Bring a Surah like it (is it a sound argument)

[Angrboda]

I recently attended a debate with a Muslim scholar who made this argument. It's full of holes. First, how do you measure how "like" one example of literature is to another? There is no objective way, and if you depend on the subjective testimony, then non-Muslims will find plenty "similar" and Muslims none at all. So surely, the sura is in the mind of the beholder. This being the case, it becomes a case of, "I believe, thus be it so." In that case, the Quran is just serving as a middleman for blind faith. The second problem is how to eliminate confirmation bias. If you believe the Quran inimitable, everything you see is unlike it, and every sura unique. Finally is the question of what is meant by similar. In the thinking of Heidegger is the notion that there is sameness in difference and difference in sameness. If there weren't similars in two things, they could not be compared, having no common properties; and the Quran and other "differents" certainly have "similars" -- derived from a human language, poetic, prosodic, argumentative, easily situated hermeneutically, etc. But there is also difference in sameness -- two things, no matter how alike, must differ, or be mistaken for the same thing, an identity; difference in spatial location, difference in theme, in audience, in tropes. So how does one measure the sameness in difference in the Quran, and the difference in sameness amongst its sura, without hopelessly falling into subjectivity and rendering your argument vacuous? Muslims try by pointing out how the forms of Arabic literature prior to that time differ from the form of the Quran. Does this prove that it is unique, rather than either simply innovative or poorly written? No. And if it's simply innovative, we have good reason to think that it stands alone not due to the impossibility of copying, but due to the unwillingness of Muslims to do so. Who better than a Muslim scholar to do so? And who less likely to do so?

No, the "perfect Quran" argument is little more than a stand in for other, more assailable arguments.


At that debate, they passed around index cards to write questions on for the Q & A period. Being handicapped, I demurred, but I wanted to ask why he felt so ill of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu in as close to the original Chinese as possible? Had he even read it? That brings up the other side of the argument, the argument from ignorance. If you haven't examined all the world's examples of literature, what are you measuring the Quran's uniqueness against. The answer is simple, they aren't. They declare a lie to be a fact, and move on. It isn't meant to persuade, but to stymie, and comfort the faithful (who have done basically no comparisons or thinking before accepting this as true).

Indeed, I would say that both the Tao Te Ching and Sun Tzu's Art Of War are inimitable. What does that prove? Nothing.

Next time a Muslim presents you with this argument, demand they produce an original chapter of the Art Of War in classical Chinese.

Let me know your results.

(There are even simpler examples, and more pointed. Suggest they write a new, substantial chapter for, say, Bronte's Jane Eyre, and ask them, if, you were to insert that chapter into Jane Eyre, a reader already familiar with Jane Eyre -- as Muslims are with the Quran -- would not notice the odd chapter in the course of their rereading the book. Indeed, in this case, familiarity does indeed breed contempt, for other forms and examples; what the Muslim perceives as wisdom and beauty is nothing more than the old familiar tunnel vision that afflicts those with more faith than sense.)