Is the Quran a literary miracle no human could produce?

Summary

• Five verses in the Quran challenge doubters to produce something like it. The best known is Quran 2:23-24: "then produce a sūrah the like thereof … But if you do not — and you will never be able to — then fear the Fire."¹² Muslims call these the Challenge Verses, and the doctrine built on them is i'jaz al-Quran, the inimitability of the Quran. It is the oldest and most serious Muslim argument that the Quran is from God, far older than the modern claim that it contains scientific miracles.
• Something real is being pointed at. The Quran's Arabic is powerful, and its effect on hearers is documented from the earliest sources onward. Arabic literary norms were partly set by it. A Christian who has never heard surat al-Rahman recited aloud is not qualified to sneer, and this article does not.
• But the doctrine is late. Richard Martin, writing the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān entry on inimitability, states that "the earliest texts or fragments thereof that refer directly to the inimitability of the Qurʾān date … from the third⁄ninth century."³ The argument that Muslims now treat as the standing proof of the Quran's origin took roughly two hundred years to be formulated.
• A major Muslim theologian denied it, from inside the tradition. Abu Ishaq al-Nazzam (d. c. 230/845) held the doctrine of sarfa — that the Arabs could have matched the Quran, and that God simply prevented them. "The Arabs were able to utter speech like that of the Qurʾān with respect to linguistic purity and eloquence … until the Prophet was sent."³ This is the single most damaging classical fact for the literary-miracle argument, because it shows the inimitability was not obvious to a native speaker of classical Arabic who was steeped in the text and had every motive to see it.
• The claim cannot be judged from outside. Al-Baqillani (d. 403/1013), the doctrine's greatest defender, tells the reader who cannot perceive the Quran's beauty to "take one's seat among the muqallidīna" — those who accept it on authority.⁴ Al-Jurjani (d. 471/1078), the most sophisticated theorist, confines the capacity to "the people of taste and knowledge," and of those who lack it says "how little words avail with such a one!"⁴ A test whose failure mode is "you lack the faculty" is not a test.
• Al-Baqillani's key claim was contested inside the tradition from the start. He argued the Quran's composition "defies classification and departs from all accustomed styles, modes or genres, such as poetry or rhymed prose (sajʿ)."⁴ Devin Stewart's survey of the medieval debate shows this was one of three positions, and that al-Nazzam — again — held the opposite, as did Ibn al-Athir (d. 637/1239), who wrote that "the majority of the Qurʾan is sajʿ."⁵⁶ Stewart's own count is that "86% of the verses in the Qurʾān exhibit end rhyme," and that many surahs are composed entirely in saj'.⁵ A form whose rules can be written down is a form.
• The competition record was curated by the winners. Musaylima was killed at Aqraba in 12/633 by Khalid b. al-Walid; Ibn al-Muqaffa was executed around 139/756-7; only fragments of either survive, preserved by hostile hands.³⁷ Absence of surviving rivals in a corpus edited by the victors is weak evidence.
• "Muhammad was illiterate" proves less than it is asked to prove. Sebastian Günther's Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān entry finds the Quranic sense of ummi is most likely "belonging to a people who had not yet received a revelation," dates the illiteracy dogma no earlier than the first half of the second Islamic century, and concludes that whether Muhammad could read and write at the end of his life "cannot be decided conclusively on the basis of the textual evidence available today."⁸⁸⁸ Sahih al-Bukhari itself has him taking the document at Hudaybiya and writing.⁹
• The Byzantine prophecy turns on vowels that the earliest text does not carry. Quran 30:2-5 predicts a Roman defeat then victory — but only on one vocalisation. The consonantal skeleton supports the opposite reading, and the opposite reading is attested from the earliest grammarians onward: Corpus Coranicum lists it in six separate works, the oldest by Ibn Wahb (d. 812) and al-Farra (d. 207/822), ascribed to Ibn Umar, Abu Sa'id al-Khudri and Ali b. Abi Talib.¹⁰ In the tradition's own account, Abu Bakr bet on the standard reading, set the term at six years, and lost the wager.¹¹

Verdict.  The literary-miracle argument points at something real and then asks it to carry a load it cannot carry.  The Quran is a great work of Arabic prose;  that is not in dispute among Arabists.  What cannot be got from "great" to "supernatural" is a criterion.  The challenge names no metric, appoints no neutral judge, and has no failure condition — there is no possible submission whose rejection would count as evidence against the claim rather than evidence for it.  Add the three internal facts:  the doctrine is third-century, a major Muslim theologian held the text alone was matchable, and the tradition's own prosodists say the Quran is written in a describable form.  The argument works as a description of how the Quran strikes people who already believe.  It does not work as a proof addressed to people who do not.

Where this article is weak.  Four places.  First, nobody writing here reads classical Arabic as a native, and aesthetic judgements about a language one has learned are worth less than the judgements of those who have not.  Second, the sarfa argument cuts less deeply than it looks:  al-Nazzam's view lost, and the fact that a minority position existed does not make it right.  Third, the failure of the True Furqan and of Musaylima's fragments to impress anyone is a real datum, and the Muslim side is entitled to it.  Fourth, this article cannot show that a matching surah could be produced;  it argues only that the challenge is structured so that no submission could ever win, which is a claim about the test and not about the text.

The claim being tested

The Arabic word is i'jaz — "rendering incapable."  It comes from the root that gives a'jaza, to make someone unable to do something.  A mu'jiza, from the same root, is what English calls a miracle:  an act that leaves the onlooker unable to match it.  The doctrine of i'jaz al-Quran says the Quran is that kind of act.  It is not merely good Arabic.  It is Arabic that no human being can equal, and its unmatchability is the standing public proof of Muhammad's prophethood.

Sophia Vasalou, in her encyclopedia entry on the term, defines it as "a technical term referring to the status of the Qur'an as a miracle (mu'jiz or mu'jiza) resisting imitation and confirming the Prophet's mission."⁴  Martin makes the comparison the classical theologians themselves made:  the inimitable Quran was "a miracle that served as an earthly sign and proof of Muḥammad's claim to be a prophet, akin to Moses' division of the Red Sea and Jesus' raising of the dead."³  That is the weight the argument is meant to bear.  It is not an aesthetic compliment.  It is offered as the same class of evidence as a parted sea.

Five distinct propositions usually travel together and need separating, because they have different evidence and different failure conditions.

1. The Quran is outstanding Arabic. Widely granted, including by non-Muslim Arabists.
2. The Quran has an unusual effect on hearers. Documented, and not only by Muslims.
3. No one has produced a passage that competent judges accept as its equal. True as far as the record goes, but the record is thin and the judges are not neutral.
4. No one can. This is the actual claim of i'jaz, and it is a universal negative about all future human speech.
5. Therefore the Quran is from God. This requires (4) plus the premise that only God could produce such speech — which is what (4) is supposed to establish, and so cannot also be assumed.

Most popular presentations argue (1), (2) and (3), then assert (4) and (5).  The classical theologians were far more careful than that, which is why the classical literature is worth reading and the modern pamphlets mostly are not.  Two further claims are usually attached and are treated separately below:  that Muhammad was illiterate, which is supposed to rule out human composition;  and that the Quran contains fulfilled prophecy, which was al-Nazzam's preferred proof and is a different kind of argument altogether.

A note on what this article does not cover.  The claim that the Quran contains modern scientific knowledge — i'jaz ilmi — is a separate and much newer argument, treated in the companion article on the Quran and science.  Ahmad Dallal's Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān survey is blunt that it is not a development of the classical doctrine:  "classical commentators on the Qurʾān never even hinted that the miracle of the Qurʾān lies in its prediction of scientific discoveries that were made centuries after the coming of the revelation."¹²  The two arguments should not be run together, and Muslims who press the literary case are pressing the older and better one.

The strongest case for the Muslim claim

Set out at full strength, with nothing held back.

The challenge was issued in public, to the people best placed to meet it.  Seventh-century Arabia prized eloquence.  Poetry was the tribal press, the tribal law court and the tribal weapon.  Poets competed openly;  the practice of mu'arada, matching a rival's poem in metre, rhyme and theme, was a recognised form.  Martin puts the point precisely:  "The theological claim that the Qurʾān could not be imitated was a calque on the poetic muʿāraḍa, the competitive imitation or emulation of one poet or poem (usually a qaṣīda) by another poet, a cultural practice going back to pre-Islamic times."³  A man in that culture who challenged his neighbours to out-write him was not making a safe bet.  He was inviting the one contest his audience was best equipped to win.

