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WillowOne's Positions

Inimitability of the Quran

Form

The argument from i'jaz, the inimitability of the Qur'an:

  1. The Qur'an challenges its doubters to produce a single chapter like it (2:23, 10:38, 17:88).
  2. In fourteen centuries, no one has met the challenge.
  3. A text that no human can imitate cannot have a human author.
  4. Therefore the Qur'an is the word of God.

My Positions

  1. The challenge has no criteria for success and no judge, so it cannot be met and cannot fail. A test that cannot be failed is not a test (Popper's Razor).
  2. Literary excellence, even if granted, is evidence of a gifted author, not of a divine one. The same argument would establish the divinity of Homer, Shakespeare and the Tao Te Ching.
  3. The argument is addressed almost entirely to people who cannot assess it. Most Muslims do not read classical Arabic, and most non-Muslims who do are not persuaded.

Notes

  1. "Like it" by whose judgement? The challenge does not say what would count as a chapter like the Qur'an: the same rhyme scheme, the same rhetorical devices, the same effect on the reader, the same theological content? Every attempt is judged by Muslim scholars who hold in advance that the thing is impossible, and every attempt is rejected. The seventh-century contemporaries who did take up the challenge, such as the Yemeni prophet Musaylimah, are remembered as laughing stocks by the tradition that defeated them, which is not the same as having lost the contest.
  2. Inimitability is not a property of texts. No work of literature can be reproduced by someone else, because that is what it means to be the work of a particular author. King Lear has not been equalled in four hundred years of trying, and no one concludes that Shakespeare was God. The Qur'an's power in Arabic is real, as the power of any great text in its own language is real. It is evidence that its author was very good at Arabic.
  3. The audience problem. The argument is deployed in English to people who speak no Arabic at all, who are invited to believe that an experience they cannot have proves something they cannot check. Native Arabic speakers who are Christian, secular or ex-Muslim exist in their millions and report no such compulsion. Belief in the Qur'an's inimitability correlates perfectly with prior belief in the Qur'an, which is what one would expect if the judgement were downstream of the faith rather than a reason for it.
  4. Circularity. The doctrine of i'jaz was developed in the ninth and tenth centuries by theologians who began from the Qur'an's divinity and sought a reason for it. The premise that the book is inimitable is a conclusion from the belief, presented as its foundation (Circular Reasoning).
  5. The argument's family. It is the Islamic cousin of the Experiential Argument: the believer reports an overwhelming response to the text and treats the response as evidence about the text's origin. The response is evidence of a response.

Sources

  • Qur'an 2:23–24, 10:38, 11:13, 17:88, the "challenge verses"
  • Vasalou, S., "The Miraculous Eloquence of the Qur'an: General Trajectories and Individual Approaches", Journal of Qur'anic Studies 4 (2002)
  • Martin, R. C., "Inimitability", in Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān (Brill, 2002)

Also see