The Final Prophet by Mohammad Elshinawy

According to both the highest authorities of the Arabic language in early Arabia, and its foremost experts today, there is consensus on the literary uniqueness of the Qur’an. Professor Martin Zammit, the author of A Comparative Lexical Study of Qur’anic Arabic, says, “Notwithstanding the literary excellence of some of the long pre-Islamic poems… the Qur’an is definitely on a level of its own as the most eminent written manifestation of the Arabic language.”407 Arthur J. Arberry (d. 1969), a British scholar of Arabic literature, wrote in his popular translation of the Qur’an, “The rhetoric and rhythm of the Koran are so characteristic, so powerful, so highly emotive, that any version whatsoever is bound in the nature of things to be but a poor copy of the glittering splendour of the original.”408

During the Prophet’s صلى الله عليه وسلم time, Arabs were people who valued language almost as much as life itself.409 Before Islam, they would derogatorily call non-Arabs ʿajam (literally: silent or speechless), implying that others were not equally alive, or were deficient, since they could not articulate with the same lucidity and emotiveness. To further illustrate this belief that “language equals life,” the eleventh-century poet Ibn Rashīq (d. 999) says, Whenever a poet emerged in an Arab tribe, other tribes would come to congratulate, feasts would be prepared, the women would play lutes as they do at weddings, and old and young men would all rejoice at the good news— for this was a shield for their honor, a defense of their lineages, and an immortalization of their triumphs. The Arabs used to congratulate each other only on the birth of a child and when a poet rose among them.410

Ground for such festivities were understandable, since, as Navid Kermani says, Old Arabic poetry is a highly complex phenomenon.

The vocabulary, grammatical idiosyncrasies, and strict norms were passed down from generation to generation, and only the most gifted students fully mastered the language. A person had to study for years, sometimes even decades, under a master poet before laying claim to the title of poet.411

Everyone else was validated by what they retained in memory of these odes and speeches that captured the history, morals, and wisdoms of this otherwise primitive desert civilization.

This was the historical context within which the Qur’an was revealed. It descended amid people at the pinnacle of rhetorical expression. Virtually overnight, these same people experienced a Qur’an from Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم that was pure in its Arabic, unprecedented in its eloquence, but mysteriously independent of the poetry or prose they knew and had mastered. Dr Bassam Saeh explains, ...the miraculousness of the Qur’an lies in this very paradox: the paradox of its being truly Arabic, and its being, at one and the same time, a new language. This might appear to be illogical. However, the logic of miracle inheres in precisely the fact that it surpasses logic.

A miracle that rests on logic ceases to be a miracle.412

The prideful Arabs could not explain how they collectively failed the Qur’anic challenge to produce a single chapter with merely “similar” literary features, according to their own biased judges, when its shortest chapter is only ten words,413 when they were the masters of Arabic, and when Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم brought over 6,000 verses of it. But that was not all. What dealt the killer blow to the Prophet’s opponents in this standoff, leaving absolutely no room for further doubt, was the fact that he صلى الله عليه وسلم was unlettered to begin with. As Allah says, “And you did not recite before it any scripture, nor did you inscribe one with your right hand. Otherwise, the falsifiers would have had [cause for] doubt.”414 It was an utter enigma, one that ultimately forced the Prophet’s صلى الله عليه وسلم detractors to settle on the accusation of him being a magician,415 unwittingly conceding that there was indeed something supernatural about this Book.

Some critics argue that while the Qur’an is a literary masterpiece, this does not mean that it is supernatural. They claim that every civilization has its unequaled works of literature, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets in English and Homer’s Iliad in Greek, and the Qur’an is no different. However, this view ignores a myriad of major differences between the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم and Shakespeare:416

Unlike the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم, Shakespeare was educated in both Greek and Latin and had, alongside his mentors, access to libraries of books that he built on for his own writings.

1. Shakespeare earned a living as a professional playwright and continued refining his craft with each dramatic production, while the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم was never reported to utter a single full couplet of poetry in his entire life,417 nor was it possible for him to retract any word of the Qur’an for quality control once it was spoken to his vast Muslim and non-Muslim audiences.

2. Sonnets were known and produced for centuries before Shakespeare, while the Qur’an had a unique compositional structure that differed from every pattern of writing or speech used by Arabia’s master poets.418

3. Unlike Shakespeare, whose hallmark style and vocabulary permeate all his writings, the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم brought the world a Qur’an whose style differs from the Hadith tradition—the everyday statements of Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم. While this was noticed by his contemporaries, more than a dozen experiments have since been conducted to establish this objectively. Stylometry is the statistical analysis of variations in literary style to discriminate between one writer and another.

It has been utilized to distinguish between the authentic and pseudonymous letters of Paul in the New Testament, and to prove that the Hadith and the Qur’an must have had two different authors. Researchers of the latter were forced to accept that it would be impossible for any human being to employ such extensive self-policing of their language for a lifetime.

