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The
Evidence
Initially, the Meccan unbelievers
said Muhammad is the author of the Quran. God responded to them:
“Or do they say, ‘He himself has composed this
[message]’? No, but they are
not willing to believe! But
then, [if they deem it the work of a mere mortal,] let them produce another
discourse like it - if what they say be true! [Or do they deny the existence of God implicitly by
denying the fact of His revelation?]
Have they themselves been created without anything - or were they,
perchance, their own creators?” (Quran 52:33-35)
First, God challenged them to
produce ten chapters like the Quran:
“Or they may say, ‘He forged it,’ Say, ‘Bring ye then ten
suras forged, like unto it, and call (to your aid) whomsoever you can,
other than God! - If you speak the truth!’ If then they answer not your (call), know you that this
revelation is sent down with the knowledge of God, and that there is no god
but He! Will you then submit
(to Islam)?” (Quran 11:13-14)
But, when they were unable to
meet the challenge of ten chapters, God reduced it to a single chapter:
“And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down on Our
slave, then produce a surah thereof and call upon your witnesses other than
God, if you should be truthful.
But if you do not – and you will never be able to – then fear the
Fire whose fuel is men and stones, prepared for the unbelievers.” (Quran
2:23-24)
Finally, God foretold their
eternal failure to meet the divine challenge:
“Say: ‘If all mankind and all jinn[1] would come together to produce the
like of this Quran, they could not produce its like even though they were
to exert all their strength in aiding one another!’” (Quran 17:88)
The Prophet of Islam said:
“Every
Prophet was given ‘signs’ because of which people believed in him. Indeed, I have been given the
Divine Revelation that God has inspired to me. So, I hope to have the most followers of all the prophets
on the Day of Resurrection.” (Saheeh Al-Bukhari)
The physical miracles performed
by the prophets were time-specific, valid only for those who witnessed
them, whereas the like of the continuing miracle of our Prophet, the Noble
Quran, was not granted to any other prophet. Its linguistic superiority, style, clarity of message,
strength of argument, quality of rhetoric, and the human inability to match
even its shortest chapter till the end of time grant it an exquisite
uniqueness. Those who
witnessed the revelation and those who came after, all can drink from its
fountain of wisdom. That is
why the Prophet of Mercy hoped he will have the most followers of all the
prophets, and prophesized that he would at a time when Muslims were few,
but then they began to embrace Islam in floods. Thus, this prophecy came true.
Explanation
of Quran’s Inimitability
State of the Prophet Muhammad
He was an ordinary human being.
He was illiterate. He could neither read nor write.
He was more than forty years old
when he received the first revelation. Until then he was not known to be an orator, poet, or a
man of letters; he was just a merchant. He did not compose a single poem or deliver even one
sermon before he was chosen to be a prophet.
He brought a book attributing it
to God, and all Arabs of his time were in agreement it was inimitable.
The
Challenge of the Quran
The Quran puts a challenge out to
anyone who opposes the Prophet. The challenge is to produce a chapter
(surah) similar to it, even if it were to be a cooperative effort. A person may summon all the help he
can from the physical and spiritual realms.
Why
this Challenge?
First, Arabs were poets. Poetry was their supreme ornament
and their most representative form of discourse. Arabic poetry was rooted in the oral; it was a voice before
it acquired an alphabet. Poets
could compose intricate poems spontaneously and commit thousands of lines
to memory. Arabs had a complex
system of evaluating a poet and the poetry to meet rigid standards. Annual competition selected the
‘idols’ of poetry, and they were engraved in gold and hung inside the
Kaaba, alongside their idols of worship. The most skilled served as judges. Poets could ignite wars and bring
truce between warring tribes.
They described women, wine, and war like no one else.
Second, the opponents of the
Prophet Muhammad were strongly determined to quash his mission in any way
possible. God gave them a
non-violent approach to disprove Muhammad.
Inability to Meet the Challenge
and its Consequences
History is a witness that the
pre-Islamic Arabs could not produce a single chapter to meet the challenge
of the Quran.[2] Instead of
meeting the challenge, they chose violence and waged war against him. They, of all people, had the
ability and the motive to meet the Quranic challenge, but could not do
so. Had they done so, the
Quran would have proven false, and the man who brought it would have been
exposed as a false prophet.
The fact that the ancient Arabs did not and could not meet this
challenge is proof of Quran’s inimitability. Their example is of a thirsty man next to a well, the
only reason he dies of thirst is if he was unable to reach the water!
