The Quran asked its critics for one surah. They chose war instead. What al-Baqillani argued about the cheapest refutation nobody ever wrote.
Quraysh had a cheap way to finish the Prophet ﷺ and they never used it. They fought him at Badr and buried their own chiefs in a well. They boycotted their own relatives in a mountain pass, and in the end they lost the city. The verse they were answering had asked them for a paragraph.
That gap is the argument, and it is a thousand years old. Al-Baqillani built a four hundred page book around it, Ijaz al-Quran, and his case for why nobody has produced a surah like the Quran is historical rather than a claim about beauty. The people with the most to gain from a rival text, and the native craft to attempt it, spent twenty three years choosing the expensive route over the cheap one. He reads that as evidence the cheap route was shut. And the challenge itself, taken in the order the classical scholars give it, never tightens. It loosens. A whole Quran, then ten surahs, then one surah, then a single statement like it.
Ibn Kathir sets the sequence out in al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya. Mankind and jinn were challenged to bring the like of it and could not. Then ten surahs of it, and could not. Then, in his own word for it, the challenge came down to a single surah.
The broadest form is in Surah al-Isra. Say, if mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Quran, they could not produce the like of it, even if they were to each other assistants (17:88). Surah al-Tur cuts it to a sentence. Then let them produce a statement like it, if they should be truthful (52:34).
Surah Hud drops the number to ten and drops the standard with it. Say, then bring ten surahs like it that have been invented and call upon whomever you can besides Allah, if you should be truthful (11:13). Invented. They are not asked to receive anything, or to be right about anything. Only to manufacture ten, by any method, with any help they can find.
Surah Yunus takes it down to one. And after the migration, in Madinah, Surah al-Baqarah puts it in front of a new audience with the result already written in. And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down upon Our Servant, then produce a surah the like thereof. But if you do not, and you will never be able to, then fear the Fire (2:23-24). Ibn Kathir reads that last pair of clauses as covering the past and the future both.
The terms get easier at every step, and at every step the price of meeting them goes unpaid. That is not how a demand behaves when it is afraid of being answered.
Al-Baqillani builds on two things. That this Quran is the text the Prophet ﷺ recited in public for twenty three years, and that he challenged them with it the whole time and they did not answer.
Then he asks what refusing cost them. His rulings, al-Baqillani writes, made their blood lawful, their property lawful, and their children liable to captivity. Had they been able to falsify him they would have done it by a near thing, one that was their own habit in their own tongue, and it would have spared them the fighting. He lists what following the Prophet ﷺ cost a Meccan chief instead: his gods discarded, his fathers judged astray, obedience after a lifetime of being obeyed, another man given authority over his wealth. Men give up their lives rather than accept some of that.
So how, he asks, do people at the summit of eloquence, arguing in the language they speak to each other with, walk past the refutation that costs no sweat and pick up the one that costs everything? His verdict is flat. It does not happen in the ordinary run of things, and is not conceivable from rational people.
The sharpest page in the book is not about the Quran at all. Al-Baqillani has been discussing al-Jahiz, the ceiling of Arabic prose in his day, and he points out that Abu al-Fadl ibn al-Amid took the same road and did not fall short of him. From that he draws a rule about people. When a thing is found excellent it gets imitated. When it is found pleasing it gets deliberately aimed at.
Then the turn. If opposing the Quran were within human power for the sake of that glory alone, he writes, the oppositions would have been many and the competitions would have continued. How then, when there are motives with no end to them and inducements beyond counting? Had they opposed it, they would have got to calling him a liar, cut his defenders away, put doubt into their hearts, and that would have been enough for them, in place of spending lives and risking wealth and children. Speech was their nature, their custom and their craft.
He does not leave the standard vague, which is where modern versions of it collapse. Three things. First, category. Arabic composition comes in known classes, and he lists them: the metres of poetry in all their kinds, measured speech without rhyme, balanced rhymed prose, balanced prose without rhyme, loose prose. The Quran sits outside all of them, in a manner of its own. Notice what that rules out. His claim is not that the Quran wins at some countable feature. It is that it is not playing in any category where features get counted.
Second, length. The Arabs have no body of speech, he writes, that holds this eloquence, this subtlety and this proportion at this length and quantity. Their sage is credited with a handful of sayings, their poet with a limited set of odes. His proof text is Surah al-Nisa. Then do they not reflect upon the Quran? If it had been from other than Allah, they would have found within it much contradiction (4:82). Human speech, run long enough, goes uneven.
Third, level. The Quran moves through stories, warning, argument, law, promise, threat, comfort and the teaching of character, and does not drop in quality as it changes gear. A poet is good at praise and weak at satire, or strong at satire and thin at praise. So the test for a rival is that it hold one altitude across every mode, at length. You run that test by reading, not by arithmetic.
And he runs it. He takes Imru' al-Qays, a master by common agreement, and walks the reader through the flaws, the strain, and the market word sitting beside the kingly one.
Somebody did take the challenge. Musaylima announced his own revelation in Yamama, and al-Baqillani says the material is too poor to engage with, then quotes it anyway so the reader can look for himself. One piece swears by the night, and by the wolf, and by the palm trunk, and lands on a complaint about a tribe.
Al-Baqillani relays that Abu Bakr (RA) questioned a delegation from Banu Hanifa about these words. They recited some of them back to him. Abu Bakr (RA) said: Subhan Allah, woe to you, this speech did not come out from a Lord. So where were you being taken?
The limits are worth marking, because al-Baqillani marks them himself. He rejects the idea that people were simply prevented. Al-Nazzam and others held that the Quran's composition could in principle be matched, and that Allah merely turned everyone away from doing it. Al-Baqillani treats that as a position to refute. He is as hard on a friendlier answer. Whoever replies that the Quran cannot be matched in its reports of the unseen, while granting that its composition could be, has surrendered the question.
He also takes the obvious objection. Perhaps only that one generation failed. If the most eloquent audience the language ever assembled came up short, he answers, everyone after stands further back, and the best case for later speakers is to draw level rather than overtake.
Which leaves it where Surah al-Baqarah leaves it. Open, cheap, and unclaimed.
Silsila Research Desk
Grade: Sourced · 7 min read