THE QURAN - THE MIRACLE GIVEN TO THE PROPHET
Every Prophet is given a miracle—a sign. The miracle of the Prophet of Islam is the Quran. The prophethood of Muhammad was to be valid until the Last Day. It was imperative, therefore, that his miracle also be one which would last for all time. The Quran was, therefore, assigned to the Prophet as his everlasting miracle.
The Prophet’s opponents demanded miracles, such as those performed by previous prophets, but the Quran stated clearly that such miracles would not be forthcoming. The Quran even had this to say to the Prophet:
If you find their aversion hard to bear (and would like to show them a miracle), seek a burrow in the earth or a ladder to the sky by which you may bring them a sign. Had God pleased, He would have guided them, one and all. Do not be one of the ignorants.
Instead, the revealed Book of God was made into Prophet’s miracle:
They ask: “Why has his Lord given no sign to him?” Say: “Signs are in the hands of God. My mission is only to give plain warning.” Is it not enough for them that We have revealed to you the Book which is recited to them? Indeed, there is a blessing and an admonition to true believers.
There are many different aspects of the Quran’s miraculous nature. However, here we are going to concentrate on just three:
- The language of the Quran—Arabic—has, unlike other international languages, remained a living form of communication over the ages.
- The Quran is unique among divine scriptures in that its text has remained intact in its original form.
- The Quran challenged its doubters to produce a book like it. But unfortunately, no one has been able to take up this challenge and produce anything comparable to the Book of God.
The languages in which all the ancient scriptures were revealed have been locked in history archives. The only exception is Arabic, the language of the Quran, which is still current in the world today. Millions of people still speak and write the language in which the Quran was revealed nearly 1500 years ago. This provides stunning proof of the miraculous nature of the Quran, for there is no other book in history which has been able to impact its language; no other book has moulded a whole language according to its style and maintained it in that form over the centuries.
Take the Injil, known as the New Testament, of which the oldest extant copy is in Greek and not Aramaic, the language which Jesus is thought to have spoken. That means we only possess a translated account of what the Prophet Jesus said and did, and that too, in ancient Greek, which is considerably different from the modern language. By the end of the 19th century, the Greek language had changed so much that the meaning of at least 550 words in the New Testament—about 12% of the entire text—was challenged. At that time, a German expert, Adolf Deissman, discovered some ancient scrolls in Egypt. From them, it emerged that biblical Greek was, in fact, a colloquial version of classical Greek. This language was spoken in Palestine during the first century A.D. Deissman was able to attach meanings to some of the unknown words, but there are another fifty words whose meanings are still unknown.
Ernest Renan (1823 - 1894) extensively researched Semitic languages. He wrote a book on their vocabularies, in which he had this to say about the Arabic language:
The Arabic language is the most wonderful event in human history. Unknown during the classical period, it suddenly emerged as a complete language. After this, it underwent no noticeable changes, so one cannot define it as an early or a late stage. It is just the same today as it was when it first appeared.
In acknowledging this “astonishing event of human history”, Renan, a French orientalist, acknowledges the miraculous nature of the Quran. It was the Quran’s phenomenal literary style, which preserved the Arabic language from alteration, such as other languages, have undergone. The noted Christian writer Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914) is one of the scholars to have recognized this fact. In a book on Arabic literature, he writes:
No religious book has had such an impact on the language in which it was written as the Quran has had on Arabic literature.
World languages have changed so much over the ages that no expert in any modern language can understand its ancient form without a dictionary. There have been two leading causes of language alteration—upheavals in a nation’s social order and the development of a language’s literature. Over the centuries, these factors have worked in Arabic, just as in other languages. The difference is that they have not been able to change the structure of the Arabic language. The Arabic spoken today is the same as that which was current in Makkah when the Quran was revealed. Homer’s Iliad (850 B.C.), Tulsi Das’ Ramayan (A.D. 1623), and the dramas of Shakespeare (1564-1616) are considered literary masterpieces of their respective languages. They have been read and performed continuously from their compilation until today. But they have been unable to keep the languages they were written from alteration. The Greek of Homer, the Sanskrit of Tulsi Das and even the English of Shakespeare are now classical rather than modern languages.
