Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

116 t CHAPTER FIVE
the Muslim might well echo Paul’s assertion to his fellow Christians
that “without it, your faith is futile” (cf. 1 Cor. 15:17).
How earnestly the Quran’s challenge to produce its like was uttered
or understood by Muhammad’s listeners we cannot know,
but later Muslims took it seriously indeed. The Prophet’s opponents
had criticized both the manner—Muhammad was a familiar
poet, a jinn-addled versifier—as well as the content—old stories,
cribbed from someone else—of what they were hearing. We might
be excused for thinking that the challenge/defense of the Quran
was about the content of the revelation since all the preserved pre-
Islamic poetry has to do with quite different matters—love and
war, manliness, honor, and nostalgia—but there were early arguments
among Muslim scholars on whether the Quran’s ijaz rested
primarily on God’s rendering humankind incapable of imitating
the Holy Book or whether the Quran’s inimitability was intrinsic,
that it was quite simply superior to anything mortals could produce.
The latter view eventually prevailed, though without fully
driving out the notion of God’s miraculous “incapacitation” of
would-be competitors in quranic composition.
The Quran nonpareil? It does not seem so to us. We are, of
course, nonbelievers, the Muslim would quickly point out. But so
was that first audience who were asked to believe that there was
nothing to equal this Recitation. It may simply be a matter of a
different aesthetic, that the criteria for literary admiration were
different for seventh-century Arabians and us. Although that much
is self-evident, the Quran does not in fact conform very closely to
our best preserved examples of seventh-century Arabian literary
artifacts, the poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabs, which had presumably
shaped the tastes of Muhammad’s audience but whose strict
metrics and prosody and even stricter conventions of form and
content find no parallel in the Quran.
The cause of this misprision of the Quran’s literary merits, why
one group of people judges them miraculous while another finds
the book at best difficult and at worst obscure and ambiguous,
may be quite other. It is entirely possible that the beauty of the
Recitation lies precisely and primarily in its recitation. As we have
seen, the Quran, or at least its Meccan suras, were surely sung or,