An Excerpt From Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
I‘jaaz al-Qur’aan: An Excerpt From Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
“The Holy Qur’an which is believed to be miraculous for the last 1300 years I too consider it to be. Our earlier scholars have only given a superficial proof of its miraculousness i.e. the beauty of its language and the rhetorical speech to the extent of which no human speech has ever reached. They were challenged to produce a speech like this but they were not able to.
I consider Qur’an to be of high literary and rhetorical value....... but this proof...... is not sufficient to convince non-Believers. It will not (completely) satisfy them. I have one more proof which I consider to be stronger. What is that? It is the guiding principles for human beings which have been described in Qur’an. There cannot be any thing like this Guidance. I consider it a miracle – rather the real miracle of Qur’an.
Qur’an was revealed in the time of ignorant, uneducated and untrained people. It was for the guidance of the people of that time. Also, it was for the guidance of the highly educated people of the same time and age who were found at that time and were ever to be found on earth. It was necessary that its teachings were put forth in a manner that desert-dwellers, camel grazing Bedouins as well as great philosophers like Socrates and Hippocrates could all benefit from it. Qur’an is the only book which has this quality that people of varying and rather opposing capacities could equally get guidance from it. An ignorant Bedouin, a maulvi and a philosopher get equal guidance and do not find anything in it which is against nature or philosophy.
Write a book in any language like French, Latin, Sanskrit and Persian etc or identify one written in a past age which is full of philosophical wisdom in very easy and beautiful words and which an educated, a non-educated and a philosopher could equally benefit from. And which leaves an impact on everyone. This is impossible. Qur’an is the only book which has all these qualities and this is the real and true miraculousness of Qur’an. Its subjects were as true when the earth was considered to be stationary as they are now when the sun is considered to be stationary and the earth orbiting.
The philosophy and science which is considered to be true today if it is proved to be wrong in future (as it happened with the Greek philosophy) and entirely new principles are discovered in the domains of philosophy and science, even then – I can claim – Qur’an will be as true as it is today and it will be proved after reflection and research that whatever mistake was there it was only in our understanding of it and it was merely because of our lack of knowledge.” (Hayaat-e-Jaaved by Maulana Altaaf Hussain Hali, Taraqqi Urdu Bureau, New Delhi, 1990 pp. 267-268)
