The very language in which it is written—Arabic—is a kind of miracle, being an astonishing exception to the historical rule that a language cannot survive in the same form for more than 500 years. In the course of five centuries, a language changes so radically that the coming generations find it increasingly difficult to understand the works of their distant predecessors. For instance, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer    (1342-1400), the father of English poetry, and the plays and poetry Of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), one of the greatest writers of the English language, have become almost unintelligible to twentieth-century readers, and are now read almost exclusively as part of college curricula with the help of glossaries, dictionaries and ‘translations.’

But the history of the Arabic language is strikingly different, having withstood the test of time for no less than 1500 years. Wording and style have, of course, undergone some development, but not to such an extent that words should lose their original meaning. Supposing someone belonging to the Quranic times of ancient Arabia could be reborn today, the form of language in which he would express himself would be as understandable to modern Arabs as it was to his own contemporaries.

It is as if the Quran had placed a divine imprint upon Arabic, arresting it in its course so that it should remain understandable right up to the last day. This being so, the Quran is never just going to collect dust on some obscure ‘Classical Literature’ shelf, but will be read by, and give inspiration to people for all time to come.

In the field of science, despite the great and rapid advances in knowledge in recent years, we come back to what was asserted in the Quran, so many centuries ago, as having arrived at the quintessence of the matter. Just as the Arabic language seems to have been crystallized at a particular point in time—in fact, at the moment of divine revelation, so also does science seem to have been arrested in its course, the Quran having the final say on matters which for centuries lay beyond man’s knowledge and which still, in many important cases, elude man’s intellectual grasp. The most significant of these is the origin of the universe.

Source: Quran: An Abiding Wonder