13 Preface في صُحُفٍ مُكَرَّمَةٍYusuf Ali(It1 is) in Books held (greatly) in honour,At the time this Sūra was revealed, there were perhaps only about 42 or 45 Sūras in the hands of the Muslims. But it was a sufficient body of Revelation of high spiritual value, to which the description given here could be applied. It was held in the highest honour; its place in the hearts of Muslims was more exalted than that of anything else: as God’s Word, it was pure and sacred; and those who transcribed it were men who were honourable, just and pious. The legend that the early Sūras were not carefully written down and preserved in books is a pure invention. The recensions made later in the time of the first and the third Khalifahs were merely to preserve the purity and safeguard the arrangement of the text at a time when the expansion of Islam among non-Arabic-speaking peoples made such precautions necessary.