The challenge gets easier over time, which is the opposite of what a bluff does.  The most demanding form asks for the whole book:  "if mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Qurʾān, they could not produce the like of it" (Quran 17:88).¹³  A later form asks for ten surahs (Quran 11:13), and the two easiest ask for one (Quran 10:38, Quran 2:23) — and a surah can be three verses long.¹⁴¹⁵  Both the traditional revelation order and Theodor Nöldeke's reconstruction put surah 17 before surahs 10, 11 and 2:  surah 17 is 50th in the 1924 Cairo edition's order and second-Meccan for Nöldeke, while surah 2 is 87th and Medinan.¹⁶  The two schemes disagree about whether the ten-surah form or the one-surah form came first, so the narrowing should not be pressed into a neat staircase.  But the direction is the same on both:  the demand shrinks from the entire Quran to a single short surah.  A man worried about being matched raises the bar.  This one lowered it.

The effect on hearers is on record, including from opponents.  The biography of Muhammad by Ibn Ishaq (d. 151/767), as edited by Ibn Hisham (d. 218/833), has al-Walid b. al-Mughira, one of the Prophet's leading Meccan opponents, telling his own side:  "his speech is sweet, his root is a palm tree whose branches are fruitful, and everything you have said [in criticism of the Prophet's recitations] would be known to be false."³  Vasalou notes that the accessibility of the Quran's beauty to unbelievers was the point:  "the underlying assumption of the challenge was that the merit and beauty of the Qur'an could be appreciated even by those outside the hold of faith."⁴  Reports of conversion on hearing recitation run through the earliest sources.

Fourteen centuries is a long time for nobody to succeed.  Arabic has produced al-Mutanabbi, al-Ma'arri, Ibn Khaldun, Naguib Mahfouz and Adonis.  It has produced hostile critics of Islam who were native speakers and formidable stylists.  Ibn al-Rawandi (d. c. 298/910-1), whom the theologians called an atheist, "debated and wrote against many of those Sunnī theologians of the late third⁄ninth century who had written in defense of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān."³  If a matching surah were producible, the motive to produce one has been continuously present, and no one has.

The one modern attempt everyone cites is bad.  Al-Furqan al-Haqq, "The True Furqan," published in 1999 under the pseudonyms "Al Saffee" and "Al Mahdee," is a Christian-authored Arabic pastiche of the Quran.  It is widely reported to be poor Arabic, by readers on every side.  The Muslim who says this confirms the challenge is entitled to say it.¹⁷

The argument does not require the outsider to accept Muslim sources.  Unlike most claims about Muhammad's life, this one is about a text anyone can pick up.  The Quran is in front of the critic.  He is invited to try.  That is a rare and admirable structure for a religious claim, and it deserves better than dismissal.

Taken together this is a serious argument.  It is not obviously wrong, and the parts of it that are true are genuinely true.  What follows is an audit of the parts that do not hold.

What the challenge verses actually say

Five passages carry the challenge.  They are not identical, and the differences matter.

The operative word in all five is mithl, "like."  Translators differ over what it governs.  Arberry renders Quran 52:34 "Then let them bring a discourse like it";  Pickthall has "Then let them produce speech the like thereof";  Yusuf Ali has "Let them then produce a recital like unto it."¹⁸  The Arabic hadith here means simply a piece of speech or a narration, not a report about the Prophet.  Abdel Haleem's Quran 2:23 reads "then produce a single sura like it — enlist whatever supporters you have other than God — if you truly [think you can]," and Arberry's reads "then bring a sura like it, and call your witnesses, apart from God, if you are truthful."¹  The bracketed words in Sahih International and Abdel Haleem are the translators', not the Arabic.

Like it in what respect?  This is the question everything turns on, and the Quran does not answer it.  The classical commentators had to supply the criterion.  Tafsir al-Jalalayn, in Feras Hamza's translation, glosses Quran 2:23 this way:  "then bring a sūra like it, that is also revealed … that is, a sūra like it in its eloquence, fine arrangement and its bestowal of knowledge of the Unseen;  a sūra is a passage with a beginning and end made up of a minimum of three verses … So do this, for you are also fluent speakers of Arabic like him."¹⁹  On Quran 17:88 the same commentary specifies "the like thereof in terms of clarity and rhetorical excellence."²⁰

Read that criterion carefully.  It has three parts, and they do not work the same way.

• Eloquence (fasaha) and fine arrangement (nazm) are aesthetic. There is no number attached, no procedure, no threshold.
• Knowledge of the Unseen is not a literary property at all. It smuggles a content requirement into what is advertised as a challenge about language, and it makes the challenge unanswerable by construction: a rival text is disqualified not for being badly written but for not being revelation.
• "That is also revealed" does the same job more openly. If the submission has to be revealed in order to count, then no human submission can ever count, and the challenge is not a challenge.

This is the structural problem, and it appears in the tradition's own earliest working out of what the verses ask.  It is not a modern objection invented by hostile readers.

The doctrine took two centuries to appear

The Quran issues a challenge.  It does not contain the doctrine of i'jaz.  The word i'jaz is never used of the Quran in the Quran, and Martin notes that the Quran "contains no verse attesting that any hearer of the word of God recited by the Prophet ever met the challenge, although there are reports in early sources of several attempts to do so."³

The doctrine was built afterwards, and the building took time.  Martin's dating is careful and worth quoting in full because it concedes what can be conceded:

"Given the challenges and opposition to the Prophet and the Qurʾān by many of his contemporaries, and the lengths to which later theologians went to emphasize the extraordinary linguistic qualities of the Qurʾān as proof of Muḥammad's prophethood, it seems quite likely that disputes about the nature of the Qurʾān as a sign of the authenticity of Muḥammad's mission took place during the first two centuries after the emigration from Mecca to Medina.  The earliest texts or fragments thereof that refer directly to the inimitability of the Qurʾān date, however, from the third⁄ninth century."³

Vasalou says the same:  "it was in the 3rd/9th century that the doctrine took shape and found its place at the confluence of several Islamic sciences."⁴  The first known book with i'jaz in its title is by Abu Abdallah Muhammad b. Zayd al-Wasiti (d. 307/918-9).³  Al-Jahiz (d. 255/868-9) wrote a Nazm al-Quran which is lost;  what survives of his position locates the miracle in ta'lif, composition, and nazm, the ordering of words.³

Two contexts explain why the doctrine appeared when it did, and neither is flattering to the idea that it simply recorded an obvious fact.

Inter-religious polemic.  Vasalou lists among the causes "the heightened interest in the notion of prophethood and in miracles as the grounds of prophetic claims which was stimulated by inter-religious (especially Muslim and Christian) polemics in the 3rd/9th century."⁴  Christians under Muslim rule pressed the question of what miracle authenticated Muhammad, since the Quran itself declines to offer the sign-miracles his opponents demanded.  The answer that the Quran is the miracle solves that problem.

Internal challenge.  The same century produced Muslim freethinkers who attacked the Quran directly, Ibn al-Rawandi most famously.  Vasalou also connects the doctrine to shu'ubism, the movement of non-Arab Muslims asserting themselves against Arab cultural primacy:  the doctrine "might be seen in its connection with the battles over language which were bound up with larger questions about cultural and ethnic allegiance … and hence as a force cementing a sense of community."⁴

None of this makes the doctrine false.  Doctrines can be formulated late and still be true.  But it removes one of the argument's most-used supports.  The claim is often presented as the unbroken verdict of the Arabs from the beginning — as though the Meccans fell silent in 610 and the silence has continued ever since.  What the record shows is a theological argument constructed in Baghdad and Basra in the ninth century, in response to specific pressures, by men who had to work out what the challenge even meant.

How the doctrine was built: al-Jahiz to al-Jurjani

The classical literature on i'jaz is a genuine intellectual achievement.  It produced the first sustained literary theory in Arabic, and al-Jurjani's work in particular is still read by scholars of rhetoric who have no religious stake in it at all.  This section states what each thinker actually argued, because the arguments are better than their reputation among Western readers who have only met the pamphlet version.

Al-Jahiz (d. 255/868-9), the great Basran essayist and one-time student of al-Nazzam, is the earliest theologian whose defence of the Quran's style survives in any quantity.  He located the miracle in ta'lif, the composition of the text, and nazm, the arrangement of its words — not in its subject matter and not in isolated fine phrases.³  He rejected his teacher's sarfa theory.

Al-Rummani (d. 384/994), a Mu'tazili, wrote al-Nukat fi i'jaz al-Quran.  He listed seven manifestations of inimitability and analysed ten rhetorical figures.  Martin records that al-Rummani held sarfa alongside the eloquence view, and also counted "the prophets' foretelling of unseen, that is future, events" among the manifestations — "without comment on how he reconciled its apparent contradiction with ṣarfa."³  That a leading theorist could hold two incompatible accounts at once is itself a datum about how settled the question was.

Al-Khattabi (d. c. 386/996) wrote Bayan i'jaz al-Quran.  He rejected sarfa, and he also rejected al-Rummani's claim that the Quran's rhetorical figures reach a degree of eloquence humanly unattainable.³  His work is more literary than theological.

