This Religion Is a Science 157an intrinsic power that was naturally associated with the Divine. It was
this same intrinsic divinity of words that led the Kahins to present
their oracular pronouncements through poetry: it would have been
inconceivable for the gods to speak in any other way.
Obviously, it is difficult for non-Arabic speakers to appreciate the
exquisite quality of the Quran’s language. But it may be sufficient to
note that the Quran is widely recognized as the Arabic language at its
poetic height. Indeed, in codifying the idiom and dialect of the Hijaz,
the Quran essentially created the Arabic language. As a text, the
Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the
source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek,
what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language,
frozen forever in time.
As the “the supreme Arab event,” to quote Kenneth Cragg, the
Quran is regarded by most Muslims as Muhammad’s sole miracle.
Like the prophets who came before him, Muhammad was repeatedly
urged to prove his divine mission through miraculous acts. But when-
ever he was challenged in this way, he insisted that he was nothing
more than a messenger, and his message was the only miracle he had
to offer. And unlike the miracles of other prophets, which are con-
fined to a particular age, Muhammad’s miracle of the Quran would, in
the words of the twelfth-century mystic Nadjm ad-Din Razi Daya
(1177–1256), “remain until the end of the world.”
Daya was appealing to a fundamental belief in Islam that in both
speech and form, the Quran is incomparable to any other religious or
secular writing the world has seen. Muhammad himself often chal-
lenged the pagan poets of his time to match the splendor of the
Quran, saying, “If you are in doubt of what we have revealed... then
bring [a verse] like it. But if you cannot—and indeed you cannot—
then guard yourself against the Fire, whose fuel is men and stones”
(2:23–4; also 16:101).
While the concept of the Umm al-Kitab (“the Mother of Books”)
means that the Quran is spiritually connected to other sacred scrip-
tures, unlike the Torah and the Gospels—both of which consist of
individual books written by many different writers over hundreds of
years, conveying the experience of encountering the Divine in his-
tory—the Quran is considered to be direct revelation (tanzil), the