I said:
The Prophet’s statement, peace and blessings be upon him, “Learn the Qur’an from four—­from Ibn Umm ʿAbd …,” establishes its soundness. What further makes this clear is that the masters of recitation from the Ḥijāz, Syria, and Iraq each attributed the reading he adopted to a Companion who had recited it to the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings upon him—without excluding any portion of the Qur’an. Thus ʿĀṣim traced his recitation to ʿAlī and Ibn Masʿūd; Ibn Kathīr traced his to Ubayy; likewise Abū ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ traced his to Ubayy; and ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿĀmir traced his reading to ʿUthmān. All of them declare, “We recited before the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him,” and the chains of transmission for these readings are continuous and their transmitters reliable. This was stated by al-Khaṭṭābī.

[Chapter: Reports on the ordering of the Qur’an’s surahs and verses, its vocalisation and diacritics, its division into ḥizbs and tenths, and the number of its letters, parts, words, and verses]

Ibn al-Ṭayyib said: If someone were to object, “The early generations disagreed about the arrangement of the Qur’an’s surahs: some wrote them in their codices according to the chronological order of revelation, giving precedence to the Meccan over the Medinan; some began their muṣḥaf with ‘al-Ḥamd’ (al-Fātiḥah); and some began it with ‘Read in the name of your Lord,’ which was the opening of ʿAlī’s muṣḥaf, may Allah be pleased with him. Ibn Masʿūd’s muṣḥaf, for its part, opened with ‘Mālik Yawm ad-Dīn,’ then al-Baqarah, then al-Nisāʾ, in a different sequence, while Ubayy’s muṣḥaf began with ‘Praise be to Allah,’ followed by al-Nisāʾ, Āl ʿImrān, al-Anʿām, al-Aʿrāf, al-Māʾidah, and so on with considerable variation.”

Qāḍī Abū Bakr ibn al-Ṭayyib replied: It is possible that the order of the surahs as we have it today in the muṣḥaf was fixed by the Companions through their own ijtihād. Makkī, may Allah have mercy on him, mentioned this in his commentary on Sūrat Barāʾah, adding that the arrangement of the verses within each surah and the placement of the basmalah at their beginnings came from the Prophet himself, peace and blessings be upon him; and because he did not command that in the opening of Sūrat Barāʾah, it was left without a basmalah. This, he said, is the soundest view on the matter, and it will be discussed later.¹

Ibn Wahb recorded in his Jāmiʿ: I heard Sulaymān ibn Bilāl say, “I heard Rabīʿah ask, ‘Why were al-Baqarah and Āl ʿImrān placed at the beginning when more than eighty surahs were revealed before them and they themselves were revealed in Medina?’ He replied …”