 بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم صلى الله عليه وسلم وعليه وصحبه جمعين سبحانكه لا علم لنا إلا ما علمتنا إنك أنت أنت علم الحكيم ولا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله العلي العظيم السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته إن شاء الله تعالى I'm going to speak tonight about the Quran the greatness of the Quran the uniqueness of the Quran الله سبحانه و تعالى says in the Quran that in the month of Ramadan شاهر رمضان الذي أنزل فيه القرآن that it was in the month of Ramadan in which the Quran was revealed to humanity so this is a blessed month it's blessed for a number of reasons first and foremost because it is it marks the commencement of the Quranic revelation to the world the bi'atha of the prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه و سلم the beginning of the revelation that came to him so I'm going to talk about the Quran and I'm going to talk a little bit maybe a little bit more academically than what usually probably happens on a night like this where it's more sort of a preaching style or حتبة style and the reason I'm doing this is because there are a lot of questions about the Quran lately of course there are a lot of anti-Muslim people on the internet whether they're atheists or Christians who are making a lot of claims about the Quran who are criticizing the Quran in a polemical sort of sense so I thought I'd address some of these issues or at least talk about the Quran from the standpoint of the classical scholarship so I've chosen to talk about the uniqueness of the Quran so the Quran itself issues a challenge this is called a تحدي and the most recent challenge is an البقرة verse 23 if you happen to be in doubt about what we have revealed to our servant then bring a surah like unto it a chapter like unto it and call to your aid any whom you want as helpers other than Allah if you speak the truth إن لم تفعلوا ولم تفعلوا and if you can't do it and you won't do it فتقوا النار التي وقودوا الناس والحجارة then fear the fire who's fuel is man and stones اردت للكافرين prepared for those who reject faith so إمام الزركشي he said that initially the challenge was to produce 10 was to produce a recital an account like this Quran فأتوا بحديث المثله produce something like the whole of the Quran then it was reduced to 10 سور فأتوا بعشر سور المثله finally it was reduced to one surah فأتوا بسورة من مثله that's the last challenge being issued in Medina so the challenge of the Quran testifies to its إعجاز what's known as إعجاز القرآن which is sometimes translated as the insuperability of the Quran the inimitability of the Quran so the proposition that the Quran cannot be imitated of course the word إعجاز is a form for infinitive in grammar meaning to debilitate to disable or to incapacitate so this is the concept the word معجزة is the active participle in theology it's a technical term for a prophetic miracle معجزة is a prophetic miracle as opposed to a karama a saintly miracle a non prophetic miracle linguistically معجزة is that which incapacitates so the Quran is a معجزة in the sense that it incapacitates others from producing its likeness now the first theologians to broach the subject of the nature of the Quran's إعجاز were probably مؤتزيلي theologians مؤتزيليت إبراهيم and نظام for example from Basra in Iraq so his position and this is the standard مؤتزيلي position is that he says if all the Arabs were left alone they would have been able to compose pieces like those of the Quran the أقل in other words would have been able to do it so the مؤتزيلي they give the intellect a status that it doesn't it doesn't deserve and their position really is that the Quran this is the مؤتزيلي position is that the Quran is really more like is more like the very voice of God in other words more like more like an inspired text rather than a revealed text so it's kind of like what Christians believe about the Bible as opposed to like what Jews believe about the Torah right it's not the revealed words of God in other words God is not choosing words but rather inspiring a profit to choose his own words but the meanings are are given to that profit so that's it's more akin to the مؤتزيلي position so he says if all the Arabs were left alone they would have been able to compose pieces so left alone are the operative words here so the مؤتزيلي position is that the Quran jazz is external to its text right rather than internal it's extrinsic rather than intrinsic in other words it is possible for the Arab poets to produce the likes of the Quran to match its unique style to rival its eloquence but Allah سبحانه وتعالى simply will not allow them to do that right he will deflect them from that يصرفه معنه right so they call it a صرفة the صرفة is the deflection or the aversion okay so Allah سبحانه وتعالى يجب أن يتكلم anyone who tries to imitate the Quran from from producing its likeness by deflecting them so the analogy is like imagine there's an expert marksman an expert archer and there's a target that's five feet away from him just five feet away and so he aims at the target he aims at the target and he misses completely and he tries it again over and over and over again and he can't seem to hit the target he's an expert marksman it's five feet away and he's he does it a hundred times and he's zero