How Long Does It Take To Read The Quran?

The Bible, the sacred text of billions of Jews and Christians around the world, and the Quran, the sacred text of the world's approximately 2 billion Muslims (per World Population Review), share several similarities. Both are sacred texts of Abrahamic religions, for example; similarly, both contain a mix of history, doctrine, prophecy, and other literary forms.

However, there are differences as well, and not just in doctrine. For example, the Bible covers thousands of years, while the Quran, according to Al Islam, was dictated by Allah to Mohammed over the course of a couple of decades. Similarly, while the Bible purports to have been written by a couple dozen men, the authorship of the Quran is ascribed to one man: Mohammed. Like the Bible, the Quran is divided into chapters and verses. The original text was written in Arabic.

The books are also considerably different in size. As a religious text, the Bible is a rather thick one, coming in at 800,000 words, depending on which English translation you're using, according to Word Counter, making it a third longer than "War and Peace." The Koran, by comparison, is only around 77,000 words, according to the website Study – also depending on the translation you're using. If you were to set out to read it, that means that, if you committed to it, you could finish it in an afternoon.

Determining how long it takes to read any text, whether the Bible or the Koran, is, at its core, a simple matter of arithmetic. Plug in the length of the text, divide by the average number of words per minute a reader can be expected to read, tap a few keys on the calculator, and you have your answer, expressed in minutes. A bit more division and you can have it expressed in hours, days, years, or whatever works for you. Of course, mathematics doesn't account for the need for a human reader to take breaks, or perhaps reread a section that didn't fully register, or the other variables of life. There's also a difference between reading and studying, too, so keep that in mind.

Nevertheless, mathematically speaking, the length of the Quran (77,000 words), divided by 200 words per minute (the average reading speed of an adult reading in English, per Iris Reading), means that the book can be finished in 385 minutes, or about six-and-a-half hours. Therefore, the average reader could start reading the Quran after lunch and have it finished by supper.