the media has for us today. Thus, the Arabs were trained from early childhood to have great memorization skills, memorizing the tribal histories, poetry and folklore. It was easy for the early Muslims to memorize the entire Qur’an as it was revealed. To this day there are millions of Muslims around the world that have memorized the entire book, most of whom completed memorizing it by about age 10.
The Qur’an was written down as it was revealed by several of the companions of the prophet. They would write on whatever they could find, sometimes it was on stones and other times on pieces of leather. It was not collaborated into a book form until immediately after the prophet passed away. Then the first caliph, Abu Bakr, ordered all of the parchments to be collected and had a committee, headed by Zaid ibn Thatbit, read through all of the parchments with those who had memorized the Qur’an until they were satisfied that they had not missed any verses or written them down wrong. Then, the committee wrote down the Qur’an in one book.
The Arabs of that time were experts in poetry; they knew every type of prose and rhythm. The Qur’an was unlike any poem they had ever heard before, that is because it is not poetry, it is the word of God. The way that Ayas were put together and the vocabulary and rhythms used were something shocking to those Arabs; they were professionals in language and yet this book was far superior to anything a human had ever written. And, it was rhythmical and rhyming. To this day the Qur’an is used as the standard for grammar and linguistics; it is far above anything that has ever been written before or since. In fact, the Qur’an challenges any of those professional poets to create