Al-Baqillani (d. 403/1013), an Ash'ari, wrote the most influential single book, I'jaz al-Quran.  His central move is to place the Quran outside every human literary category.  Vasalou:  "one of the grounds on which al-Bāqillānī argues the case of the Qur'an's unsurpassable eloquence is in its sui generis construction (naẓm) which defies classification and departs from all accustomed styles, modes or genres, such as poetry or rhymed prose (sajʿ)."⁴  He grants that the Quran uses recognised rhetorical figures, badi, but insists its eloquence "cannot be reduced to them," because such figures are "a craft attainable through training" and the Quran's excellence "must lie beyond the reach of human artifice."⁴  His comparison case is the mu'allaqa of Imru al-Qays (d. c. 540), the most admired pre-Islamic poem.  Martin quotes his verdict through von Grunebaum's translation:  the poetic devices of even so great a figure "are within the orbit of human possibilities and are of a type mankind can match.…  The composition of the Qurʾān, however, is a thing apart and a special process, not to be equalled, free of rivals."³

Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 471/1078) is the high point.  He was a working philologist and literary theorist, not a theologian doing literature as a sideline, and his Dala'il al-i'jaz set the theory on its strongest footing.  His account of eloquence is that it lives in nazm — but nazm defined as ma'ani al-nahw, the meanings realised by grammatical construction.  Word order is determined by the order of meanings in the mind, so form and content cannot be separated.⁴  Where al-Baqillani rested the case on style, Martin notes, "al-Jurjānī argued that the overall composition of the Qurʾān, its meaning as well as its wording, was the true miracle."³

Al-Jurjani also insisted, against pure subjectivism, that aesthetic judgements have reasons:  "for every instance of discourse which you approve … your approval of it must have a known ground and intelligible cause."⁴  That is exactly the right instinct, and it is the instinct a critic of the doctrine should want the tradition to have.

Two things follow from this history, and they pull in opposite directions.

First, the doctrine was refined by serious people using serious tools, and the standard modern dismissal — that it is circular hand-waving — is not fair to al-Jurjani.  Vasalou's own judgement is that his project is a contribution "less to the articulation of an apologetic theological doctrine, than to the development of the sciences of rhetoric."⁴

Second, and this is the audit point:  the two best classical theorists arrive at opposite ends of a dilemma neither can escape.  Al-Baqillani puts the Quran beyond all human categories, which makes it unjudgeable, since judging requires categories.  Al-Jurjani brings it inside a general theory of literary value, which makes it judgeable but assimilates it to human literature.  Vasalou puts the tension exactly:  al-Jurjani's interest in a unified account of literary value "could be deemed to frustrate an appreciation of the special otherness of the Qurʾan, insofar as it is handled in terms of its instantiation of grounds of value which it shares with other literary works and is thus assimilated to human literary creations."⁴  A text that can be shown to be excellent by general criteria is excellent by general criteria — which is a claim about degree, not about kind.  The miracle needs a difference in kind.

Sarfa: the doctrine that concedes the point

The most damaging fact in the classical record is not something a critic found.  It is something Muslims argued among themselves for centuries.

Sarfa means "turning away."  On this view the Quran is a miracle, but not because of anything in the text.  It is a miracle because God turns people away from matching it.  Vasalou states it:

"Two approaches came to be distinguished early in the history of the debates, one of which located the miracle in certain features of the Qurʾan itself, while the other located it in God's act of averting or preventing (ṣarafa) human beings from attempts to rival the Qurʾan by depriving them of motivation and interest.  Known as the doctrine of ṣarfa, the latter was notably propounded by the Baġdādī Muʿtazilite ʾAbū Isḥāq an-Naẓẓām (d. between 220/835 and 230/845), and its corollary was the claim that 'had God left [the Arabs] to their own devices, they would have been capable of producing a sūra which was like it in eloquence'."⁴

The words in single quotation marks there are Vasalou's rendering of al-Shahrastani's al-Milal wa-l-nihal reporting al-Nazzam's position.  Martin gives a fuller late Mu'tazili statement of the same doctrine, from a Basran commentary manuscript in the British Museum:

"Know that al-Naẓẓām took the position that the Qurʾān is a miracle only with respect to ṣarfa.  The meaning of ṣarfa is that the Arabs were able to utter speech like that of the Qurʾān with respect to linguistic purity and eloquence (al-faṣāḥa wa-l-balāgha) until the Prophet was sent.  When the Prophet was sent, this [characteristic] eloquence was taken away from them and they were deprived of their knowledge of it, and thus they [were] unable to produce speech like the Qurʾān."³

Al-Nazzam did not think the Quran had no evidential force.  He thought its force lay elsewhere.  Martin, reporting al-Khayyat (d. c. 300/913):  "al-Naẓẓām argued that the Qurʾān was a proof (ḥujja) of Muḥammad's prophethood on the basis of its several passages that reported on things unseen or in the future," while holding "that the linguistic qualities of the Qurʾān were not superior to ordinary human speaking abilities."³

Why this matters more than any outsider's objection.  Al-Nazzam was not a hostile critic.  He was a native speaker of classical Arabic, a leading theologian of the Mu'tazila, writing within about two hundred years of the Prophet, in the language and the culture in which the Quran was recited daily.  He had every reason to see the eloquence if it were there to be seen.  He looked, and concluded that the Arabs of Muhammad's day could have matched the text, and that the miracle had to be relocated into God's act of prevention.

Sarfa was not a fringe eccentricity, either.  Martin traces it forward:  it "found some acceptance in the fourth⁄tenth century among some of the mutakallimūn of the Baghdad branch of the Muʿtazila and the Imāmī Shīʿa," and its strongest later proponent was al-Sharif al-Murtada (d. 436/1044), the leading Imami Shi'i authority in Baghdad.³  Al-Rummani held it alongside the eloquence view.

Sarfa lost.  Al-Jahiz refuted it, Abu Hashim and the Bahshamiyya opposed it, al-Ash'ari opposed it, and "the majority of Sunnī Muslims in the centuries to come" opposed it.³  Al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505) went so far as to claim consensus against it.⁴  A Muslim is entitled to say the doctrine was tested and rejected.

But notice what the rejection was and was not.  It was a theological argument that a miracle ought to reside in the Quran rather than in God's manipulation of human minds.  It was not a demonstration that al-Nazzam had misread the Arabic.  Nobody produced a metric, ran a comparison, and showed him wrong.  The eloquence view won by argument and by institutional weight, not by measurement.

And the existence of the debate settles one thing regardless of who won.  If the Quran's unmatchability were self-evident to competent Arabic speakers, the sarfa doctrine would have been unintelligible.  Nobody needs to posit divine suppression of a competition that visibly cannot be won.  The doctrine exists because, to some of the best-qualified judges in history, the text alone did not settle the matter.

Who judges, and what would count as failure?

This is the centre of the article.  Everything above is history;  this is the question that decides whether the challenge is evidence or aesthetics.

A claim is testable when it is possible to say in advance what result would refute it.  "Nobody can match this" is refuted by somebody matching it.  So the whole weight rests on the judging:  who decides, by what criterion, and is any verdict possible other than the one the judges already hold?

The criterion is beauty, and no metric is offered.  Al-Jalalayn's gloss is "eloquence, fine arrangement" — fasaha and nazm.  Al-Baqillani's is fasaha and balagha.  None of these is quantified anywhere in the classical literature.  There is no word count, no rhetorical-figure density, no rhyme-scheme test, no blind comparison.  There could not be, because the whole claim is that the quality in question lies "beyond the reach of human artifice," and anything measurable is by that definition within reach.

The judges are, by design, believers.  Both of the doctrine's greatest defenders say so explicitly when pressed, and both say it at the exact point where the argument would have to face a reader who is unpersuaded.

Al-Baqillani's book ends by pointing at examples of the Quran's beauty and inviting the reader to contemplate them.  Vasalou describes what happens if the reader looks and sees nothing special:  al-Baqillani's "final admonition to his reader, should he fail to perceive the beauty towards which al-Bāqillānī points, [is] to 'take one's seat among the muqallidīna', contenting himself with taqlīd — the mode of knowledge which consists of accepting the judgment of authority."⁴  Vasalou's assessment of what this does to the argument is severe, and she is not a polemicist:

"At his hands, the inquiry into the Qurʾan's unsurpassable eloquence, formally conceived as a probative sign addressed to [t]he unbeliever, becomes a form of fides quaerens intellectum — a devotional practice in which the miraculous character of the sacred text is presupposed in the attempt to perceive it."⁴

Fides quaerens intellectum is Anselm's phrase:  faith seeking understanding.  It describes a practice for believers, not a proof for outsiders.  Vasalou is saying that al-Baqillani's argument, whatever it was meant to be, ends up assuming its conclusion.

