Trilogy Relative Sizes of Texts

Koran: 152,006 words. Note: this count will differ with each translation.

Hadith: Bukhari has 645,745 words.

Sira: the Sira has three divisions. There is Mohammed’s life as a prophet and auxiliary material that precedes his prophet-ship and events following his death. The third element is Hisham’s notes. We have a precise word count for Mohammed’s prophet-hood from a scanned version of Guillaume’s The Life of the Muhammad. It covers 423 pages and has a word count of 272,918 words. Since the material from his actual life as a prophet is Sunna, we only use the prophet material.

Total of Koran, Sira  (without Sira extras) and Hadith: 1,072,589 words.

As a technical note: if we include the auxiliary material and Hisham, the total word count is estimated to be: 379,700 words.

The Relative Sizes of the Islamic Texts

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Supporting Data

Reference Koran Sira Hadith
Word Count 152,006 272,918 645,745
Fraction of Total
1,070,669 words
14% 26% 60%