The Quran is the only book to have moulded a language in its form and maintained it in that form over the ages. There have been various intellectual and political upheavals in Arab countries, but the Arabic language had remained as it was when the Quran was revealed. No Arab social order has been altered in any way in the Arabic tongue. This fact indicates that the Quran came from a supernatural source. One does not have to look any further than the history of the last 1500 years to see the miraculous nature of the Book revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
Social Upheavals
The example of Latin shows how social upheavals affect languages. Though Italy became the centre of Latin in the latter days, it was not originally a product of that country. Around the 12th century B.C., during the Iron Age, many central European tribes spread out into surrounding regions. Some of them, especially the Alpine tribes, entered Italy and settled in and around Rome. Their language mixed with the language of Rome, and that was how Latin was formed. In the third century B.C. Lubus Andronicus translated some Greek tales and dramas into Latin, thus making it a literary language. The Roman Empire was established in the first century B.C., and Latin became the official language. The spread of Christianity even further reinforced the strength of Latin. With the support of religious and political institutions and backed by social and economic forces, Latin continued to spread until it eventually came to cover almost the whole of ancient Europe. At the time of St. Augustine, Latin was at its peak, and right up to the Middle Ages, it was considered the primary international language.
The 8th century A.D. was an age of Muslim conquest. The Romans were forced to take refuge in Constantinople, which became the capital of the eastern half of the Empire, until in 1453, the Turks took Constantinople and banished the Romans from this, their last stronghold. The decline of the Roman Empire enabled various local languages to flourish, notably French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Latin, the parent language, strongly influenced all of them but remained only as the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. No longer a living tongue, it retained only historical interest and continued to be used to explain technical, legal and scientific terms. For instance, without a good grasp of Latin, one cannot read Newton’s Principia in the original.
Every classical language followed much the same pattern, changing along with social circumstances until, eventually, the original language gave way to another, completely changed one. Ethnic integration, political revolutions, and cultural clashes always left a deep mark on the language they affected. These factors have been at work in Arabic over the last 1500 years, but amazingly, it has remained intact. This extraordinary resilience of the Arabic language is entirely due to the miraculous spell the Quran has cast on it.
In A.D. 70, some Jewish tribes left Syria and settled in Madinah, where the Arabic-speaking ‘Amaliqah tribe lived. Along with the ‘Amaliqahs, the Jews took Arabic as their language, but the Arabic they spoke differed from standard Arabic, retaining a strong Hebrew influence. After the coming of Islam, Arabs settled in many parts of Africa and Asia where other languages besides Arabic were spoken. However, their intermingling with other races did not affect the Arabic language, which remained in its original state.
In the very first century, after the revelation of the Quran, Arabic was exposed to the sort of forces which cause a language to alter radically. This was when Islam spread among various Arab tribes, who began to congregate in major Muslim cities. There was a considerable variety of intonation and accents among the different Arab tribes. So much so that Abu ‘Amr ibn al-’Ula’ was moved to remark that the “Himyar tribe do not speak our language; their vocabulary is quite different from ours.” ‘Umar ibn Khattab once took before the Prophet an Arab he had heard reciting the Quran. The Arab had been pronouncing the words of the Quran in such a strange manner that ‘Umar was unable to make out what part of the Book of God he was reading. The Prophet once spoke to a visiting delegation of some Arab tribe in their dialect. It seemed to ‘Ali as if the Prophet was speaking in a foreign tongue.
The main reason for this difference was the variation in accent. For instance, the Banu Tamim, who lived in the eastern part of Najd, could not say the letter ‘j’ (jiim) and used to pronounce it as ‘y’ (Ye) instead. The word for a mosque (masjid), they used to pronounce ‘masyid’, and instead of shajarat’ (trees), they would say’ sharat’. ‘Q’ (Qaaf) they pronounced as ‘j’, (je) calling a ‘tariq’ (road) a ‘tarij’, a ‘sadiq’ (friend) a ‘sadij’, ‘qadr’ (value) ‘jadr’ and ‘qasim’ (distributor) ‘jasim’. According to standard linguistic patterns, the coming together of tribes who spoke such varying dialects should have initiated a new process of change in Arabic, but this was not to be. The supreme eloquence of the language of the Quran guarded Arabic against any such transformation. What happened instead has been explained in the following words by Dr Ahmad Hasan Zayyat:
After the coming of Islam, the Arabic language did not remain the monopoly of one nation. It became the language of all those who entered the faith.
