The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2378 page)

Sura
.

Site of one of the Babylonian Jewish
academies
. Sura was an important centre of
Torah
study. It was established by
Rav
in 219 CE. It was known as the ‘yeshivah of the right’, because its head sat on the right hand of the
exilarch
at his induction ceremony. At the beginning of the 10th cent., the academy moved to Baghd
d.
Sa‘adiah
Gaon became its head in 928. By the 12th cent. the town was in ruins.

 
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Sura
.

One of a class of Hindu deities. They inhabit
Indra's
heaven, but they have no strong role or identity—indeed, they may be derived from a mistaken view that the ‘a’ in
asuras
is a negative, producing ‘gods’ (suras) and anti-gods (asuras).

 
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S
ra
.

A division of the
Qur’
n
(roughly equivalent to a ‘chapter’). The term originally referred to a single portion of scripture, in this sense equivalent to
qur’
n
, a recitation. The word may come from the Syriac
rt
(or
s
rth
), a ‘writing’. In the Qur’
n itself, it has the sense of a text of scripture. The Qur’
n is composed of 114 s
ras in all, each one with a name, by which it is known to Muslims. Each s
ra is classified as Meccan or Madinan according to whether it was first recited before or after the
Hijra
, though it is accepted that some s
ras contain verses from both periods. Each S
ra is composed of a number of
ay
t