The Miraculous Nature of the Qur’an

Jul 21, 2020 | Feature Articles

The Qur’an includes a very peculiar claim, which differentiates it from all the other sacred books. In several verses with some difference in detail, God (Allah), as the speaker in the Qur’an, challenges all created beings, including humans and jinns, to bring about a work that resembles the Qur’an.1 On the basis of these verses, which are known as “the challenging verses” (ayat al-tahaddi), the Muslim tradition holds that the Qur’an is inimitable. Thus the Qur’an is miraculous in the sense that no created being can produce a text similar to it. This doctrine also known as “the inimitability of the Qur’an” (i’jaz al-Qur’an) is a deeply discussed issue in the Medieval Age among Muslim scholars.2 Oliver Leaman has recently revived this debate by offering a philosophical evaluation of Said Nursi’s understanding of the miraculousness of the Qur’an. Leaman argues that Nursi’s view is not immune to certain generic criticisms regarding this miraculousness phenomenon. Nonetheless, Leaman’s reading of Nursi is at best superficial, since he does not present Nursi’s view entirely. I argue that Leaman utilizes the straw man fallacy. As such Leaman’s critique directed towards Nursi, I’ll argue, is based on an incomplete presentation of the latter’s argumentation, criticizing Nursi on the basis of this incomplete presentation. In what follows, I’ll present Leaman’s evaluation and critique of Nursi. Secondly, I shall present the aspects of Nursi’s view overlooked by Leaman in his critique to show that Leaman’s criticisms are not applicable to it.

OLIVER LEAMAN ON NURSI’S VIEW OF THE MIRACULOUSNESS OF THE QUR’AN

To begin with, Leaman does not commit himself to the idea that the Qur’an is miraculous. He tries to understand how Muslim scholars, in general, and Said Nursi in particular, interpret the challenging verses and apprehend what exactly is inimitable and miraculous in the Qur’an. Leaman points out three main views on this issue in the history of Islamic intellectual thought.3 The first view puts forward the content of the Qur’an. This view, according to Leaman, appeals to the truths presented by the Qur’an, and to its maxims and rules appropriate for practical life. For Leaman, considering the content suggesting practical guidance is not a good way to understand the miraculousness of the Qur’an because he thinks that the practical suggestions and instructions of the text can be regarded as appropriate for us to follow if we are already convinced that the text is miraculous. Thus they cannot be used to justify the miraculousness of the Qur’an.4 The second view suggests looking at the style of the Qur’an to understand its miraculousness. This view concerns only the stylistic features of the Qur’an and purports to present it as the most excellent composition of sounds and words. For Leaman, this view completely appeals to our aesthetic judgment for deciding whether the Qur’an is miraculous or not. As aesthetic judgments are subjective, some people may consider the style of the Qur’an to be beautiful and others may reject it. Thus, being based on aesthetic criteria, this view is at best suggestive or persuasive, but not conclusive.5 The last view presents a more balanced approach and focuses both on the form and content of the Qur’an. For Leaman, this is a more plausible candidate for understanding the miraculousness phenomenon and worth examining in detail.6 Leaman considers Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani and Said Nursi to be significant proponents of the last view. Leaman concentrates on evaluating Nursi’s ideas probably because Nursi claims and exemplies that the miraculousness of the Qur’an can be seen in a very small part of it, consisting of not more than a few verses. Leaman evaluates two main examples from Nursi.

As for the first example, Nursi pays attention to the verses in which God states His own creative action. For example, consider the following verses: “O earth, swallow up your waters! And, O sky, cease [your rain]!” (11:44); “And He directed [His Knowledge, Will, Power, and Favor] to the heaven when it was as a cloud [of gases], and ordered it and the earth, ‘Come both of you, willingly or unwillingly!’ They said: ‘We have come in willing obedience’” (41:11).

