Three Voices Across a Century
🎧 Listen to this chapter (2 min)
Welcome. For fourteen centuries, Muslims have said that the Qur’an is a miracle. Not only because of what it says, but because of how it says it.
But what exactly does that mean? What is it about the Qur’an’s language that no one has ever been able to match?
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, three great scholars each tried to answer that question. Each in his own way.
al-Rummani, a grammarian and theologian of Baghdad, approached it like a scientist, carefully classifying the beauties of the Qur’an’s style.
al-Khattabi, a hadith scholar from the city of Bust, in what is now Afghanistan, looked at the balance of words, meanings, and arrangement, and at the Qur’an’s effect on the human heart.
And Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, perhaps the greatest literary critic in Arabic history, made a powerful argument from the silence of the Arabs themselves.
Their three short treatises were later gathered into one volume. In this summary, we will listen to each of them in turn, and see how three very different minds arrived at the same wonder.
