Why the Bible and not the Qur'an?

Two great world religions, Christianity and Islam claim to be revealed religions. That is, they both claim to have been the recipients of infallible, divine revelation which marks out their respective religion as exclusively true. For the Christian, the divinely inspired written document is the Bible. For the Muslim it is the Qur'an.

But, of course, both books cannot be the Word of God. They contain contradictory messages. Both the Muslim and the Christian are agreed that God would not inspire two contradictory books. So, at most, only one of them can truly be the Word of God. The other is a fraud. So, the question before us is: which book— the Bible or the Qur’an—is truly the Word of God?

In this blog, perhaps over the course of the next several days, I would like to pursue this question in some detail. First, let us consider what credentials, if any, the Qur'an has for being the Word of God. It seems to me that there is absolutely no good reason to believe that the Qur’an is the Word of God, and every reason to believe that it is a purely human book, fraudulently claiming to be divinely inspired. One day, Muhammad walked out of the desert and said, "I've got a message from God!" But, what reason is there for anyone to believe this claim?

Sometimes Muslims will try to give supportive arguments. For example, the most popular argument given for the Qur'an's inspiration is its supposed literary elegance. One Muslim apologist, Yusuf Ali, says, “No human composition could contain the beauty, power, and spiritual insight of the Qur'an.” Muhammad himself said, “This Qur’an is not such as can be produced by other than God” (Sura 10:37). In fact, the Qur’an lays down a challenge which Muslims believe has never been met: “And if you are in doubt as to what we have revealed from time to time to our servant, then produce a sura like unto it” (Sura 2:23). The challenge is for someone to produce a literary work of equal quality to the Qur’an. Supposedly, if this could be done, the Qur’an would be shown to be a merely human work. But, the Muslim is confident that it cannot be done. The argument from literary elegance may be formulated like this:

(1) The literary elegance of the Qur’an is such that it could not have been composed by a human being.
(2) Any literary work the elegance of which is such that it could not have been composed by a human being must be divinely inspired.
(3) Therefore, the Qur’an must be divinely inspired.

But, we can challenge both premises of this argument. Let’s start with premise (2). The premise claims that any book which is of such a high literary quality that it could not have been produced by a human being must, therefore, be the product of God. However, this premise assumes that the only possible candidates for the authorship of a work like the Qur’an are human beings and God. But, this assumption is dubious at best. Even supposing that the Qur’an possesses a literary excellence that would surpass what we would expect from any human being, it doesn’t follow that the book would be divinely inspired. We might suppose that angels or demons, or some alien race are capable of producing a great literary work that no man could produce. So, non-human authorship does not imply divine authorship.

And we might add here that even Muhammad himself entertained the possibility that someone other than God might have been the source of the Qur’an. When he first began to receive the revelations that would later become the Qur’an, he suspected that he might be possessed by a jinn (i.e., a demon). So, we might wonder how seriously we should take the claim that the Qur’an is so clearly superior in literary quality that only God could have produced it.

As a related note, we might also ask how we could ever know whether a book is of such superior quality that it could not have been composed by a human being. What are the criteria for recognizing this level of literary elegance? As far as I can tell, no Muslim has ever set out such criteria.

Premise (1), which claims that the Qur’an possesses this kind of literary elegance is even more doubtful. Arabic scholars, who are well-acquainted with the Arabic language, have challenged the Qur’an at this point. For example, C.G. Pfander says that “it is by no means the universal opinion of unprejudiced Arabic scholars that the literary style of the Qur’an is superior to that of all other books in the Arabic language.” He then cites several Arabic books that surpass the literary elegance of the Qur’an. Moreover, even Muslim scholars have pointed out numerous grammatical irregularities in the Qur’an. For example, Shi’ite scholar Ali Dashti writes:

"The Quran contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words, and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concord of gender and number; illogical and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects. These and other such aberrations in the language have given scope to critics who deny the Quran’s eloquence. . . .To sum up, more than 100 Quranic aberrations from the normal rules and structure of Arabic have been noted.11Dashti cites numerous examples of such literary irregularities including Sura 2:172, 177; 4:160; 9:49; 20:66; and 74:1."

The conclusion to be reached in light of these facts is that the Qur’an’s literary elegance is not nearly so wonderful as the Muslims claim. And this means that this argument for the divine inspiration of the Qur’an fails.

If someone claims to be a prophet, it is not rational to simply take his word for it. Such a strong claim, especially in light of competing prophetic claims, requires some strong evidential support. Yet, such support is lacking with regard to the Qur'an.