The Qur'an is inimitable

The Qur’an makes its challenge more than once and in different forms. It asks doubters to bring “ten sūrahs like it” (11:13), “a sūrah like it” (10:38), or “a statement like it” (52:34). At its strongest: “If mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Qur’ān, they could not produce the like of it” (17:88).

What exactly makes it inimitable has been discussed among Muslim scholars for centuries. Many located the miracle in its eloquence and the arrangement of its words. Others pointed to its reports about the unseen and the future. One early school held that people could in principle have matched it, but that God prevented them from doing so, a view called sarfa. Most later scholars rejected it, but that anyone held it shows that what makes the Qur’an inimitable was never self-evident, even within Islam.

None of this weakens the Qur’an’s beauty. It does mean that “no one can produce the like of it” needs to be explained before it can serve as evidence.

The miracle is said to lie in the Arabic. That puts it beyond the reach of most of humanity, and of most Muslims, who do not speak classical Arabic and cannot perceive the qualities that are said to make it unmatched. They accept the verdict on trust, from scholars they respect.

That does not fault anyone’s faith. A sign meant for all people that most of them cannot examine for themselves works differently from a sign anyone can check. You may have been moved by hearing the Qur’an recited, whether or not you know Arabic, and that experience is real. But the claim that it cannot be matched, if you do not read classical Arabic well, rests on what scholars who do have said, not on a comparison you have made yourself.

Judgments of beauty also vary with training, era, and devotion. A reader formed by the Qur’an from childhood, who has heard it recited in worship all their life, will hear it differently from a gifted Arab poet who does not believe in it. Both responses are real. Neither can tell you whether the book came from God.

A test settles a question only if both sides can agree on how it is scored. “Produce the like of it” leaves open what likeness means. Like it in eloquence, in form, in effect on the hearer, or in all of these at once, and who is to decide?

In practice, those who judge whether an attempt succeeds are scholars formed by the Qur’an, using standards of excellence drawn from the Qur’an. Attempts to meet the challenge have been made in several centuries, and they have been judged failures by the same tradition that issued it. That may be the right judgment. But a test scored only by the side that set it cannot show much to someone outside that side.

Every great literary tradition has works its readers consider unequaled. Greek readers have said this of Homer, English readers of Shakespeare, and Sanskrit readers of their own poets. Those works make claims that contradict each other and the Qur’an. If being unmatched showed divine origin, it would show too much.

Suppose the Qur’an is granted to be the most eloquent book in any language. That would show it is a literary achievement without equal. It would not show that what it says is true. A message can be magnificent and mistaken, and a plain message can be true.

The Qur’an itself proposes a test of content: “If it had been from [any] other than Allāh, they would have found within it much contradiction” (4:82). The Torah, which the Qur’an calls “guidance and light” (5:44), tests a prophet’s message by whether it comes true and whether it agrees with what God has already revealed (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). Those are tests of truth, not of style.

Some of what the Qur’an says can be weighed by ordinary means, because it concerns history. It says, for example, that Jesus was not crucified (4:157). Whether that happened is a question the historical evidence can address, whatever one thinks of the verse’s beauty. The page on whether Jesus was crucified looks at that evidence.

Christians do not claim that the New Testament is a literary miracle, and would not ask you to believe it because of its style. Its Greek is mostly the everyday language of the eastern Mediterranean, plain and sometimes rough.

The Christian faith stakes itself on an event. The earliest summary of its message says that Jesus died, was buried, was raised, and was seen by named people, “most of whom are still living” when Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Paul states what follows if it did not happen: “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith. In that case, we are also exposed as false witnesses about God” (1 Corinthians 15:14-15).

That is a claim that can fail. It concerns a public event at a known time and place, and it can be investigated by anyone, in any language, by the ordinary methods of history. This page does not show that the resurrection happened. It shows what kind of question the matter turns on: what happened, and how we would know.