An Invitation to Peace

eloquence and transcends what man is capable of, so that none of the
servants of God is able to match it, it becomes a proof and a sign for the
Messengers of the One, the All-powerful. It is then the counterpart of
raising the dead and curing of lepers and the blind, themselves proofs
and signs for the Messengers because they transcend the realm of the
highest attainment of man's medicine and therapy…
It is obvious that there is no discourse more eloquent, no wisdom
more profound, no speech more sublime and no form of expression
more noble than this clear discourse and speech with which a single
man challenged a people at a time when they were acknowledged
masters of the art of oratory and rhetoric, poetry and prose, rhymed
prose and soothsaying. He reduced their fancy to folly and
demonstrated the inadequacy of their logic. He dissociated himself
from their religion and summoned all of them to follow him, accept his
mission, testify to its truth, and affirm that he was the Messenger sent to
them by their Lord. He let them know that the demonstration of the
truth of what he said, the proof of the genuineness of his apostleship,
was the clear discourse, the wisdom and the criterion between truth
and falsehood which he conveyed to them in a language like their
language, in a speech whose meanings conformed to the meanings of
their speech. Then he told them that they were incapable of bringing
anything comparable to even a part of what he brought, and that they
lacked the power to do this. They all confessed their inability,
voluntarily acknowledging the truth of what he had brought, and bore
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witness to their own insufficiency…”
History is witness to the impact this message had on the hearts of those
who knew its language. The man who was to become one of the
Prophet’s closest allies, `Umar ibn al-Khattab, had originally set out to
kill him in cold blood. It was while he was on his way that he happened
to come across the first verses of the twentieth chapter,
131
Anthony Greene, quoting the Qur’anic Commentary, at-Tabari, Material on the Authenticity of the
Qur’an, p. 6
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An Invitation to Peace