The Qur'an, a miracle renewed at every moment

Al-Fatiha is not the first surah to be revealed, and Surah al-Baqarah is not the second surah. This arrangement of the mushaf was made not according to the order of revelation but by an entirely different divine wisdom. On this matter we have touched before on whether the arrangement is tawqifi, that is, of revelatory origin, or random or the result of an ijtihad of the Prophet (pbuh); but, apart from certain reports, the discoveries made about the miraculous balance and symmetry within the arrangement of the mushaf itself show very clearly that it can only be of revelatory origin.

In fact, these discoveries alone show a miracle before which those who regard the Qur'an as human speech, those who do not believe, and even Muslims who approach the Qur'an historically ought to stand and submit.

It is well known that the Qur'an is the greatest miracle given to the Prophet. Indeed, according to some views it is the only miracle, a debate we need not enter, there is no need; but none of the debates object to the Qur'an being a miracle. The dimension of the Qur'an as a miracle shows, above all, that it is not human speech, through its eloquence, its style, its never-aging effect and its coherence, to whoever sees, to whoever does not close his eyes to seeing.

Although some historicists have tried to look at it almost as an expression, by the Prophet, within the language and cultural horizon of that day, of a meaning revealed to the Prophet, one cannot believe how these views fail to see even the radical textual difference between the Prophet's own hadiths and the Qur'an. The fact is that when a person does not want to believe, he can find a rational way of not believing.

Yet the radical difference in the style of the Qur'an, its superiority that has never been surpassed and that no human being has been able to match, comes today not only from the eloquence of the matter, from its style, or from the realization that at times it contains certain pieces of knowledge that no human being knew in the period when it was revealed. With this effect of speech, perhaps with this effect of speech alone, the Qur'an, when revealed in Mecca and Medina, issued a challenge to those who denied it to bring a surah like it. In an environment where masters of speech existed and where poetry and beauty of speech were quite widespread, practiced and admired arts, it is well known that no one could answer this challenge, that everyone remained "incapable" before this challenge and thereby it rendered everyone "incapacitated." Although some made certain attempts merely for clowning, these attempts sounded like the buzzing of a fly. It is well known that even someone regarded as the learned man and sage of the Quraysh, such as al-Walid b. al-Mughira, although he wanted to deny it, could not bring his tongue to say that it was human speech.

A broad literature has formed on the inimitability of the Qur'an. In this literature of i'jaz, many books have each pointed to certain aspects of the Qur'an, to the linguistic novelties, originalities and riches it contains, even to its reports. In my view all of them are valuable. Even though the Qur'an says that it is a miracle, there is the possibility that, in terms of style, it does not affect the person of today, let alone the person who does not know Arabic, as much as it affected the first-period Arabs. Of course our living in a language basin different from that of the Qur'an plays a large role in this.

However, there are studies showing that the Qur'an's being the greatest miracle is not limited to linguistic style and eloquence. There is an extraordinary mathematical balance and symmetry in the Qur'an, which in the past perhaps almost put people off seeing it, with the "Miracle 19" of figures such as Rashad Khalifa, who turned it into a karamah for themselves or fabricated prophecies through jafr calculations.

On this subject there is a very fine book by Ahmed Bessam Sa'i published by Mahya Publications, "The Miraculous Language of the Qur'an: New Testimonies." When the Qur'an is looked at through special glasses, all one will see in each of its surahs, in each of its letters, indeed in the sequence of the surahs, is a divine signature, a miracle.

Just as, when we look deeply at each object that we see around us with the naked eye, we see what a magnificent, cleverly designed system, carefully operated at every moment, it is, so, when the Qur'an is looked at with a different eye, all we will see is that no letter in the text stands by chance at the point where it is, but that it is there both to complete a mathematical equation and to form a semantic whole. Here we are not speaking of a prophecy based on the Qur'an; we are only speaking of the mathematical balance and symmetry in the text's own internal arrangement. Sa'i's book is in fact like the introduction to a large 4-volume book; we hope the publisher will bring out its continuation too.

Indeed, on this subject in Turkey there are the works of Prof. Dr. Sami al-Arian of Sabahattin Zaim University, Prof. Dr. Halis Aydemir's "Symmetric Book," and some studies put forward by Prof. Dr. Caner Taslaman in his book "Why Am I a Muslim?" To these perhaps one must add the work of Dr. Ahmed Muhammed Zaynulmannawi, published in Arabic in 2017 and not yet translated into Turkish, entitled "Al-Hurûfu'l Sâcideti: Min delail azameti'l-Nesc al-raqamî al Kur'anî" (The prostrating letters: on the evidences of the greatness of the numerical fabric in the Qur'an). Even recalling only some of the findings, all parallel to one another, shows that the Qur'an bears a divine signature untouched by human hands not only in terms of style and eloquence but with every letter, every verse and surah, and the position of each of these within the arrangement of the Qur'an as a whole. Thus we feel that whatever signature we see in the features that enchant us as we discover them every day in our own bodies, in that perfect system, in that perfection we see in every event, object and living being of the cosmos, we see the same signature in this Book.

Let us look a little more closely at some of the points that these studies, taken together, put forward.