Furthermore, the inability of
previous Arabs to meet the challenge of the Quran implies later Arabs are
less competent to meet the challenge, due to their lack the mastery of
classical Arabic that the previous, ‘classical’ Arabs had. According to linguists of the
Arabic language, the Arabs before and during the time of the Prophet, in
exclusion to subsequent generations, had the most complete mastery of the
Arabic language, its rules, meters, and rhymes. Later Arabs did not match the mastery of classical
Arabs.[3]
Lastly, the challenge is for
Arabs and non-Arabs alike. If
the Arabs cannot meet the challenge, the non-speakers of Arabic cannot
claim to meet the challenge either.
Hence, the inimitability of the Quran is established for non-Arabs
as well.
What if someone were to say:
‘perhaps the challenge of the Quran was met by someone in the time of the
Prophet, but the pages of history did not preserve it.’?
Since the beginning, people have
reported important events to their succeeding generations, especially in
that which captures attention or what people are looking out for. The Quranic challenge was well
spread and well known, and had someone met it, it would have been impossible
for it not to have reached us.
If it has been lost in the annals of history, then, for the sake of
argument, it is also possible that there was more than one Moses, more than
one Jesus, and more than one Muhammad; perhaps many scriptures were also
revealed to these imaginary prophets, and it is possible the world knows
nothing about it! Just like
these suppositions are unfounded historically, it is also unreasonable to
imagine that the Quranic challenge was met without it reaching us.[4]
Second, had they met the
challenge, the Arabs would have discredited the Prophet. It would have been their biggest
propaganda tool against him.
Nothing like this happened, instead, they chose war.
The fact that no effort of the
non-Muslim has succeeded in ‘producing a verse’ like a verse of the Quran
means that either no-one has taken the Quran seriously enough to make the
effort, or that they made the effort, but were not successful. This shows the inimitability of the
Quran, a unique and everlasting message. The uniqueness of the Quran combined with the divine
message it brings to mankind is a sure indication of the truth of Islam. In
the face of this, every person is faced with one of the two choices. He either openly accepts the Quran
is God’s Word . In doing so he
must also accept that Muhammad was sent by God and was His Messenger. Or else he secretly knows the Quran
is true, but he chooses in his heart to refuse it. If the seeker is honest in his
seeking, he need but explore this question of its inimitability to nurture
the inner certainty that he has really found the final truth in the
religion it predicates.
Footnotes:
[1]
Invisible beings with parallel existence to humans.
[2]
The fact is attested to by non-Muslim Orientalists.
‘That
the best of Arab writers has never succeeded in producing anything equal in
merit to the Quran itself is not surprising…’ (E H Palmer (Tr.), The Quran,
1900, Part I, Oxford at Clarendon Press, p. lv).
‘…and
no man in fifteen hundred years has ever played on that deep-toned
instrument with such power, such boldness, and such range of emotional
effect as Mohammad did…As a literary monument the Quran thus stands by
itself, a production unique to the Arabic literature, having neither
forerunners nor successors in its own idiom…’.’ (H A R Gibb, Islam - A
Historical Survey, 1980, Oxford University Press, p. 28).
and Christian Arabs:
‘Many
Christian Arabs speak of its style with warm admiration, and most Arabists
acknowledge its excellence. When it is read aloud or recited it has an
almost hypnotic effect that makes the listener indifferent to its sometimes
strange syntax and its sometimes, to us, repellent content. It is this
quality it possesses of silencing criticism by the sweet music of its
language that has given birth to the dogma of its inimitability; indeed it
may be affirmed that within the literature of the Arabs, wide and fecund as
it is both in poetry and in elevated prose, there is nothing to compare
with it.’ (Alfred Guillaume, Islam, 1990 (Reprinted), Penguin Books, pp.
73-74)
[3]
Rummani (d. 386 AH), a classical scholar, writes: ‘So if someone were to
say: “You rely in your argumentation on the failure of the Bedouin Arabs,
without taking into account the post-classical Arabs; yet, according to
you, the Quran is a miracle for all. One can find in the post-classical
Arabs excellence in their speech”, the following can be said in reply, “The
Bedouin had developed and had full command of the complete grammatical
structure of Arabic but among the post-classical Arabs there are none who
can use the full structure of the language. The Bedouin Arabs were more
powerful in their use of the full language. Since they failed in the
imitation of the Quran, so the post-classical Arabs must fail to an even
greater extent.”‘ (Textual Sources for the Study of Islam, tr. and ed. by
Andrew Rippin and Jan Knappart)
[4]
The argument was made by al-Khattabi (d.388 AH).
Location www.IslamReligion.com
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