for a hundred so then his only conclusion must be that something something is causing me not to do this something is preventing me from hitting the target and it must be external now the Sunni position is that the jazz is internal that it's intrinsic to the text in other words it is impossible for the Arab poets to produce the likes of the Quran so going back to this archery analogy imagine now this expert marksman he's trying to hit a target that's five hundred yards away so he tries over and over and over again he's close to it because it's just impossible he doesn't have the capacity to do something like that so in this case prevention is internal another analogy is like imagine there's like a room and there's something there's a book in this room let's say it's called the book of secrets or something it's on a table and you want to get to this book and read it so you go inside the room and you notice that there are guards there right that are preventing you from even touching the book so you are being externally incapacitated that's akin to the مرتزيلي position but now let's say another scenario you go into the room and the book is there so you pick it up and you open it and you notice that it's written in a strange code that you don't understand so you can't understand it so now you're being internally incapacitated and that's akin to the the nature of the book itself incapacitates you so the problem with the مرتزيلي position is that it does not locate the miracle of the Quran within the Quran but rather outside of the Quran or to put it another way the مرتزيلي position is like it is as if the prophet can move his foot like normal but everyone else is somehow paralyzed which is abnormal and that is the very definition of a miracle خرق العادات which is a break or breach of what is customary and a breach of what is normal the سني position is as if the prophet can walk on water which is abnormal while everyone else can't which is normal so at the end of the day both are saying the same thing imitation of the Quran will not be done so let's unpack this concept of إعجاز a bit further according to some سني أرلماء the إعجاز of the Quran is detected through intuition in other words it's impact upon the listener the way that the Quran causes joy and tears and fear and hope for example others say no because this is subjective it's like whose poetry is more beautiful whose poetry is more impactful Shakespeare or Wordsworth some people will say Shakespeare some people might say Wordsworth right some would say beauty is in the eye of the beholder if you most people find that their own children are the most beautiful children that's probably because emotion gets involved or they see themselves in their children so we need objective standards of beauty others would argue that in poetry there is an objective standard that Shakespeare is objectively more beautiful more eloquent than all of the other poets this is why he became the most beloved of all the English poets and why most experts say that his poetry is superior therefore we also have objective standards when it comes to physical human beauty and this might not be PC but that's okay it's true this is what for example the nursery rhyme Goldilocks that's what it's trying to teach children that there's a standard for beauty so if you look at the prophet for example who was the epitome of physical beauty he was of medium height not too tall, not too short so what's known is sort of the Goldilocks range his skin was not too dark not too pale his hair was not curly it wasn't straight but more wavy he wasn't overweight he wasn't too thin but something in the middle but he also had other qualities that are viewed probably cross-culturally as being beautiful qualities in men for example long eyelashes he had very broad shoulders large forearms, large calfs he had an aquiline nose which is highly desirable across different cultures so there's this objective standard of physical beauty so with respect to the Quran this intuitive I feel it approach did not work for many Sunni scholars so people were definitely intuiting the Quran's beauty there's no doubt about that people were definitely intuiting the beauty but scholars wanted to know why exactly what was happening just as if you saw the Prophet ﷺ he would be overwhelmed overwhelmed by his beauty and you can tell me why you were overcome you specifically tell me why he was so so beautiful okay now before we get to that popular among Sunni متكلد مون this scholastic or discursive theologians what could be called circumstantial evidence so circumstantial evidence is evidence that relies on an inference or deduction to connect it to a factor conclusion in other words indirect evidence like fingerprints at a crime scene as opposed to like direct evidence as opposed to like an eyewitness who saw an actual crime so the متكلد مون mentioned two pieces of circumstantial evidence so number one they say were the Arabs had reached the peak of their language in 7th century Arabia right the Hijaz and the late antiquity was the height of Arabic poetry was their pride and joy right they had the seven hanging odes right at the annual festival at a town called Rukav just outside of Mecca the Arab poets would have taken the challenge very seriously they had ample