In these verses, the speaker is God Himself and He gives orders to be executed. As Leaman notices, these orders are totally different from human orders because divine orders result in the realization of the relevant activity, whereas such orders can never be realized if given by human beings. It is the performative meaning of such verses, as Leaman notes, that brings about an extraordinary dimension to the miraculousness phenomenon. Leaman has two observations here. First, he thinks that a small part of the Qur’an, such as these verses, rejects the whole meaning of the Qur’an and these short verses should not be evaluated independently of the whole text. That is to say, arguing for the miraculousness of the Qur’an on the basis of a smaller part thereof does not have any privilege over arguing for the miraculousness of the whole Qur’an. Secondly, Leaman thinks that such verses cannot be used to establish that the Qur’an is miraculous because they can only serve to support such a conclusion if we are already convinced that the speaker of the Qur’an is God. If it is really God who is speaking in the text, then we can easily see the absurdity to expect the same creative activity from creatures. Yet Leaman comments, “This is what the text is supposed to prove,” and thus he considers such an argument to be circular.7

The second example of Nursi concerns the following verse: “If a breath of Your Lord’s punishment touches them” (“Wa la in massathum na atun min adhabi Rabbika”) (21:46). According to Nursi, this verse makes us think about the totality of God’s punishment by showing the intensity of just a little part of it. Thus the words in this verse are chosen exactly to express the scarcity of the punishment. In Leaman’s terms, “This passage stresses the restraint of God’s action, and matches it with literary restraint.”

Nazif Muhtaroğlu

Bahçeşehir University
Dr. Nazif Muhtaroğlu is a PhD instructor at Bahçeşehir University and former a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Bogazici University, Istanbul. He received his PhD in philosophy at the University of Kentucky, and former postdoctoral fellow at the Near Eastern Languages and Civilization Department, Harvard University.

1 There are verses challenging created beings in this sense. The first one (52:34) challenges them to produce a discourse like the Qur’an; the second (17:88) to produce a book like the Qur’an; the third (11:13) to produce ten chapters like the Qur’anic chapters; the fourth (10:38) to bring about only one chapter. All these four verses were revealed in the late Meccan period. And the fifth and final one (2:23) challenges them to bring about a chapter again, which was revealed in the first year of hijra in the Medinan period. See Ali Unal, The Qur’an with Annotated Interpretation in Modern English (New Jersey: Light, 2006). All translations from the Qur’an that appear in the article are from this source. The Hindu text The Vedas is considered by some people to be inimitable and miraculous, but the text itself does not include any verse that challenges people to bring about a text like it.

2 Stefan Wild, “Inimitability”, in The Qur’an: An Encylopedia, ed. Oliver Leaman (London: Routledge, 2006), 295.

3 Oliver Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 141–64; Leaman, Controversies in Contemporary Islam (New York: Routledge, 2014), 26–31.

4 Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics, 153, 159–61; Leaman, Controversies, 27. Note that Leaman refers to the issues of truth and practical guidance in relation to this approach but does not explicitly mention the future predictions of the Qur’an that had been realized. For example, at the time of Prophet, the Sasanites defeated the Byzantine Romans. The Qur’an (30:4–5) stated that the Romans will defeat the Sasanites in a few years, and it happened as it was predicted. Another example is the 111th chapter of the Qur’an, al-Masad, which is about the Prophet’s nonbelieving uncle, Abu Lahab, and says the he will enter the hell fire (because he did not confirm the message of God). This chapter was revealed prior to Abu Lahab’s death. Had he wished to negate the Qur’an, he could have simply accepted Islam, since the third verse says, “He will enter to burn in a Fire of blazing,” yet the fact that he died as a nonbeliever is further testimony to the veracity and miraculousness of the Qur’an insofar as God revealed what He knew would happen by His will.

5 Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics, 154, 158. Note also that Leaman considers the Mu’tazilis to be followers of the second view in Islamic Aesthetics but cites them when he presents the first view in Controversies in Contemporary Islam. See Leaman, Controversies, 27.

6 Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics, 159–64; Leaman, Controversies, 28–31.

7 Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics, 162–3.

8 Leaman, Controversies, 28.