An Invitation to Peace

An Invitation to Peace
splendour flowed through their veins. They were so artistic in speech
that they would often argue with each other in poetry. Their rhetoric
was powerful and stirring, their expressions were emotive and intense.
This was their art.
It has always been God’s way to send to a people signs that they could
relate to: Moses was sent with his staff before a people who were
fascinated by magic; Jesus had the gift of curing lepers and the
incurably sick at a time when physicians and their medicine
demanded great respect. The Qur’an revealed to Muhammad was of
such grandeur and majesty that, momentarily, even the Arabs were
speechless. And not only that, but in the verse quoted above and
others like it, it told them so. It said to these people who were so proud
of their power over language: ‘This is better than anything you have
ever heard – all of you together cannot match this. You’re challenged
to prove otherwise.’ And not one of them, with all their hostility to the
message of this Book and their wish to be able to shut it up once and for
all, could meet that challenge. And the challenge still stands today,
over fourteen hundred years later, still unanswered.
The Arabs knew poetry and they knew prose, but what they heard in
the Qur’an was neither poetry nor prose. How could they meet a
challenge to imitate something which, being in their own mother
tongue, was virtually foreign to them? They were at a loss as to how to
even go about combatting such speech. And to complete their
dilemma, the bringer of this unrivalled eloquence was an unlettered,
unlearned man, one who had lived for forty years in their midst and
never been known to say a single verse of poetry.
“There can be no doubt that the highest and most resplendent
degree of eloquence is that which expresses itself with the greatest
clarity, making the intention of the speaker evident and facilitating the
hearer's understanding. But when it rises beyond this level of
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