motives for taking up the challenge with overwhelming enthusiasm I mean the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he was denouncing their gods he was condemning aspects of their culture he was claiming prophecy however they broke their custom of normal behavior they broke their custom of normal behavior and persecuted and fought against the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم so he was denouncing the notion that they immediately recognized the superiority of the Quran and simply knew that they couldn't answer the challenge so this piece of circumstantial evidence supports the Sunni position of the Quran's internal incapacitating mechanism or maybe they tried to imitate the Quran right you hear the Quran you think this is beautiful and they thought to themselves هذا يبدو like when when you watch an expert calligrapher and he makes it look so easy and you think well I can do that this looks easy right then you try to do it and you it's not even close so maybe they try to imitate the Quran but yet they failed consistently and collectively so this kind of supports the position of an external incapacitating a mechanism in a verse that supports this position is Allah وإذا تطلع عليهم آياتنا قالوا قد سميعنا لو نشاء لقولنا مثل هذا when when our signs are rehearsed to them they say indeed we have heard it and if we wanted we could say the like of that we could say the likes of it as well right so وماذا عياته يكتبه لكه يوجد فرصة فيه في بوكه في اعجازه وهي يكتبه لكي يحيا ابن حكم الغزال who was the foremost of the poets in Andalusia and he wanted to create something like سورة الإخلاص so he began to work on it and then he says suddenly an incredible sense of terror came over me it moved me to regret and repentance so that's the first piece of circumstantial evidence is that is that the Arabs it appears that the Arabs just they immediately immediately began to persecute the Prophet SallallahuAla rather than what would have been expected of them to take the challenge of the Prophet SallallahuAla very very seriously and attempt to answer the challenge and then eventually of course the greatest living Arab poets all of them became Muslim all of them eventually confessed to the Quran superiority where there's Hassan ibn Thabit or Abdullah ibn Rawaha Ka'b ibn Zuhair even the great Labid ibn Rabi'a all of them at some point through their hands into the air and said that we cannot even come close to anything like this and then the second piece of indirect evidence is that the Quran has since not been successfully imitated okay and and several modern Arab Christians have attempted to do this and their attempts are their attempts have been laughingly pathetic so nothing even comes close so then the two points the two pieces then of indirect evidence just to recap or that the Arabs at the time could not produce its likeness right the greatest poets became Muslim and the Arabs since that time have not produced its likeness now many many medieval Sunni theologians were not satisfied with this type of indirect evidence primarily because the Murtazili could also argue these points to support the surfa that the Quran has an external incapacitating mechanism so they sought direct evidence of the Quran's and they believe that this could be done from a literary standpoint okay so the three major classical Sunni authorities who undertook this task were قادي أبو بكر الباقي لاني right his book is called إعجاز القرآن you have عبد القاهر الجورجاني دلائل العجاز or أسرار البراغة and then you have ابن جزي الكلبي in his book تسهيل العنومة تنزيل okay الباقي لاني الجورجاني الكلبي now according to these classical سن العلمة it is unique stylistics ورقل أصليب يونيك stylistics and unmatched إلكوانس بلاغة which is at the seat of the Quran's إعجاز so by unmatched إلكوانس they mean that the Quran is أبجكتب لي more eloquent than the poets okay so like موسى عليه السلام he confounded these sorcerers with his you know white magic it was أبجكتب لي superior أبجكتب لي more powerful عيس عليه السلام confounded the physicians and healers of his day with his ability to heal people his quote unquote medicine the Prophet سلام then confounded the poets of his day with his style and eloquence so with respect to إلكوانس what makes a speaker more eloquent than others so his superior choice of words and his clear and concise communication okay this is what makes his words more powerful more interesting more motivating more persuasive and more memorable i.e. more impactful so eloquent speakers make an impact upon the heart and mind okay so let's start with الباقي لاني so الباقي لاني he said that the style the usloob of the Quran defies classification right it has the classifiability as he puts it in other words it broke the custom of the existing literary norms that were known to the Arabs at that time so the right the breach of of what is customary was not only external to the text with this initial sort of Arab reaction to the text to fight the Prophet but it was preeminently internal right the Quran's unique you know abnormal customary style the Quran is an amazingly eloquent and masterful fusion of poetry and prose with incredible rhetoric as well okay and there's actually no record of any poet at the time of the Prophet ﷺ actually answering the challenge is an ocean