Al-Jurjani, the better literary critic, faces the same wall and is franker about it.  His method is to start from the reader's aesthetic response and work backwards to the reasons for it.  What if the reader has no response?  Vasalou:  he "accepts that the capacity for such response may be confined to the people of taste and knowledge (ahl adh-dhawq wa-l-maʿrifa)," and regarding those who lack the faculty entirely he "would advise against seeking to enlighten" them — "how little words avail with such a one!"⁴

Put those two together and the structure is clear.  If you perceive the miracle, the doctrine is confirmed.  If you do not, you lack taste, or you should defer to authority.  There is no third outcome.  A test with no failure condition is not a test.

The genre problem makes it worse.  Suppose someone submits a surah.  It will be judged against the Quran by judges whose standard of Arabic excellence was formed by the Quran.  Martin notes that Arabic literary theory "took qurʾānic language as the model for the purest, most eloquent Arabic speech."³  Classical Arabic grammar was codified largely from the Quran and pre-Islamic poetry;  where a Quranic usage differs from the poets', the Quran is usually the norm and the deviation is the poet's.  A rival text will therefore look wrong in proportion as it differs, and derivative in proportion as it does not.  There is no move that wins.

And it is not clear what "like it" would even look like.  Suppose an Arabic stylist today produced a passage that a blind panel of Arabists rated as beautiful as Quran 55.  A Muslim could correctly reply that it is not "like" the Quran, because it is not revelation, carries no knowledge of the Unseen, and was written by a man who read the Quran first.  All three replies are fair.  All three also confirm that no submission can ever qualify.

The honest way to state the situation.  The Muslim claim is not obviously false.  It might be true.  What it is not, is evidence — because evidence is something that could have come out the other way.  A Christian should feel this sharply, because the same objection retires several arguments Christians like.  "The Bible's moral vision is unmatched by any human book" has exactly the same structure and exactly the same defect.  So does "no human could have invented the character of Jesus."  Those are testimonies, not proofs, and they should be labelled as testimonies.  The double standard runs both ways, and this article applies the rule to its own side.

The attempts, and how they were judged

The classical argument leans on a historical claim:  people tried, and failed.  The record is thinner and more compromised than the claim needs.

Musaylima b. Habib (d. 12/633), of the Banu Hanifa in Yamama, is the standard example.  He is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a joke, because the sources are more interesting than their reputation.  M.J. Kister's Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān entry notes that "Musaylima never denied the prophethood of Muḥammad;  he rather claimed that he was destined to share this mission with him," writing to Muhammad under the title "Messenger of Allāh" and proposing that "half of the earth was given to Quraysh and the other half was allotted to us."⁷  Kister lists the parallels plainly:  "Like Muḥammad, Musaylima claimed to be the recipient of divine revelation.  Further, he claimed to heal the sick and work miracles."⁷  Martin records that Margoliouth argued Musaylima declared himself a prophet before Muhammad did, and notes the dispute matters for "whether Musaylima in history should be regarded as an imitator of Muḥammad and the Qurʾān or as a senior rival."³

What survives of his revelations is two oath-formulas and a short verse, all preserved by his enemies.  Kister gives the oaths, delivered when tribes under his protection complained of mistreatment by his allies the Banu Usayyid:  "(I swear) by the darkness of the night and by the black wolf, the Usayyid did not violate [the sanctity] of the ḥaram";  and then "[I swear] by the dark night and by the softly treading lion, the Usayyid cut neither fresh nor dry."⁷  And a verse attributed to him after Muhammad's death:  "O you, woman, take the tambourine and play, / and disseminate the virtues of this prophet! / Passed away the prophet of Banū Hāshim, / and rose up the prophet of Banū Yaʿrub."⁷

Two observations.  The oath-formulas are transparently in the same register as the early Meccan surahs, which swear by the night, the dawn, the running horses.  And they are the passages his opponents chose to preserve.  Nobody is obliged to think Musaylima was a good writer.  But a corpus consisting of the worst three fragments an enemy could find is not a fair sample, and Musaylima was killed at Aqraba by an army under Khalid b. al-Walid within a year of Muhammad's death.³

Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. c. 139/756-7), the Persian convert and the greatest Arabic prose stylist of his generation, is the second case.  Martin:  "A few lines of imitation of the Qurʾān attributed to [him] indicate that by the second⁄eighth century the muʿāraḍa was a cultural form of honoring or challenging the qurʾānic style."³  Fragments only, again preserved by opponents, and edited into an article by van Ess.  Ibn al-Muqaffa was executed.

Abu l-Ala al-Ma'arri (d. 449/1058) wrote al-Fusul wa-l-ghayat, rhymed homiletic prose that many contemporaries read as a mock-Quran.  Only part survives, and modern scholars dispute whether it was hostile in intent at all.  No copy or scholarly treatment of it was obtained for this article, so nothing is claimed about it beyond that it exists and is disputed.

The modern case is al-Furqan al-Haqq (1999), and it counts against the critic.  It is reported on all sides to be bad Arabic.  A Muslim who says the one serious modern attempt failed badly is on strong ground.¹⁷

What the record actually supports.  Three things, and not a fourth.  It supports that few attempts were made.  It supports that the surviving fragments are unimpressive.  It does not support that the attempts were numerous, or that they were judged fairly, or that the sample is representative — because the two best-known attempters were killed, and everything preserved of both comes through the hands of the people who killed them.  Martin's own framing concedes the difficulty:  "Insufficient textual evidence exists to ascertain how soon Muslims or non-Muslims attempted to emulate or, more negatively, to parody the Qurʾān."³

Absence of surviving rivals in a corpus curated by the winners is weak evidence.  This is not a special rule invented for Islam.  It is the same rule that makes historians cautious about Roman accounts of Carthaginian religion, or about what the losing side at Nicaea actually taught.

Is the Quran outside all genres? The saj' question

Al-Baqillani's strongest claim is that the Quran's nazm "defies classification and departs from all accustomed styles, modes or genres, such as poetry or rhymed prose (sajʿ)."⁴  This is the claim that most nearly delivers a difference in kind rather than degree.  If the Quran belongs to no genre, it cannot be matched by working within a genre.

The tradition itself did not agree, and modern prosody does not agree either.

What saj' is.  Devin Stewart, who wrote the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān entry on it, defines saj' as "an ancient form of Arabic composition used in proverbs, aphorisms, orations, descriptions of meteorological phenomena, and soothsayers' oracular pronouncements before the advent of Islam."⁵  Structurally:  "In its simplest form, sajʿ consists of groups of consecutive cola sharing a common rhyme and meter.  The meter of sajʿ is accentual, determined by the number of words … in each colon … rather than the patterns of long and short syllables that characterize quantitative meter, with word accents providing the feet or beats."⁵  Stewart's own judgement is that "rhymed prose" is a poor name:  "it is more accurate to label sajʿ a type of accent poetry."⁵

The medieval Muslim debate.  Stewart lays out three positions, and this is where al-Baqillani's claim is placed in context:

"Medieval Muslim theologians, rhetoricians and commentators have disagreed concerning the presence of sajʿ in the Qurʾān.  This debate reflects a strong concern to distance the Qurʾān, as the primary miracle of the prophet Muḥammad's mission, from ordinary human types of composition such as jāhilī poetry or the sajʿ pronouncements of pre-Islamic soothsayers.  After all, the Qurʾān itself denies accusations that the prophet Muḥammad was a poet (shāʿir, q 21:5;  52:30;  69:41) or soothsayer (kāhin, q 52:29)."⁵

Position one denies the Quran contains saj' at all.  Stewart names its holders:  "Theologians such as al-Ashʿarī, (d. ca. 325/937), al-Rummānī (d. 384/994) and al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013) held that the Qurʾān does not contain sajʿ.  Their reasoning is that in the Qurʾān, meaning dominates form, whereas in sajʿ, form dominates meaning.  Therefore, the Qurʾān cannot be sajʿ."⁵  Read that reasoning again.  It is not an observation about rhyme and beat.  It is a deduction from a prior commitment about what the Quran must be.

Position two says the Quran plainly contains saj'.  Its earliest named holder is the same man who held sarfa:  "The second position, held by early Muʿtazilī theologians such as al-Naẓẓām (d. 220-30/835-45) and taken up by later rhetoricians such as Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn b. al-Athīr (d. 637/1239) and al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418), admits that the Qurʾān contains sajʿ and that many sūras of the Qurʾān are composed entirely in this form.  Such authors identify specific sūras, such as Sūrat al-Najm (q 53), Sūrat al-Qamar (q 54) and Sūrat al-Raḥmān (q 55), as being composed entirely in sajʿ."⁵  Ibn al-Athir put it flatly, in Marianna Klar's rendering of his own words:  "the majority of the Qurʾan is sajʿ" (inna akthar al-qurʾān masjūʿ), and only the occasional need for "brevity" and "concision" kept the whole book from being written that way.⁶  Klar herself does not accept that explanation — she writes that Ibn al-Athir's stated reason "does not immediately ring true," because he never defines the compositional techniques his claim would require — so the medieval maximalist position should not be taken over wholesale.⁶  What she does grant is the point that matters here, and it is quoted below:  much more of the Quran was once heard as sajʿ than the modern Western account allows.

