in his Muʿjam:

“We asked the Companions of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, ‘How did the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, divide the Quran into portions?’ They replied, ‘The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, divided it into portions of three surahs and five surahs…’”—then he related the remainder of the hadith.

This hadith agrees in meaning with the hadith of ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAmr: they regarded completing its recitation in seven days as the Sunnah practice. Hence they divided it into seven portions, not three or five. It also indicates that they divided it by surahs. This is established through mass transmission. For it is known that dividing the Quran by letter count into twenty-eight, thirty, or sixty portions—the divisions whose sections and portions begin in the middle of a surah, a narrative, or the like—dates from the time of al-Hajjāj and thereafter. It is reported that al-Hajjāj ordered this. The practice spread from Iraq, while the people of Medina were unfamiliar with it.

If division by letter count was introduced in Iraq in the time of al-Hajjāj, then it is clear that the Companions, before that, during the Prophet’s lifetime, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and afterward, had another way of dividing the Quran into portions. Sometimes they measured their recitation by verses, saying, “Fifty verses,” or “Sixty verses,” and sometimes by surahs. Yet no one has narrated or mentioned that they divided it into seven portions by verse count. Division by surahs is therefore the only remaining possibility.

If it is said: “But the ordering of the Quran’s surahs is not an obligation expressly prescribed