Then these Arab Muslims left their native land, conquering territory from Kashghar in the east to Gibraltar in the west. Persian, Qibti, Berber, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Suryani were among the languages spoken by the peoples they came into contact with. Some of these nations were politically and culturally more advanced than the Arabs. Iraq, the bastion of an ancient civilization and the cultural centre of major tribes, was one of the countries they entered. They mingled with the Iranians, masters of one of the world’s two great empires. The highly advanced Roman civilization and expanding Christian religion were two forces that clashed. Among the countries they occupied was Syria, where Phoenician, Ghassanid, Greek, Egyptian and Cana’anian tribes had left behind great traditions in literature and ethics. Then there was Egypt, the meeting place of oriental and occidental philosophy. These factors were enough to transform the Arabic language, as had been the case with other tongues exposed to similar forces. But they were rendered ineffective by the Quran, a specimen of such unrivalled literary excellence that no power could shake the language in which it had been written.
With the conquests of Islam, Arabic no longer belonged to one people alone; it became the language of several nations and races. When the “ajamis” of Asia and Africa accepted Islam, they gradually adopted Arabic as their language. Naturally, these new converts were not as proficient in speaking the language as the Arabs of old. Then the Arabs, in their turn, were affected by the language spoken by their new co-religionists. The deterioration of Arabic was especially evident in large, cosmopolitan cities, where there was more intermingling of races. First, it was the rank and file, those who did not pay much attention to the finer points of linguistics, who were affected. But the cultural elite did not remain immune either. A man once came to the court of Ziyad ibn Umayyah and lamented. “Our fathers have died, leaving small children,” with both “fathers” and “children” in the wrong case. Mistakes of this nature became commonplace, yet the Arabic language remained essentially the same. Shielded by the Quran’s supreme eloquence, written Arabic was not corrupted by the degradation of the spoken version. It remained cast in the mould of the Quran.
To prove the Quran’s miraculous nature, one has only to look at all the traumatic experiences that Arabic has been through over the last 1500 years. If it had not been for the protective wing of the Quran, the Arabic language would indeed have been altered. Yet, the unsurpassable model that the Quran established remained the immutable touchstone of standard Arabic.
Hijrah’s fall of the Umayyad dynasty in the second century significantly threatened the Arabic language. The Umayyads had been a purely Arab dynasty. Strong supporters of Arab nationalism, they promoted Arabic literature and language almost to the point of partiality. Their capital was situated in Damascus, in the Arab heartland. In their time, both the military and the civil administration were controlled by Arabs.
Now the Abbasids took over the reins of power. Iranian support had brought the caliphate to the Abbasids. It was inevitable then that the Iranians should maintain a strong influence on their administration. This influence led to the capital being moved to Baghdad, on the threshold of Persia. The Abbasids gave the Iranians a free hand in government affairs but looked down on the Arabs and their civilization and made conscious efforts to weaken them, unlike the Umayyads, who had always preferred Arabs for high posts.
With the wane of pro-Arab favouritism, Iranians, Turks, Syrians, Byzantine and Berber elements could gain control over all affairs of society and state. Marriages between Arabs and non-Arabs became commonplace. With the mixing of Aryan and Semitic civilizations, the Arabic language and culture faced a new crisis. The grandsons of the emperors and lords of Persia arose to resurrect the civilization of their forefathers.
These events had a profound effect on the Arabic language. The state that it had reached by the time of the poet Mutanabbi (A.D. 915-965) is expressed in the following lines:
The buildings of Iran excel all others in beauty. The season of spring excels over all other seasons. An Arab youth goes amongst them, His face, hands, tongue, a stranger in their midst. They say Solomon used to converse with the jinns but were he to visit the Iranians; he would need a translator.
The Quran’s literary greatness alone kept Arabic from being permanently scarred by these upheavals. On the contrary, the language always returned to its Quranic base, like a ship which, after weathering temporary storms on the high seas, returns to the safety of its harbour.
During the reign of the caliph Mutawakkil (A.H. 207-247), large numbers of ‘Ajamis—especially Iranians and Turks—entered Arab territory. Then, in 656, the Mongolian warrior Hulaku Khan sacked Baghdad. Later the Islamic empire received a further setback when, in 898, Andalusia fell to the Christians. The Fatimid dynasty, which had held sway in Egypt and Syria, did not last long either: in 923, they were replaced by the Ottoman Turks in large stretches of Arab territory. The centre of the Islamic government moved from Cairo to Constantinople; the official language became Turkish instead of Arabic, which continued to assimilate many foreign words and phrases.
