The Qur’an An Abiding Wonder
The Qur’an —The Prophet’s Miracle
~ 67 ~
In acknowledging this ‘astonishing event of human
history’ Renan, a French orientalist, is in fact
acknowledging the miraculous nature of the
Qur’an. It was the Qur’an’s phenomenal literary
style which preserved the Arabic language from
alteration, such as other languages have undergone.
The Christian Jurgi Zaydan (1861-1914) is one of the
scholars to have recognized this fact. In a book on
Arabic literature he writes:
“No religious book has had such an impact on
the language in which it was written as the
Qur’an has had on Arabic literature.”
World languages have changed so much throughout
the ages that no expert in any modern language is
able to understand its ancient form without the aid
of a dictionary. There have been two main causes of
language alteration – upheavals in the social order of
a nation and the development of a language’s
literature. Over the centuries these factors have been
at work in Arabic, just as in other languages. The
difference is that they have not been able to change
the structure of the Arabic language. The Arabic that
is spoken today is the same as that which was