For instance, they found that 62% of the words from Ṣaḥīḥ al- Bukhārī, a voluminous collection of Hadith, do not appear in the Qur’an, and 83% of Qur’anic terms do not exist in Hadith.419

4. Shakespeare’s sonnets were not uniformly eloquent, but instead had segments of distinct brilliance. In contrast, the Arabs who took great pride in their naqd (literary critique)

tradition, a genre in which they brutally scrutinized each other’s poetry to identify suboptimal word choices, never identified a single passage in the Qur’an that could be improved.420

5. Shakespeare and his peers never considered his work beyond the reach of human effort; it was but the champion—to some—in an arena of worthy competitors. In fact, Professor Hugh Craig of Newcastle University ranked Shakespeare as the seventh-greatest English-speaking playwright, behind Webster, Dekker, Peele, Marlowe, Jonson, and Greene.421 In contrast, the Qur’an shamed its deniers and challenged them at every turn to try to create anything that merely resembled it;422 and this challenge has never been met. As Allah says, And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down upon Our servant [Muhammad], then produce a sūrah the like thereof and call upon your witnesses other than Allah, 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 disbelievers.423

6. Shakespeare enjoyed the creative liberties of fictional storytelling. As for the Qur’an, entertainment is not its goal.

It addresses theology, philosophy, history, and law—stiff technical discussions that do not ordinarily have mass appeal.

The Qur’an asserted complex existential truths and taught a nuanced morality with a remarkable blend of precision and graceful elegance. It deconstructed prevalent wrongs that had become normalized and revealed the hypocrisy within—all uncomfortable narratives that would not be expected to garner widespread embrace. The Qur’an also repeats its themes quite often (to inculcate and reinforce its value system), a technique that skilled authors generally try to avoid, but with such artistic variation each time that leaves its rhetorical richness unblemished.

7. Unlike the entertainment suitable for a stage in London in the seventeenth century, the Qur’an as a religious text had to resonate with the young and the old, the premodern and postmodern mind, the eastern and western personality, and the spiritually versus intellectually inclined. When analyzing the effect of the Qur’an on the vast spectrum of hearts and minds, across the globe and across generations, no other text in human history has fascinated such a wide range of people.

In America today, for instance, a Qur’an recitation competition will be attended by all segments of the Muslim community. On the other hand, an English play by Shakespeare will find almost no appreciation among the common man and only attract the college-educated middle-to-upper class elite.

8. Shakespeare had decades of deliberation to decide what to include and omit from his works. Contrast this with the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم, who would convey verses from the Qur’an in response to people’s unscripted inquiries. For instance, there are thirteen passages in the Qur’an that begin with “And they ask you [O Prophet] about… Say…”424 Furthermore, he صلى الله عليه وسلم would receive fresh Qur’anic revelations in the most stressful conditions, at times while bleeding after an attack or mourning his deceased relatives, specifically pertaining to events that had just taken place. Should not such spontaneous “productions” of the Qur’an necessitate a disparity in eloquence between them and those written under serene candlelight, after the events have unfolded and the emotional turbulence has quieted?

9. Shakespeare must have written his works in a linear fashion, building from the ground up, just as any author would, and was free to decide from the onset how each drama would begin and end. The Qur’an, however, was assembled like a jigsaw puzzle over twenty-three years. The order of the Qur’an today does not reflect the chronology of its revelation, but rather the later designated location for each passage within its respective chapter. This means that the Qur’an did not just exhibit fascinating consistency in its structure,425 despite being spoken not written, but was somehow designed with interspersed additions, of various themes and lengths, many of which addressed unpredictable external events impromptu, and yet all this never disrupted its seamless tapestry.

While it may be difficult for many people to grasp how any work of language can be miraculous, al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013)

argues in his book, I‘jāz al-Qurʾān (The Inimitability of the Qur’an), that it suffices to consider the reaction of the Qur’an’s first audience. Instead of outperforming the unlettered man in what was their strongest suit, thereby ending his religion in its infancy by “simply” responding to his challenge of producing something like the Qur’an, they spent fortunes trying to smear his name and worked tirelessly to prevent a single Qur’anic verse from reaching the ears and hearts of visitors to Mecca.

They disavowed their codes of chivalry and tribal honor—a massive undertaking for early Arabs—to starve his followers, torture his supporters, and ultimately wage wars against their fellow clansmen.426 Failed by their words, they felt compelled to reach for their swords. It was not just because their great-est poets like Labīd ibn Rabīʿah were now converting to Islam and retiring from poetry, but due to them echoing in private that rivaling the Qur’an was impossible. When al-Walīd ibn al-Mughīrah—a staunch enemy of Islam until his death—was asked to critique the Qur’an, he responded, And what can I possibly say? There is not a single man among you who is more versed in prose or poetry than I, or in the poems of even the jinn. By God, what he says bears no resemblance to any of these things. By God, his statement which he utters has a sweetness to it, and a charm hovers over it. Its highest parts (surface meanings) are fruitful and its depths gush forth without end. It dominates and cannot be dominated, and it will certainly crush all that is beneath it.427