The Qur’an An Abiding Wonder
The Qur’an —The Prophet’s Miracle
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There is only one exception to this universal trend,
and that is Arabic. The claim of the Qur’an, that no
one would ever be able to write a book like it, has
been borne out to the letter. For further proof of this
fact, one need only look at the various attempts to
produce a work equal to the Qur’an that have been
made over the centuries. All attempts have failed
dismally. Musailema ibn Habib, Tulaiha ibn
Khuwailid, Nadhr ibn al Harith, Ibn al Rawandi,
Abu al Ala al Ma’arri, Ibn al Muqaffa, Al
Mutanabbi, and many others, have tried their hand
at it, but their efforts, like Musailema’s
extraordinary reference to ‘God’s blessing upon
pregnant women, extracting from them a sprightly
life, from between the stomach and the foetal
membrane look ridiculous when compared with the
literary majesty of the Qur’an.
But the greatest substantiation of the Qur’an’s claim
that no one would be able to write a work like it
(17:88) comes from what Ernest Renan has called
the ‘linguistic miracle’ of the Arabic language. As
with every other language, masters of Arabic - great
poets and writers – have appeared over the ages.
But, in the 1500 years since the Qur’an was
