CHAPTER TWO The Quran — The Prophet’s Miracle

now began to follow the dictates of science. Prose became more popular than poetry, factual expression more effective than story telling. Dozens of poets and writers from Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) to T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) were representative of this trend. They were the makers of the modern age of English literature through which we are now passing. The same thing happened with other languages. Writers, or groups of writers, kept on emerging who became more popular than their predecessors. Whenever they appeared, they steered the language on a new course. Eventually every language changed so much that it became impossible for a person to understand the ancient form of his own tongue without the aid of dictionaries and commentaries. There is only one exception to this universal trend, and that is Arabic. The claim of the Quran, that no one would ever be able to write a book like it, has been borne out to the letter. For further proof of this fact, one need only look at the various attempts to produce a work equal to the Quran that have been made over the centuries. All attempts have failed dismally. Musailema ibn Habib, Tulaiha ibn Khuwailid, Nadhr ibn al Harith, Ibn al Rawandi, Abu al Ala al Ma’arri, Ibn al Muqaffa, Al Mutanabbi, and many others, have tried their hand at it, but their efforts, like Musailema’s extraordinary reference to ‘God’s blessing upon pregnant women, extracting from them a sprightly life, from between the stomach and the foetal membrane look ridiculous when compared with the literary majesty of the Quran. But the greatest substantiation of the Quran’s claim that no one would be able to write a work like it (17:88) comes from what Ernest Renan has called the ‘linguistic miracle’ of the Arabic language. As with every other language, masters of Arabic - great poets and writers – have appeared over the ages. But, in the 1500 years since the Quran was revealed, no one has been able to produce a work that excelled it. Its standard has never been improved upon and Arabic has remained on the course set for it by the Quran. The impact that the Quran has had on Arabic is like that of a writer who produces a work of unsurpassable literary excellence at the very beginning of a language’s history. After such a figure has made his mark, no lesser writer can change the face of the language. The Quran, revealed in the Arabic current at the time was cast in a more elevated literary mould than had ever been seen before or afterwards. By making vital additions to traditional modes of expression, the Quran opened the way for expansion of the Arabic language. The use of the word ‘one’ (ahad) in the 112th chapter of the Quran, entitled ‘Oneness’, is a good example. Previously it had been used in the genitive to express ‘one of us’ for example, or for the ‘first day’ of the week, Saturday or Yaum al Ahad. It was used for general negations, as in ‘Ma Ja’ni ahadun’ ­‘no one came to see me.’ But in using ahad as an attribute of Almighty God, the