The Arab world spent five hundred and fifty years under the banner of Ajami (non-Arab) kings. Persian, Turkish and Mughal rulers even attempted to erase all traces of the Arabic language. Arabic libraries were burnt, schools destroyed, and scholars of the language found themselves in disgrace. The Ottoman emperors launched an anti-Arabic campaign, fittingly called “Tatrik al-‘Arab” (Turkisation of Arabs), by the well-known reformer Jamaluddin Afghani (1838-97). But no effort was strong enough to inflict any permanent scar on the face of Arabic. Fierce attacks were launched on the Arabic language and literature by the Tartars in Bukhara and Baghdad, the Crusaders in Palestine and Syria, and other Europeans in Andalusia. According to the history of other languages, these assaults on Arab culture should have been sufficient to eradicate the Arabic language. One would have expected Arabic to have followed the path of different languages and merged with other Semitic tongues. Indeed, it would be accurate to say that if Arabic had not come up against Turkish ignorance and Persian prejudice, it would be spoken throughout the Muslim world today. Still, its very survival in the Arab world was due solely to the miraculous effect of the Quran. The greatness of the Quran compelled people to remain attached to Arabic. It inspired some Arab scholars—Ibn Manzur (A.H. 630-711) and Ibn Khaldun (A.H. 732-808) being two that spring to mind—to produce, in defiance of the government of the day, works of outstanding literary and academic excellence.
Napoleon’s entry into Cairo (1798) ushered in the age of the printing press in the Middle East. Education became the order of the day. The Arabic language was invested with new life. Yet the centuries of battering that Arabic had received were bound to leave its mark: instead of pure Arabic, a mixture of Arabic and Turkish had been taken as the official language in Egypt and Syria.
The situation changed again with the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. They opposed Arabic with all their strength, prescribing compulsory English in schools and eliminating other languages from syllabi. The French did the same in areas over which they had gained control. With the colonial powers forcing their subjects to learn their languages, Arabic lived in the shadow of English and French for over one hundred years. Yet it remained in its original form. Indeed, it assimilated new words—the word “dabbabah” meaning tank, for instance, which had previously been used for a simple battering ram. New styles of writing emerged. If anyone were to write a book about why people adopt Islam today, he might call it. “Li madha aslamna” (Why we accepted Islam?), whereas rhythmical and decorative titles, were preferred in the old days. Many words were adopted by the Arabic language—the English word “doctor”, for example. But such changes were just on the surface. Arabic proper remained the same as it had been centuries ago when the Quran was revealed.
Literary Advancement
Once in a while, writers of outstanding status appear on a language’s literary scene. When this happens, the language they write changes, for their literary masterpieces influence the mode of popular expression. In this way, languages continually pass through progressive evolutionary stages until they become quite different from their original form. With Arabic, this did not happen. At the very outset of Arabic history, the Quran set a literary standard that could not be excelled. Arabic maintained the style set for it by the Quran. No masterpiece comparable to the Quran was destined to be produced after it, so Arabic remained cast in the mould of that divine symphony.
Take the example of English. In the 7th century A.D., it was just an ordinary local dialect, not geared to express profound intellectual thought. For another five hundred years, this situation continued. The Normans conquered England in 1066, and when the founding father of the English language—Geoffrey Chaucer—was born around 1340, the official language of their court was still French. Chaucer had command of Latin, French and Italian, besides his native English. This, along with his extraordinary gifts of scholarship, enabled him to make English into an academic language. To use Ernest Hauser’s words, he gave the English language a “firm boost” with his Canterbury Tales. Chaucer transformed a dialect into a language, paving the way for fresh progress in times to come.
For two hundred years, English writers and poets followed Chaucer’s guidelines. Then, when William Shakespeare (1558-1625) appeared on the scene, English took another step forward. His dramas and poems set a new literary standard, enabling English to march further forward. The coming of the scientific age two hundred years later had a tremendous impact on every stratum of society. The language now began to follow the dictates of science. Prose became more popular than poetry, and factual expression was more effective than story-telling. Dozens of poets and writers, from Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) to T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), represented 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 and 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 tongue without the aid of dictionaries and commentaries.