of rhetoric I mean sometimes a college student will feel good if he uses one or two sort of rhetorical devices in a research paper the Quran is just it's full of hundreds and hundreds of rhetorical devices an ocean of rhetoric so its miracle was the creation of a new unidentifiable genre of expression okay the Quran style is sui generous which means it's in a class of its own totally outside human forms of literature okay so it may include familiar rhetorical elements like like metaphor and hyperbole and like simile but only to assimilate them into this unclassifiable otherness Al Baqilani compares the Quran he compares them to the the verses of the greatest of the Arab poets and he points out that the Quran has no weak verses no verse in the Quran can be improved rhetorically whereas all poems have a weak verse here and there right for example like to be or not to be that is the question that's from Shakespeare's Hamlet no improvement is possible there right but there are some verses that can be improved so Baqilani says that all jaheli all jaheli poets some of their lines can be improved whereas nothing of the Quran can be improved so the Arabs could not find a literary form to which the Quran corresponded they were just sort of scratching their heads and this is evident in the Quran itself right is this poetry right is this magic is this qihana is this a type of like fortune telling or sooth saying because the diviners right the fortune tellers the Qohan they would speak their sort of predictions in something called saja which is rhymed rhymes to prose in the Quran is not exactly saja it's transcended it's different it's unique they would say are these sort of fictional tales of the ancients they couldn't identify the Quran's literary form okay so that's now he seeks to map out a definitive paradigm for understanding the Quran's inimitable eloquence so he downplays intuition and subjective responses he also downplays circumstantial evidence as a testimony to the Quran's inimitability and he sets out to establish the case on purely literary grounds okay so he argues that the Arabs they were initially dazzled and struck into wonderment by the Quran so Johnny uses the Arabs initial reaction as a proof against the surfa their reaction wasn't that's nice but we can do that no it was a state of utter bewilderment and then his sham relates the story of Al-Wadid ibn Mughaira arguably the greatest living poet at the time that he was absolutely awestruck by the Qara'a of the Prophet ﷺ and he went back to his people and he said this conquers and destroys everything that came before it of poetry and then he said to the people as well to the Quraish he said this is not his regular speech this is something else and then you know peer pressure got to him and eventually caved in and his story is told the Quran's style, composition arrangement of words and eloquence is beyond human capacity and like Baqilani he demonstrates this by comparing various poems written by the greatest of the Arab poets with the ayat of the Quran and concludes that the latter are objectively superior and then finally Ibn Jusey Al-Kalbi he said that the Quran's ayat has ten elements number one its eloquence is above any human speech you can say here that it's impact right it's impact for better or worse like the Quran says that when you mention your lord in the Quran the oneness of your lord in the Quran they turn back in a version and this is a question that sometimes we get is if the Quran is so eloquent then why didn't all of the Arabs believe in it as a divine revelation why didn't Abu Jahl for example believe it was a divine revelation well first and foremost the Quran is calling to a moral life it's calling towards a certain type of life right a certain type of ethic okay so if people don't want to change their lives it doesn't matter how beautiful or how eloquent the message is they're not going to believe in it they're not going to to follow it okay the very sound of the Quran raptures non-Arab and non-Muslims as well قدي عياد relates in his book that it's reported that Christians heard the Quran that began to weep سيوتي said that several people died when they heard the Quran I'll tell you this from experience when I was a college roommate who was a Catholic I played the Quran for him in the car recitation by and he just kind of sat there and he was he had a strange look on it and he was literally awestruck by it and he told me later that he just he was thinking about it and he eventually ended up making his Shahada a few days later and he said one of the one of the key moments that led him to that decision was just hearing the Quran there are actually dozens and dozens of Quran reaction videos on YouTube by the way some of these have millions of views okay Christians atheists agnostics listening to the Quran you see people's jaws drop they start weeping profusely you know this guy he let his little baby listen to the Quran his baby stop crying you know I asked one of my teachers about this their tongues are but their hearts are the heart the soul understands what the mind can't and it speaks to the fitra it speaks to the human being so definitely these people are intuiting something about the Quran and that's very very apparent so that's number one it's eloquence