as it gives the impression that the Cairo edition is a critical edition. In fact, the Cairo edition only came into being when the Egyptian government, having received complaints of the divergences between the versions of the Qur’an being used in various secondary schools, appointed a committee to establish a standard text for Egyptian government schools. The task of this committee was not to establish the most ancient form of the Qur’an through the investigation of early Qur’an manuscripts. Instead it sought to establish a text on the basis of one of the canonical qiraat (lit. “readings”) of the Qur’an, namely that of Hafs (d. 180/796) ‘an ‘Asim (d. 127/745). Yet the very idea of qiraat is the product of later Islamic tradition. It was developed and sponsored, most famously by Ibn Mujahid (d. 324/936), in response to the disagreements over the shape of the Qur’anic text in the third and fourth Islamic centuries. In other words, the 1924 Cairo Qur’an edition is the product of school administration, on the one hand, and religious tradition on the other. (The Qur’an and its Biblical Subtext, 2010, Routledge, 24-25.)

Elsewhere, Reynolds notes that “the Cairo text is often at odds with manuscript evidence” (“Introduction,” in ed. Reynolds, Gabriel, The Qur’an in its Historical Context, 2008, 3). The numerous discrepancies that the modern Qur’an has with one of the Qur’an’s oldest manuscripts, the Sanaa manuscripts, can be found in Sadeghi and Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾān of the Prophet”, Arabica (2010), 417-33. Before the Cairo edition, Qur’anic history saw a number of Qur’anic editions published throughout the years and each of these editions was versed in different ways. That is to say, the 29th verse in our Qur’an in a certain surah (chapter) may have not been the 29th verse of a Qur’an several centuries ago (it may have been listed in, say, the 31st verse). Tamara Sonn, Professor of the History of Islam at Georgetown University writes;

The Quran was copied and transmitted by hand until the modern era. The first printed version was produced in Rome in 1530 CE; a second printed version was produced in Hamburg in 1694. The first critical edition produced in Europe was done by Gustav Flügel in 1834. The numbering of the verses varies slightly between the standard 1925 CE Egyptian edition and the 1834 edition established by Flügel, which is used by many Western scholars. (Editions from Pakistan and India often follow the Egyptian standard edition with the exception that they count the opening phrase, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” of each chapter as the first verse. This is the numbering followed in the citations given in this text.) The variations in verse numbering comprise only a few verses and reflect differing interpretations of where certain verses end. (“Introducing”, in (ed.) Andrew Rippin, Blackwell Companion of the Quran, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 6)

In other words, there seem to have been various editions of the Qur’an throughout history (one published in Rome in 1530, one in Hamburg in 1694, some Indian and Pakistani editions, etc) where the versing seems to have been fluid until the very recent 1924 standard Egyptian edition. Because the Indian and Pakistani editions list the Basmalah (“In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”) as a separate verse altogether, these Qur’an’s possess an extra 113 verses overall, one for each surah where this phrase appears, with the exception of surah 9. After some digging, I actually found a side by side comparison chart of the 1834 Gustav Flügel edition of the Qur’an and the 1924 current edition. Here’s the Arabic version of the same comparison chart. The Qur’an has 114 surahs. The versing of 52 surahs in the Qur’an are identical between the 1834 edition and current 1924 editions of the Qur’an. They are surahs:

15, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114.

On the other hand, 62 of the surahs of the Qur’an have different versing between the 1834 edition and the 1924 standard edition. What’s more, the total number of verses in the 1834 Qur’an adds up to 5077 whereas the standard 1924 Qur’an has 5075 verses, i.e. two less. The 62 surahs that vary in their versing are:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65, 71, 72, 74, 78, 80, 89, 98, 101, 106.

In other words, the 1834 Qur’an had two more verses than the standard 1924 Qur’an used in modern Islam. If you want to see precisely how the versing varies, again, you can consult the links provided above to a side-by-side comparison between the two editions of the Qur’an. As of yet, while the scholarly data seems clear that different editions (1530 in Rome, 1694 in Hamburg, etc) also have variation in versing, I have not yet figured out how to access these editions and so I’m not precisely aware of the nature of the variation. In any case, it’s clear that the versing in the Qur’an today is not the same one when versing was first introduced into the Qur’an. Reynolds writes;

The division into verses, however, was not revealed by God but was developed by later generations after the death of the Prophet. In fact, before the standardization of the Quraan in the early twentieth century, a good deal of variation in verse numbering existed. (The Emergence of Islam: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective, 2012, 93-34)

Interestingly, the Syriac language (the major language of the Middle East from the 4th to 8th centuries) is closely related to the Arabic of the Qur’an. This has importance because we will see in the future how the Qur’an borrows a lot of its historical theology from the popular folk literature of its day where Syriac turns out to be significant influence. At the same time, less emphasis should be placed on the hadiths which, as Reynolds notes, are hardly considered as reliable by critical scholars given they date to 150 years after the events they describe (pg. 30) and the chains of transmission they give for the purposes of verifying themselves are themselves unverifiable.