There is only one exception to his universal trend: Arabic. The claim of the Quran that no one would ever be able to write a book has been borne out to the letter. For further proof, one need only look at the various attempts to produce a work equal to the Quran made over the centuries. But, unfortunately, all attempts have failed dismally. Musaylimah ibn Habib, Tulayhah ibn Khuwaylid, Nadr ibn al-Harith, Ibn al-Rawandi, Abu’l ‘Ala’ al-Ma’rri, Ibn al-Muqaffa’, Al-Mutanabbi, and many others, have tried their hand at it but their efforts, like Musaylimah’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 can write a work like it 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 in the Quran. The standard that the Quran set has never been improved upon. Arabic has remained on the course that the Quran set for it. If the Quran had ever been bettered, Arabic would not have remained stable as it has. It would have received a new impetus and set a new course.
The Quran’s impact on Arabic is like that of a writer who produces a work of unsurpassable literary excellence at the 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 was revealed in the Arabic current then, casting it 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 expanding the Arabic language. The use of the word “One” (ahad) in the 112th chapter of the Quran, entitled “The Unity,” is a good example. Previously it had been used in the genitive to express “one of us”, for example, or the “first day” of the week, Saturday or Yawm al-Ahad. It was used for general negations, as in maja’ni ahadun—” no one came to see me.” But in using ahad as an attribute of Almighty God, the Quran put the word to novel use. The Quran brought many foreign words into Arabic usage, for instance, istabraq from Persian, qaswarah from Abyssinian, sirat from Greek, yamm from Syrian, ghassaq from Turkish, qistas from Latin, malakut from Aramaic and kafur from Hindi. The Quran tells us (25:60) that the polytheists of Makkah were baffled at the word rahman. They used to say, “What is this rahman? This was because the word was not Arabic. It had been taken from the Sabaean and Hamiri languages. The Christians of Yemen and Abyssinia used to call God rahamnan. The Makkans considered the word foreign when it appeared in the Quran in an Arabicized form. They enquired what rahman meant, being unaware of its linguistic background. Over one hundred non-Arabic words were used in the Quran, taken from languages as far apart as Persian, Latin, Nabataean, Hebrew, Syrian, and Coptic.
Although the Quran was revealed mainly in the language of the Quraysh, words used by other Arab tribes were also included. ‘Abdullah ibn al-’Abbas, a Qurayshi Muslim, was puzzled when the word fatir appeared in the Quran. “I did not know what the expression ‘Originator of the heavens and the earth’ meant,” he explained. “Then I heard an Arab saying that he had ‘originated’ a well when he had just started digging it, and I knew what the word fatir meant.” Abu Hurayrah said that he had never heard the word sikkin until he heard it in the chapter, ‘Joseph’, of the Quran. “We always used to call a knife (mudiyah),” he said.
As Jalaluddin Suyuti has pointed out in al-Itqan, many words were pronounced differently by various Arab tribes. The Quran used some of these words in their most refined literary form. The Quraysh, for instance, used the word a’ata for ‘he gave,’ while the Himyaris used to pronounce it anta. The Quran preferred a’ata to anta. Likewise, it chose ‘asabi’ rather than shanatir and dhi’b instead of kata’. The general trend of preferring Qurayshi forms was sometimes reversed, as in the phrase la yalitkum min a’malikum-” nothing will be taken away from your actions”—which was borrowed from the Banu ‘Abbas dialect.
In giving old Arabic words and expressions new depth and beauty, the Quran set a standard of literary excellence that no future writer could improve on. Moreover, it revised certain metaphors, rephrasing them more eloquently than had been heard before. This was how an ancient Arab poet described the impermanence of the world:
Even if he enjoys a long period of a secure life, every mother’s son will finally be carried aloft in a coffin.
The Quran put the same idea in the poignantly succinct words: “Every soul shall taste death.” Killing and plundering presented a major problem in ancient Arabia. Specific phrases had been coined to express the idea that only killing could end the killing, and these were considered highly eloquent in pre-Islamic days. “To kill some is to give life to the whole,” one of them went. “Kill more, so that there should be less killing” and “Killing puts an end to the killing” were other examples. The Quran said, “In [this law of] retribution there is life for you, O people of understanding.”