Position three is a compromise and became the majority view:  al-Suyuti and most late medieval critics held "that while to term the Qurʾān sajʿ is unacceptable or disrespectful, it nevertheless exhibits many formal features of sajʿ style.  In fact, the overwhelming majority of the examples given of sajʿ composition in manuals of rhetoric are qurʾānic."⁵  Note what that concedes:  the objection to the word is that it is disrespectful, not that it is inaccurate.  Richard Martin, writing the neighbouring encyclopedia entry on inimitability, sums the medieval balance the same way:  "The weight of opinion among Muslim scholars in early and medieval Islam, however, was that much of the speech in the Qurʾān was like sajʿ (the rhymed prose speech pattern of the kāhin), which was characterized by assonance at the end of the verses."³

Stewart's own verdict, as a working philologist.  He does not say the Quran is nothing but rhymed prose;  he corrects overstatement in both directions.  "The evidence suggests that the Qurʾān contains a great deal of sajʿ and that many sūras are composed entirely in sajʿ, but Paret and others are wrong to state that the Qurʾān is entirely in sajʿ, for many sections of the Qurʾān do not maintain the rhythmical parallelism sajʿ requires.  This is particularly clear in the longer sūras."⁵  He gives a number:  "According to one estimate, 86% of the verses in the Qurʾān exhibit end rhyme."⁵  And his conclusion on origins:

"The best working hypothesis is that the Qurʾān's sūras drew on many of the stylistic features, content and conventions of several genres of pre-Islamic sajʿ, particularly divination and oratory, but modified these features to fit into the biblical, monotheistic framework of Islam's message."⁵

And the rules can be written down.  That is what Marianna Klar's 2021 study does.  She opens by noting that "the basic rules that govern Qurʾanic sajʿ have already been carefully elucidated by Devin Stewart in a series of articles on this subject," and her own chapter is a catalogue of the techniques — beat patterning, parallelism, rhyme — by which passages divide into saj' units.⁶  Her worked example is Stewart's division of surah 100 into four subunits by beat count and rhyme:  verses 1-3 have two accentual beats each and share one rhyme;  verses 4-5 have three beats and a different rhyme;  verses 6-8 have four beats and a third rhyme;  verses 9-11 shift again and are marked off by an introductory phrase.⁶  Klar also observes what this implies about earlier readers:  "at some point, many more of the Qurʾan's rhetorical features must have been seen as having being informed by the rules and the rhythms of sajʿ than the current understanding of Qurʾanic sajʿ in the Western Academy might lead one to imagine."⁶

What this does and does not show.  It does not show the Quran is ordinary.  Working superbly inside a form is what great writers do, and Shakespeare's sonnets are sonnets.  What it shows is that al-Baqillani's specific argument fails, and that it failed within the tradition before any Western scholar touched it.  The Quran is not outside all human literary categories.  It is a distinctive and virtuosic instance of a category the Arabs already had, its rules are describable, and Stewart's account of its origin places it in continuity with pre-Islamic divination and oratory rather than outside all genre.

That matters because the no-genre claim was doing the heavy lifting.  Once the Quran is inside a form, the difference between it and everything else becomes a difference of quality — and quality is a matter of degree, is judged by taste, and is exactly what cannot be settled across the belief line.

The same move in other traditions

The structure of the inimitability argument is not unique to Islam, and noticing that is not a cheap shot.  It is the fastest way to see what kind of argument it is.

• Hinduism. Classical Indian thought holds the Vedas to be apaurusheya — without human author — and part of the case rests on the perfection of their sound.
• Mormonism. The Book of Mormon is offered as beyond Joseph Smith's capacity to compose, and the standard invitation is for the reader to ask God and receive a confirming witness. The Berean Archive treats that claim in its own article, and rejects it partly on this ground: a text whose divine origin is confirmed by the reader's inner response has no failure condition.
• Christianity. "No mere man could have invented the character of Jesus" is a staple of popular apologetics, and it has the same shape. So does the older claim that the Bible's style is self-authenticating. This article's verdict on those is the same as its verdict on i'jaz: they describe a real experience and prove nothing to someone who has not had it.

The parallel is not an argument that Islam is false.  All of these could in principle be true, and at most one of them is.  The parallel shows that this kind of argument cannot sort between them.  Every tradition's readers find their own scripture uniquely powerful, and each judges by criteria formed on that scripture.  When a method returns "yes" for every input, it is not measuring anything.

A Muslim can reply that the Quran's case is stronger because the challenge is public and issued in a specific language to specific experts.  That reply is fair, and it is the best version of the argument.  But it holds only as long as some public verdict is possible — and the classical theorists, as shown above, closed that door themselves.

"Muhammad was illiterate"

The second pillar of the argument is that the man who delivered the Quran could not read or write.  If true, and if that rules out human composition, the case is stronger.  The verses are these.

Quran 7:157 calls Muhammad al-nabi al-ummi.  Sahih International, Yusuf Ali and Abdel Haleem all render it "the unlettered prophet";  Pickthall has "the Prophet who can neither read nor write";  Arberry has "the Prophet of the common folk."²¹  The same phrase recurs at Quran 7:158.²²  And Quran 29:48:  "And you did not recite before it any scripture, nor did you inscribe one with your right hand" (Sahih International);  "Not before this didst thou recite any Book, or inscribe it with thy right hand" (Arberry).²³

Notice already that Pickthall and Arberry are not translating the same idea.  The word is doing more than one job, and the tradition knew it.

What ummi means.  Sebastian Günther wrote the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān entry on the word.  His opening definition states the state of the question:

"A qurʾānic epithet for the prophet Muḥammad that acquired significantly different interpretations in the course of Islamic history.  Traditionally, Muslims understand ummī as 'illiterate' and as unequivocally identifying Muḥammad as 'the illiterate Prophet' (al-nabī l-ummī) — a view that has come to constitute an article of orthodox faith and spirituality in Islam.  Recent research, however, recovering some of the earliest exegetical glossing, has suggested that ummī in the Qurʾān signifies the ethnic origin (being an Arab, Arabian) and the originality of the Prophet of Islam (coming from among a people, the Arabs, who had not yet received a revelation)."⁸

The classical commentators themselves offered a range:  "'unable to read (and write),' Arab/Arabian (derived from umma, 'nation, the people of the Arabs'), Meccan (from umm al-qurā, 'Mother of all Cities'), and, 'pure, natural,' like a newborn from its 'mother' (umm)" — though "the classical commentaries stress that ummī in the two verses characterizing the prophet Muḥammad means 'unable to read (and write).'"⁸

Günther's own reading of the Quranic usage rests on the plural, ummiyyun, which appears at Quran 2:78, Quran 3:20, Quran 3:75 and Quran 62:2:

"Second, the term ummiyyūn in the Qurʾān identifies 'Arabs who have not [yet] been given a divinely inspired scripture' (cf. q 3:20, 75;  62:2).  On one occasion, however, a certain group among the Jews is called ummiyyūn, 'not knowing the scripture,' or 'not being well-versed in the book [because they are not reading in it]' (q 2:78). …  Although this spectrum of ideas does not include the meaning of 'illiterate' as such, it apparently formed the basis upon which the idea of ummī meaning 'illiterate' was developed."⁸

Test that against the verses.  Quran 3:20 sets the ummiyyun opposite "those who were given the Scripture."  Quran 2:78 applies the word to a group of Jews — a people with a book, and hardly a byword for illiteracy.  "Gentile," or "of the nation that has no scripture," fits every occurrence.  "Illiterate" fits some and strains at others.  Arberry's "Prophet of the common folk" is closer to the Quranic sense than Pickthall's "neither read nor write."

When the dogma appears.  This is the sentence that matters most, and Günther is quoting Isaiah Goldfeld's study:

"The concept of the Prophet's illiteracy, however, 'seems to have evolved in some circles of Muslim learning not before the first half of the second century of the hijra,' i.e. the first half of the eight[h] century c.e.  Furthermore, it seems that Muḥammad's illiteracy had already become dogma by the end of the third⁄ninth century when al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) summed up much of the learning of previous generations of Muslims."⁸

A doctrine that appears a century after the man it describes, and hardens into dogma two centuries after that, is a development, not a memory.

