Gabriel—peace be upon him—said to the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him:
“O Muhammad, place it at the head of the two-hundred-and-eightieth verse of al-Baqarah.”
Abu al-Hasan Ibn Battāl remarked:
“Those who hold this opinion do not claim that the recital of the Qur’an in prayer or during study must follow the same sequence in which it is arranged in the muṣḥaf. What is obligatory is only that its sūrahs be set out in that sequence in writing.
“It is not known that any of them ever maintained that this order is binding in prayer, or in the reading and study of the Qur’an, or that it is impermissible for someone to learn al-Kahf before al-Baqarah or al-Ḥajj before al-Kahf.
“Consider ʿĀʾishah’s reply—may Allah be pleased with her—to the man who questioned her: ‘It will not harm you whichever one you recite first.’ The Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—would recite one sūrah in a rakʿah and, in the next rakʿah, recite another sūrah that does not follow it in the muṣḥaf.
“As for the report from Ibn Masʿūd and Ibn ʿUmar that they disliked reciting the Qur’an ‘inverted,’ they said, ‘That is an inversion of the heart.’ They meant a person who reads a sūrah backwards, starting from its end and proceeding to its beginning, for that is strictly forbidden. Some people attempt this with the Qur’an and with poetry to train their tongues and aid memorization, but Allah Most High has prohibited it in the Qur’an because it corrupts the order of its sūrahs and contradicts their intended purpose.
“One proof that the muṣḥaf need not follow the chronological order of revelation is the sound evidence that verses were revealed in Madinah and then placed within a Makkan sūrah. Do you not see ʿĀʾishah’s statement—may Allah be pleased with her—‘None of al-Baqarah and al-Nisāʾ was revealed except while I was with him,’ meaning in Madinah, yet both come before passages that were revealed earlier in Makkah? Had it been arranged strictly by the order of revelation, the sequence of the sūrahs’ verses would necessarily have been disrupted.”
Abu Bakr al-Anbārī said: “Ismāʿīl ibn Isḥāq al-Qāḍī narrated to us; Ḥajjāj ibn Minhāl narrated to us; Hammām narrated to us from Qatādah, who said:
‘The sūrahs revealed in Madinah are: al-Baqarah, Āl ʿImrān, al-Nisāʾ, al-Māʾidah, al-Anfāl, Barāʾah (al-Tawbah), al-Raʿd, al-Naḥl, al-Ḥajj, al-Nūr, al-Aḥzāb, Muḥammad, al-Fatḥ, al-Ḥujurāt, al-Raḥmān, al-Ḥadīd, al-Mujādalah, al-Ḥashr, al-Mumtaḥanah, al-Ṣaff, al-Jumuʿah, al-Munāfiqūn, al-Taghābun, and al-Ṭalāq.’”}