In pre-Quranic days, poetry was essential in Arabic and other world languages. Poetical expression of ideas was given pride of place in the literary arena. The Quran, however, left this beaten track and used prose instead of poetry. This in itself is proof that the Quran came from God, for in the 7th century A.D. who save God—who knows the future just as He knows the past—could know that prose rather than poetry should be chosen as the medium for divine scripture that was to last for all time. The Quran was addressed to future generations, and soon poetry would become less important as a mass communication medium. The rhetorical language was also very much in vogue before the Quran, but for the first time in literary history, the Quran introduced a factual rather than rhetorical style. The most famous topics for literary treatment had previously been military and romantic exploits. The Quran, on the contrary, featured a much broader spectrum, including matters of ethical, legal, scientific, psychological, economic, political and historical significance within its scope. In ancient times, parables were a popular mode of expression. Here too, the Quran trod new ground, adopting a more direct method of saying things. The reasoning employed in the Quran was also considerably different from that used in pre-Quranic times. Whereas purely theoretical, analogical proof was all the world had known before this, the Quran introduced empirical, scientific reasoning. And to crown all its achievements, the Quran expressed all this in a refined literary style, which proved imperishable in times to come.
There was an ancient Arab saying that “the sweetest poem was the one with the most lies.” The Quran changed this introducing a new mode of “articulate speech” (55:4) based on real facts rather than hypothetical fables. Now Arabic followed the Quran’s lead. Pre-Islamic Arabic literature was collected and compiled with the preservation and understanding of the language of the Quran in mind. Great departments of learning, facilitating knowledge of the Quran and explaining its orders and prohibitions, came into existence. Learning Arabic grammar, syntax and etymology, Islamic theology and traditions, and Quranic studies were all aimed at helping us understand the Quran’s message. Even the subjects of history and geography were initially taken up as part of the Arabs’ attempt to understand and practice the teachings of the Quran. There is no other example in the history of any book with such an enormous impact on people and their language.
The Quran became known as a superb literary masterpiece through its development and improvement of the Arabic language. Anyone who knows Arabic can see the unique quality of the Quran’s style compared to any other work of Arabic literature. The Quran is written in a divine style different from anything humans can aspire to. We will close this chapter by relating a story that portrays the difference between God’s work and men’s. It is taken from Sheikh Tantawi’s commentary of the Quran:
On 13 June 1932,” Tantawi writes, “I met an Egyptian writer, Kamel Keilany, who told me an amazing story. One day he was with an American orientalist, Finkle, with whom he enjoyed a deep intellectual relationship. “Tell me, are you still among those who consider the Quran a miracle?” whispered Finkle in Keilany’s ear, adding a laugh to indicate his ridicule of such belief. He thought that Muslims could only hold this belief in blind faith. It could not be based on any sound, objective reasoning. Thinking that his blow had gone home, Finkle was visibly pleased with himself. Seeing his attitude, Keilany, too, started laughing. “Before issuing any pronouncement on the style of the Quran,” he said, “We should first look and see if we can produce anything comparable. Only when we have tried our hand will we be able to say conclusively whether humans can produce anything comparable to the Quran?”
Keilany then invited Finkle to join him in putting a Quranic idea into Arabic words. The idea he chose was: that Hell is exceptionally vast. Finkle agreed, and both men sat down with pen and paper. Between them, they produced about twenty Arabic sentences. “Hell is extremely vast,” “Hell is vaster than you can imagine,” “Man’s intellect cannot fathom the vastness of Hell, “ and many examples of this nature were some of the sentences they produced. They tried until they could think of no other sentence to express this idea. Keilany looked at Finkle triumphantly. “Now that we have done our best, we shall be able to see how the Quran stands above all work of men,” he said. “What, has the Quran expressed this idea more eloquently?” Finkle enquired. “We are like little children compared to the Quran,” Keilany told him. Amazed, Finkle asked what was in the Quran. Keilany recited this verse from Surah Qaf: “On the Day when We will ask Hell: ‘Are you full?’ And Hell will answer: ‘Are there any more?’” Finkle was startled on hearing this verse; amazed at the supreme eloquence of the Quran, he openly admitted defeat, “You were right, quite right,” he said, “I unreservedly concede defeat.” “‘For you to acknowledge the truth,” Keilany replied, “is nothing strange, for you are a man of letters, well aware of the importance of style in language.” This particular orientalist was fluent in English, German, Hebrew and Arabic and had spent all his life studying the literature of these languages.