Why the doctrine was wanted.  Günther is explicit that its function was apologetic, and names the connection to the very argument this article is about:  for al-Razi (d. 606/1210) "and other orthodox Muslim scholars in medieval and modern times, this concept also underscores the inimitability and uniqueness of the Qurʾān in terms of content, form and style … Muḥammad's illiteracy came to be seen as a particularly excellent sign and proof of the genuineness and nobility of his prophethood."⁸  The Sufi commentator al-Khazin (d. 741/1340) states the logic without embarrassment:

"The Prophet was ummī;  he did not read, write, or count.…  His being ummī is one of the greatest and most magnificent miracles.  Had he mastered writing and then come forward with this magnificent Qurʾān, he could have been accused of having written and transmitted it from others."⁸

Al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) puts the same creed in the Ihya:  "He (the Prophet) was ummī;  he did not read or write.…  God [himself] taught him all the virtues of character, the praiseworthy ways of behaving and the information about the ancients and the following generations."⁸

Tafsir al-Jalalayn says the same thing while commenting on Quran 29:48, and in doing so states the apologetic purpose outright:  "for had you been reciting something and writing, then those who follow falsehood, the Jews, would have had doubts about you and would have said, 'What the Torah states is that he will be unlettered, ummī, unable to read or write'."²⁴

That is a clear statement of what the dogma is for.  It exists to block a specific counter-explanation.  Recognising the motive does not refute the claim — motivated beliefs can be true — but it does mean the claim needs independent support, and it is here that the tradition's own strongest sources cut the other way.

What Sahih al-Bukhari says.  In the account of the treaty of Hudaybiya in 6/628, the Meccans refuse to let the document call Muhammad "Messenger of God."  Ali refuses to erase the phrase.  Then, in the Arabic of Sahih al-Bukhari 4251:  «فَأَخَذَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم الْكِتَابَ، وَلَيْسَ يُحْسِنُ يَكْتُبُ، فَكَتَبَ هَذَا مَا قَاضَى مُحَمَّدُ بْنُ عَبْدِ اللَّهِ» — "So the Messenger of God took the document, and he did not write well, and he wrote:  'This is what Muhammad son of Abdullah has settled.'"⁹  A parallel report at Sahih al-Bukhari 2699 has the same scene without the qualifier:  "So the Messenger of God took the document and wrote:  'This is what Muhammad son of Abdullah has settled.'"²⁵

Both are in Bukhari.  Neither carries a grade line, because inclusion in Bukhari is itself the claim being made about them;  al-Bukhari (d. 256/870) selected them, and Sunni scholarship has treated his selection as the highest grade of authenticity ever since.  A Muslim who accepts Bukhari for law cannot set these reports aside merely because a critic quotes them.

Günther cites both, with the Arabic, and notes the parallels in al-Darimi and Ibn Hanbal.⁸

The al-Baji affair.  What happened when a Muslim scholar said this out loud is instructive.  Abu l-Walid al-Baji al-Maliki (d. 474/1081), a distinguished Andalusian theologian, said in a teaching session in Denia that the Hudaybiya report was authentic and proved the Prophet wrote that day.  Günther:  "Because of his explanation, al-Bājī was accused of heresy and atheism."  He defended himself at an organised public disputation, arguing that Quran 29:47-48 denies only that Muhammad wrote a scripture before his prophethood.  He then had to write an epistle justifying his position, "which in turn gave rise to treatises, for and against his position, written by Muslim scholars in Spain, north Africa and Sicily."⁸

Al-Baji won his hearing.  But the sequence — a sound hadith read plainly, a charge of heresy, an international pamphlet war — shows how much weight the doctrine was carrying by the eleventh century.

Günther's verdict.  He does not overclaim in either direction:

"In conclusion, one notes two things:  While the meaning of the terms ummī and ummiyyūn in the Qurʾān can be determined as indicated above, the question as to whether or not the prophet Muḥammad knew how to read and write (at the end of his life) is another matter that cannot be decided conclusively on the basis of the textual evidence available today."⁸

And the logic fails even if the fact is granted.  Suppose Muhammad was fully illiterate all his life.  What follows is that he did not copy from a manuscript.  Nothing else.  Seventh-century Arabia was an oral culture;  the Quran calls itself a qur'an, a recitation;  the biblical narratives, Syriac Christian legends and Jewish midrash that the Quran engages all circulated by mouth, in a trading town on a caravan route, among Jews and Christians who lived in Arabia.  An illiterate man in that setting can hear everything.  Illiteracy also does not bear on composition:  oral cultures routinely produce virtuoso poets who cannot write, and pre-Islamic Arabia was one of them.  Whatever the ummi argument establishes, it does not establish that the Quran had no human author.

The prophecy claims

Al-Nazzam thought the Quran's evidential force lay in prophecy rather than eloquence.³  Modern apologetics usually adds prophecy to eloquence rather than substituting it.  Either way the claim is testable in a way the literary one is not, so it deserves a careful look.  One case is genuinely interesting and repays exact treatment.  The others do not.

Quran 30:2-5: the Byzantine defeat and victory

This is the best prophecy claim in the Quran, and the whole thing turns on vowels.

The text, in the standard Cairo edition:  غُلِبَتِ ٱلرُّومُ / فِىٓ أَدْنَى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَهُم مِّنۢ بَعْدِ غَلَبِهِمْ سَيَغْلِبُونَ / فِى بِضْعِ سِنِينَ.  Sahih International renders it "The Byzantines have been defeated in the nearest land.  But they, after their defeat, will overcome within three to nine years."²⁶

The apologetic use is straightforward and, on its face, impressive.  In the 610s the Sasanian Persians overran Byzantine Syria, Palestine and Egypt;  Jerusalem fell in 614.  Byzantium looked finished.  A Meccan preacher announced that the Romans would come back — and by 628 Heraclius had done it.  Nobody would have bet on that.

Three problems, in ascending order of seriousness.

First, the timeframe is elastic, and the tradition itself had to renegotiate it.  The Arabic is fi bid'i sinin.  Bid' means an indefinite small number.  Translators split:  Sahih International says "within three to nine years";  Pickthall says "within ten years";  Yusuf Ali, Abdel Haleem and Arberry all say "in a few years."²⁷  Nothing in the Arabic fixes the number.

What the tradition records about how this played out is remarkable, and Muslims preserved it themselves.  Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3194, from Niyar b. Mukram al-Aslami through Urwa b. al-Zubayr, tells the story:  Abu Bakr proclaimed the verse in Mecca;  some of Quraysh offered a wager;  "they said to Abu Bakr:  'What do you think — Bid' means something between three and nine years, so let us agree on the middle.'  So they agreed on six years;  Then six years passed without the Romans being victorious.  The idolaters took what they won in the bet from Abu Bakr.  When the seventh year came and the Romans were finally victorious over the Persians, the Muslims rebuked Abu Bakr for agreeing to six years.  He said:  'Because Allah said:  "In Bid' years."'"¹¹

A parallel at Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3193, from Ibn Abbas through Sa'id b. Jubayr, has the term set at five years, the Romans failing to win within it, and the Prophet asking:  "Why did you not make it less (than) … ten?"²⁸

Take those reports at face value, as Sunni scholarship does — al-Tirmidhi (d. 279/892) grades 3193 in his own text as hasan sahih gharib, sound but known through a single chain, and the modern Darussalam edition printed on sunnah.com grades both as sahih.²⁸  What they describe is a prediction whose deadline was missed, whose stake was forfeited, and whose window was then reinterpreted after the fact.  That is not how a fulfilled prophecy behaves.  It is how an elastic one behaves.

Second, the earliest written Quran does not contain the vowels the prophecy depends on.  This is the heart of it.

Tommaso Tesei's 2018 study in Der Islam sets out the problem:

"The first examples of written materials identifiable as Qurʾānic have no vowel markers.  The text is limited to the consonantal skeleton, which usually lacks any diacritical dots.  As a consequence, many Qurʾānic passages may be read in two or more different ways."²⁹

For this passage the consequence is total.  The skeleton غلبت gives ghulibat, "were defeated," or ghalabat, "defeated [others]."  The skeleton سيغلبون gives sa-yaghlibuna, "they will conquer," or sa-yughlabuna, "they will be conquered."  Tesei lists the readings the commentators actually transmitted:

"[1] ġulibat al-Rūm … sa-yaġlibūna, 'the Romans have been vanquished … they will vanquish';  [2] ġalabat al-Rūm … sa-yuġlabūna, 'the Romans have vanquished … they will be vanquished';  In addition, Qurṭubī (d. 1273) and Qummī (10th c.) acknowledged two additional minor variations.  [3] ġalabat al-Rūm … sa-yaġlibūna … [4] ġulibat al-Rūm … sa-yuġlabūna."²⁹

Reading 2 says the exact opposite of reading 1.  The written text supports both.  The prophecy's content is fixed not by the page but by the oral vocalisation tradition — which is to say, by the community that already knew what it wanted the verse to mean.