above human speech and then he says the unique arrangement of the ayat and the Suwar is the structure of the Quran at the micro and macro levels so if you look at something for example one ayat to the kursi if you look at this ayat and break it down it's a chiasmus it has sort of a concentric composition but this is also true if you look at for example larger Suwari look at Al Baqara there's a book written by I believe Raymond Farron on Surat Al Baqara he says the entire Suwara 286 verses Michel Kuiper is another these are non-muslim scholars of the Quran you can call them orientalists if you want but phenomenal work they're doing he did a book on Surat Al Ma'ida Michel Kuiper he looks at the incredible composition and symmetry of Surat Al Ma'ida and of course in our tradition as well you have people like Islahi and Al Farahi coherence in the Quran I mean this is just sort of something that is getting off the ground nowadays I mean there's going to be a lot of literature coming out of the academy at least there should be on this topic so the unique arrangement of the ayat and the Suwara of course Fakhredin Al-Razi writes about this as well number three he says the incapacitation of the Arabs to produce something similar at that time as well as thereafter number four the stories of the Quran they could not have been known to the Prophet ﷺ so maybe he knew about the Exodus and the flood and the deluge but there are things in the Quran that could not have been known specialized knowledge like from Talmudic tradition these are things that are known through initiatic chains of transmission passed down from rabbi to student rabbi to student how does he know those things number five the predictions of the Quran that came true like the defeat of the Persians within a few years the perfect theological orthodoxy espoused by the Quran the towheed of Allah restored and refined Imam Al-Razi says which is between of the Christians and the Ta'ateel of the Jews the confirmation of the of Allah سبحانه وتعالى rejection of Tathleef rejection of the Trinity the perfect theological orthodoxy number seven the superior the laws and morals espoused by the Quran it's prescribed orthopraxis as well as it's what's known as trajectory hermeneutics with respect to it's laws that the Quran clearly is moving toward the abolition of slavery I mean it's very very clear I think if you engage with the Quran and you engage with the sunnah I mean Islam initially abolished all forms of slavery except through war I mean people in the jahali time you can make them you can make them your slave you can just go and raid a town unprovoked not as a a defense sort of maneuver not as a what's known as a preeminent strike but just going and raiding a town and taking people as slaves so all of these were abolished in Islam except through war it's called it's more of a type of indentured servitude and the purpose was to reintegrate really people into the society at large but one can make a strong argument that the Quran is moving towards the total abolition of slavery that's called trajectory hermeneutics preemptive strike that's what I was trying to say earlier number eight the divinely or providentially preserved text of the Quran that there are 10 قراءات of the Quran all of them are multiple attested you know you find these videos made by Christians and this version of the دوري قراءة is different than the Hafs and you know it's so they conclude that the Quran has not been preserved they don't know the basis they don't know the foundations of Uluman Quran that there are 10 قراءات of the Quran all of them are multiple attested all of them have chains of transmission that go back to the Prophet and these are the same all around the world for 14 centuries number nine the ease by which the Quran is memorized this is incredible we have 10 year old her father of the Quran وَلَقَدْ يَسَرْنَا الْقُرْانَ says we have made this Quran easy to memorize and of course number 10 and finally the incredible polyvalence of the text of the Quran that it is multi-layered in its meaning as well as the fact that the reader never tires of reading the text year after year decade after decade so these are just some of the things that I wanted to mention about the incredible uniqueness of our scripture of the Quran and you know we should be engaged with the Quran on a daily basis this is something that is commanded in the Quran تدبر of the Quran means to really penetrate the meanings of the Quran but not just the meanings not just you know memorizing but engaging in a deep level studying the Quran its relevance in the world today understanding that there's two types of discourse in the Quran there's two types of خطاب there's a خطاب of تكليف and a خطاب of ودع there's a situational discourse of the Quran that may affect some of its أحكام depending on circumstances so this is a very deep study that we need to engage in that is now becoming necessary for more and more people because the Quran is constantly under attack so I pray that Allah سبحانه وتعالى accepts our fasting in our prayers I accept that Allah سبحانه وتعالى I pray that Allah سبحانه وتعالى accepts everything we do for his sake and to purify our intentions may Allah سبحانه وتعالى bless all of you have a good عيد and we'll see you soon inshallah