Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 115
Quran (2:106 and 16:101), God allows that on occasion he himself
has substituted one verse for another, which had the effect of
abrogating or canceling the earlier revelation. Besides serving as a
powerful inducement for Muslims to attempt to discover the actual
chronological order of the suras—the later verse would presumably
abrogate the earlier one—the notion led to considerable
speculation about whether any of the abrogated verses were still in
our Quran and why such an action was necessary in the first place.
The Miracle of the Quran
The early Muslims, most of whom lived in an environment very
different from the Arabian backwater in which the Quran first appeared,
had to serve as their own exegetes, with little help, it
would appear, from ancient Alexandria. They contrived their own
homegrown ars rhetorica, which drew its confirming testimonia
(shawahid) from the old Arab poetry and which evolved contemporarily
and in parallel with the spread of Islam and the diffusion
of the Quran (and its very gradual passage from “recitation” to
“book”). The primary function of this new endeavor was to illustrate
the (theological) proposition announced by the Quran itself,
that the Recitation was beyond human competence: Challenge
them, God instructed his Prophet, to produce suras like these
(Quran 10:38; 11:13; 28:49). The challenge was never met by Muhammad’s
contemporaries; what was proceeding from Muhammad’s
mouth was, in short, inimitable. Later Muslims weighed and
assessed this quranic quality of “inimitability” (ijaz) and judged it
a miracle, not in the sense of the “wonders” (karamat) that God
allowed his “friends” (including Muhammad) to perform on occasion,
but as a unique display of divine omnipotence inimitable by
mortals, no matter how favored. Thus the inimitability of the
Quran was a probative miracle (mujiza), absolute proof of the
Quran’s divine origins and, simultaneously, and perhaps more
pointedly in the circumstances, of Muhammad’s genuine prophethood.
The inimitability of the Quran thus plays the same authenticating
role in Islam as the resurrection does in Christianity, and