And the tradition preserves the dispute.  Al-Tabari (d. 310/923) records it and then closes it by authority rather than by evidence.  His Arabic:  «فقرأته عامة قرّاء الأمصار (غُلِبَتِ الرُّومُ) بضمّ الغين … سمعت ابن عمر يقرأ (الم غَلَبَتِ الرُّومُ) فقيل له: يا أبا عبد الرحمن، على أيّ شيء غَلَبوا؟ قال: على ريف الشام» — the general body of the city readers read ghulibat, but Ibn Umar was heard reading ghalabat, "the Romans have conquered," and when asked "over what did they conquer?" answered "over the countryside of Syria."  Al-Tabari's ruling:  «والصواب من القراءة في ذلك عندنا الذي لا يجوز غيره ( الم غُلِبَتِ الرُّومُ ) بضم الغين؛ لإجماع الحجة من القرّاء عليه» — "the correct reading, and no other is permissible, is ghulibat with damma on the ghayn, because of the consensus of the authoritative readers."³⁰

Consensus of the readers.  Not the manuscript.

Al-Qurtubi (d. 671/1273) goes further and names names:  «وقرأ أبو سعيد الخدري وعلي بن أبي طالب ومعاوية بن قرة غلبت الروم بفتح الغين واللام» — "Abu Sa'id al-Khudri, Ali b. Abi Talib and Mu'awiya b. Qurra read ghalabat al-Rum, with fatha on the ghayn and the lam."³¹  He quotes the earlier grammarian Abu Ja'far al-Nahhas:  «قراءة أكثر الناس غلبت الروم بضم الغين وكسر اللام» — "the reading of most people is ghulibat al-Rum, with damma on the ghayn and kasra on the lam."³¹  Most people — not all.  And he transmits Ibn Abbas on the verse saying simply «غلبت وغلبت» — "ghulibat and ghalabat," both.³¹  The same words appear in the canonical hadith:  Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3193 has Ibn Abbas on this verse saying "Ghulibat wa Ghalabat."²⁸

So the fourth caliph, two prominent Companions, and Ibn Abbas — the tradition's own model exegete — are all reported reading the verse in ways the standard prophecy claim cannot survive.

And this is not a late or marginal report.  Corpus Coranicum, the variant-readings database of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, catalogues the readings recorded in the earliest Arabic grammatical and exegetical literature.  For Quran 30:2 it lists twelve entries, and the active reading ghalabati is attested in six separate works, the earliest of them by Ibn Wahb (d. 812) and al-Farra (d. 207/822) — that is, roughly a century before al-Tabari.  It is ascribed there to Ibn Umar, to Abu Sa'id al-Khudri, to Abu Amr, and, in Ibn Khalawayh's tenth-century handbook of non-canonical readings, to Ali b. Abi Talib and to the Prophet himself.  For Quran 30:3 the passive sa-yughlabuna, "they will be conquered," is recorded by al-Akhfash al-Awsat (d. 830), by al-Tabari, and by Ibn Khalawayh, who ascribes it to Ali, Ibn Umar and Mu'awiya b. Qurra;  al-Nahhas records the second-person sa-tughlabuna.¹⁰

Al-Akhfash gives the reasoning behind the minority reading, and it is worth stating plainly because it shows what the verse looked like to an early grammarian:  some readers, he says, read ghalabati and sa-yughlabuna "because when Islam came they had conquered, then they were conquered when Islam grew numerous."¹⁰  On that reading the verse is not a prediction about Byzantium's recovery from Persia at all.  It is a statement that Byzantium, then dominant, would be beaten by the Muslims — which is what happened after 634.

Two cautions on this evidence, in both directions.  These are shawadhdh, non-canonical readings, and they are preserved precisely because they were rejected.  Attributions in that literature to the Prophet or to Ali are claims made in the ninth and tenth centuries, not documented history, and no one should treat "the Prophet read it this way" as a fact.  What the record does establish is narrower and still decisive:  the alternative vocalisation was in circulation early, it was ascribed to major early authorities, and the written text of the seventh century could not settle between them.

Third, the dating.  Traditional chronology places surah 30 in Mecca, before 622.  If that holds, the prediction precedes the Byzantine recovery of 627-628.  This is the strongest form of the Muslim case and it should be granted its due:  on the tradition's own dating, the passage is earlier than the event.

But two cautions apply, and one of them comes from the founder of Western Quranic chronology.  Theodor Nöldeke, writing the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the Koran, notes the traditional link to the Persian defeat of the Byzantines "not far from Damascus, about the spring of 614," and then says:  "But the reference of xxx. 1 seq. to this particular battle is by no means so certain that positive conclusions can be drawn from it."³²  Nöldeke numbers verses by Flügel, so his "xxx. 1 seq." is Quran 30:2 and following in the Cairo numbering.

Tesei goes much further.  His conclusion, reached by comparing the passage with dated seventh-century texts, is that "Q 30:2‒7 must have been composed after the conclusion of the peace treaty in 628."²⁹  His reason is not hostility to Islam;  it is the observation that the passage's structure matches a known contemporary genre:

"given the very accurate description of the final outcome of the war, the prophecy on the Rūm should be taken as a vaticinium ex eventu.  Put in different terms, like other prophecies about the outcome of the conflict, the prophecy in Q 30 should be understood as a description a posteriori of events that already had taken place."²⁹

And the prediction was not unusual.  This is the point least known to readers on either side.  Tesei documents three near-contemporary texts making the same forecast.

• Khosrow II, in Theophylact Simocatta's History of Maurice: "Be assured that troubles will flow back in turn against you Romans. The Babylonian race will hold the Roman state in its power for a threefold cyclic hebdomad of years. Thereafter you Romans will enslave Persians for a fifth hebdomad of years."²⁹
• The Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephrem, composed around the middle of the seventh century: "And the Assyrians will gain authority Over the region of the Romans […] But just as the Nile, the river of Egypt Recedes again from what it flooded; So too will Assyria recede Back to their own country. For the Romans once again will be found * In their ancestral land."²⁹
• The Jewish apocalypse Sefer Elijah, on the same war.²⁹

Tesei's assessment:  "The parallelism is especially close to Khosrow's prophecy in the History of Maurice and to the Apocalypse of Ps.-Ephrem, where the alternation of Roman defeat and victory is exposed as clearly as in the Qurʾānic passage."²⁹

Present the Muslim side fairly here, because the scholarship does.  Tesei himself argues that reading 1 — the standard one — is original, and he quotes Nicolai Sinai approvingly:  the majority reading "is surely preferable:  it is easier to imagine that some Muslims were tempted to turn a verse that had originally alluded to the Byzantine-Sassanid war ending in 628 into a miraculous prediction of the Islamic victory over the Byzantines than to see why a triumphant prediction of the Islamic conquests … should have been transformed, by the majority of Quranic readers, into a reference to an obscure pre-Islamic war."²⁹  So the standard reading is probably right, and a Muslim is entitled to say so.

It just does not deliver what the apologist needs.  The same scholarship that vindicates the reading dates the passage after the event and finds the same forecast in Greek, Syriac and Hebrew sources of the same decades.  A prediction that several contemporaries also made, whose written form is ambiguous, whose deadline the tradition itself says was missed, is not a miracle.  It is a reasonable guess, in a genre where such guesses were common, preserved by the side that turned out to be right.

The other prophecy claims, briefly

Quran 48:27, the entry into Mecca.  Tafsir al-Jalalayn is candid about the setting, and it settles the matter:  the Prophet had seen in a dream that he and his Companions would enter Mecca safely, told them so, and then the Meccans turned them back at Hudaybiya — "which was distressing for them, for some of the hypocrites began to have doubts about the Prophet's sincerity, this verse was revealed."³³  The verse is reassurance issued after a setback, not a prediction issued before an event;  it contains the escape clause in sha'a Llah, "if God wills," inside the prophecy itself;  it gives no date;  and the fulfilment came the following year under a clause of the Hudaybiya treaty that Muhammad had himself negotiated.  This claim should be retired by apologists rather than attacked by critics.

Quran 15:9, the preservation promise — "Indeed, it is We who sent down the message, and indeed, We will be its guardian."³⁴  As an argument it is circular:  a book's claim to be preserved is evidence only if the book is already trusted, and every scripture that claims preservation claims it about itself.  As a testable proposition it belongs with the manuscripts, and is treated in the article on the Quran's preservation.

Hadith foretellings — the signs of the Hour, the barefoot shepherds competing in tall buildings, the conquest of Constantinople.  These belong to the article on hadith reliability, because their whole weight rests on showing the report predates the event, which requires chain-critical work on each one.  This article makes no claim about them.

The strongest Muslim responses

These are the best serious replies, stated as their proponents would state them, and answered.

"You are judging a language you do not know."  This is the most powerful response and it is largely correct.  Aesthetic judgement in a second language is thin.  Nobody writing here can hear classical Arabic the way a Cairo hafiz hears it, and the article does not claim to.

Answer.  The article's case does not rest on an aesthetic judgement.  It rests on the structure of the claim.  The point is not "the Quran is not beautiful";  it is that the doctrine's own greatest defenders — al-Baqillani and al-Jurjani, both native speakers, both masters of the material — tell the reader who does not perceive the beauty that he lacks the faculty or should defer to authority.  That structural fact is visible in translation, because it is a fact about the argument's form.  And the sarfa debate happened entirely among native speakers.

"The Arabs of Muhammad's day were the world's greatest connoisseurs of Arabic, they hated him, and they did not produce a rival.  That is the real argument."  This is the classical form, and Vasalou records it:  those who lack trained literary judgement can rely on "the indirect or circumstantial evidence provided by the fact that the Arabs, acknowledged masters of their eloquence, had not produced a successful match for the Qurʾan."⁴

Answer.  Three problems.  The evidence that they did not try comes from the tradition that says they could not.  Martin concedes that "insufficient textual evidence exists to ascertain how soon Muslims or non-Muslims attempted to emulate" the Quran.³  Those who did try, Musaylima above all, were killed and their work survives only in the hands of the winners.  And "did not produce a successful match" presupposes a judging procedure, which is exactly what is missing.

"Sarfa was rejected by consensus.  You are quoting a losing minority."  True, and the article says so.  Al-Suyuti claimed consensus against it.⁴

Answer.  The sarfa debate is not being cited as an authority.  It is being cited as evidence about perception.  The claim under test is that the Quran's superiority to all human speech is apparent to competent Arabic speakers.  Al-Nazzam was a competent Arabic speaker who did not find it apparent, and al-Sharif al-Murtada, the leading Imami authority in Baghdad, agreed with him two centuries later.³  That a majority later ruled otherwise on theological grounds does not undo the observation.

"Al-Jurjani's theory is a real theory of literary value, and it identifies real features of the text."  Correct, and the article grants it.  His work is a genuine contribution to rhetoric.

Answer.  This is the strongest reply and it also contains the difficulty.  A theory that explains the Quran's excellence by general grounds of literary value places it on the same scale as other literature.  Vasalou notes that this can be seen as assimilating the Quran "to human literary creations."⁴  Excellence on a shared scale is a difference of degree.  The miracle needs a difference of kind, and al-Baqillani's attempt to supply one — the no-genre claim — is contradicted by Ibn al-Athir and by modern prosody.

"Modern Muslim scholarship has moved past the medieval theology."  Also correct.  Martin observes that in the twentieth century, Muhammad Abduh, Sayyid Qutb and Aisha Abd al-Rahman have all worked on "that which characterizes the stylistic superiority of the Qurʾān over other Arabic literary works of art," and that "the theological dimension … appear[s] to be less important in contemporary writing about the Qurʾān."³

Answer.  That is a real shift, and it is a shift away from the argument this article is testing.  A claim of stylistic superiority over other Arabic literature is a comparative literary judgement.  It may well be true.  It is not a miracle claim, and it cannot do the work of proving divine authorship.  If modern Muslim scholarship is quietly retreating from i'jaz as proof to i'jaz as literary appreciation, that is an honest move — but the pamphlets have not followed it.

"Non-Muslim Arabists praise the Quran's power."  They do, and the article has said so.  Its effect on hearers is documented from the earliest sources.

Answer.  Praise is not the claim.  No Arabist known to this article has ever written that the Quran could not have been produced by a human being.  The gap between "extraordinary" and "supernatural" is where the whole argument lives, and admiration does not cross it.

Common objections and responses

"Christians make the same claim about the Bible, so this is special pleading."

Some do, and they should stop.  The Berean Archive's rule is that a standard applied to the Quran must be applied to the Bible.  "No human could have written this" is a bad argument in Arabic and a bad argument in Hebrew and Greek.  The Bible is a library of wildly uneven styles — Kings is not Job, and Mark is not Hebrews — so the parallel claim is not even available in the same form.  Where Christians make it anyway, they are making the mistake this article describes.

"Sarfa was heresy; citing it is like citing Arianism against Christianity."

The comparison is instructive but backwards.  Arianism is cited against Christianity precisely to show that the doctrine of the Trinity was contested and developed, which is a legitimate historical point that Christian historians accept.  The same applies here.  Al-Nazzam was not an outsider;  he was a leading Mu'tazili theologian in an era when the Mu'tazila had state backing, and his student al-Jahiz became the doctrine's chief defender.  The point is not that sarfa is true.  It is that the inimitability of the Quran as literature was seriously contested by qualified Muslims within two centuries.

"Musaylima's verses are obviously ridiculous, which proves the challenge stands."

They read poorly, and nobody should pretend otherwise.  But what survives is three fragments selected by his enemies from a career the sources say drew large tribal followings.  Kister notes that Musaylima "was held in high esteem" and that "his companions called him 'the merciful one of Yamāma'."⁷  Whatever those followers were responding to, we do not have it.  Judging a rival by the excerpts his conquerors chose to keep is not a fair test, and the same objection would be immediately obvious if the situation were reversed.

"The challenge has stood for 1,400 years unmet."

Unmet by whose ruling?  There is no panel, no criterion and no record of submissions being assessed.  What has stood for 1,400 years is the absence of an accepted verdict against the claim, in a community where producing a rival Quran has often been dangerous and always been socially impossible.  That is not the same thing.

"Then produce a surah yourself."

This is the right challenge to raise, and the honest answer is:  a submission would not settle anything, because the judging is the problem.  If a passage were produced and Arabists rated it highly, it would be rejected as derivative, or as not revealed, or as lacking knowledge of the Unseen — all three of which are stated criteria in the tradition's own gloss on the challenge.  A test that cannot be failed by the claim cannot be passed by the challenger.

"Modern computational stylometry could settle it."

It could settle some narrower questions and has begun to.  Marianna Klar's catalogue of saj' techniques is measurement, and Devin Stewart's prosodic rules are testable.⁶  What such work can establish is whether the Quran's rhyme, beat and parallelism follow describable patterns — and the answer so far is that they do.  What it cannot establish is that a text is beyond human capacity, because no measurement of a text tells you what a human could or could not have written.

"The Quran's preservation proves its divine origin, and Quran 15:9 says so."

That is a different argument with different evidence, and it is testable against manuscripts.  It belongs to the article on the Quran's preservation.

"The scientific miracles confirm the literary one."

They are a separate and much later claim, and Dallal's survey finds that the classical commentators never made it.¹²  See the companion article.  Note also that the two arguments pull against each other:  the literary claim says the Quran's excellence is in its Arabic form, while the scientific claim says it is in propositional content that survives translation.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

What would strengthen the Muslim claim.

• A stated, public criterion, agreed in advance. If Muslim scholars specified what a successful submission would look like — features, thresholds, a named panel including non-Muslim Arabists, blind assessment — and then no submission met it, that would be evidence. The challenge would become a test.
• Early evidence of the doctrine. A first- or second-century text arguing that the Quran is inimitable as Arabic would push the doctrine back toward the Prophet's own generation and blunt the objection that it was constructed in the ninth century for polemical reasons.
• Documented failures by qualified rivals. If the sources preserved substantial attempts by first-rate Arabic stylists — not fragments chosen by enemies, but real texts — and those texts read as clearly inferior to competent readers on all sides, the historical claim would carry real weight.
• A vocalised early manuscript of Quran 30:2-3. A dated seventh-century codex carrying the vowel marks or an unambiguous orthography for ghulibat … sa-yaghlibuna would remove the ambiguity problem entirely. Manuscript scholarship is advancing fast, and this is a live possibility.

What would weaken it further.

• A successful match, publicly judged. If a passage of Arabic were produced and a mixed panel of Arabists, including Muslims, judged it the equal of a short surah, the claim would be finished as an argument.
• Earlier evidence that the illiteracy dogma is later still, or evidence that Muhammad was demonstrably literate. Günther's judgement is that the question cannot be settled on present evidence; new evidence either way would matter.
• More attested variant readings of Quran 30:2-3 in early manuscripts, especially if the minority reading appeared in a dated early codex.
• A demonstration that the Quran's saj' is fully rule-describable across the whole corpus, with the rules stated formally. This is the direction Stewart's and Klar's work points, and each step along it further dissolves al-Baqillani's no-genre claim.

What would settle nothing either way.  More testimony about how the Quran makes people feel, from either side.  That testimony is real and it is worth respecting.  It is not evidence about who wrote the book.

Sources

Quran text and translations were retrieved from api.quran.com/api/v4 on 22 August 2026:  Uthmani Arabic, and the English of Saheeh International (resource 20), M. Pickthall (19), A. Yusuf Ali (22) and M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (85).  A.J. Arberry was retrieved from api.alquran.cloud/v1 (edition en.arberry) the same day.  Verse numbering follows the 1924 Cairo edition throughout.  Hadith were retrieved from sunnah.com as HTML and read locally.  Nothing in this article was established through an AI summarising fetch;  every quotation was read from downloaded bytes.