Once in a while, writers of outstanding status appear on a language's literary scene. When this happens, the language in which they write undergoes some change, for their literary masterpieces influence the mode of popular expression. In this way languages are continually passing through progressive evolutionary stages, until eventually they become quite different from their original form. With Arabic this did not happen. At the very outset of Arabic history, the Qur'an set a literary standard that could not be excelled. Arabic maintained the style set for it by the Qur'an. No masterpiece comparable to the Qur'an was destined to be produced after it; so Arabic remained cast in the mould of that divine symphony.

Take the example of English. In the 7th century AD it was just an ordinary local dialect, not geared to the expression of profound intellectual thought. For another five hundred years this situation continued. The Normans conquered England in 1066 and, when the founding father of the English language - Geoffrey Chaucer - was born around 1340, the official language of their court was still French. Chaucer himself had a command of Latin, French and Italian, besides his native English. This, along with his great gifts of scholarship, enabled him to make English into an academic language. To use Ernest Hauser's words, he gave the English language a 'firm boost' with his Canterbury Tales. Chaucer transformed a dialect into a language, paving the way for fresh progress in times to come.

For two hundred years English writers and poets followed Chaucer's guidelines. When William Shakespeare (1558-1625) appeared on the scene, English took another step forward. His dramas and poems set a new literary standard, enabling English to march further forward. The coming of the scientific age two hundred years later had a tremendous impact on every stratum of society. Language now began to follow the dictates of science. Prose became more popular than poetry, factual expression more effective than story telling. Dozens of poets and writers from Jonathan Swift (1667- 1745) to T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) were representative of this trend. They were the makers of the modern age of English literature through which we are now passing.

The same thing happened with other languages. Writers, or groups of writers, kept on emerging who became more popular than their predecessors. Whenever they appeared, they steered the language on a new course. Eventually every language changed so much that it became impossible for a person to understand the ancient form of his own tongue without the aid of dictionaries and commentaries.

There is only one exception to this universal trend, and that is Arabic. The claim of the Qur'an, that no one would ever be able to write a book like it, has been borne out to the letter. For further proof of this fact, one need only look at the various attempts to produce a work equal to the Qur'an that have been made over the centuries. All attempts have failed dismally. Musailema ibn Habib, Tulaiha ibn Khuwailid, Nadhr ibn al Harith, Ibn al Rawandi, Abu al Ala al Ma'arri, Ibn al Muqaffa, Al Mutanabbi, and many others, have tried their hand at it, but their efforts, like Musailema's extraordinary reference to 'God's blessing upon pregnant women, extracting from them a sprightly life, from between the stomach and the foetal membrane look ridiculous when compared with the literary majesty of the Qur'an.

But the greatest substantiation of the Qur'an's claim that no one would be able to write a work like it (17:88) comes from what Ernest Renan has called the 'linguistic miracle' of the Arabic language. As with every other language, masters of Arabic - great poets and writers - have appeared over the ages. But, in the 1500 years since the Qur'an was revealed, no one has been able to produce a work that excelled it. Its standard has never been improved upon and Arabic has remained on the course set for it by the Qur'an. The impact that the Qur'an has had on Arabic is like that of a writer who produces a work of unsurpassable literary excellence at the very beginning of a language's history. After such a figure has made his mark, no lesser writer can change the face of the language. The Qur'an, revealed in the Arabic current at the time was cast in a more elevated literary mould than had ever been seen before or afterwards.

By making vital additions to traditional modes of expression, the Qur'an opened the way for expansion of the Arabic language. The use of the word 'one' (ahad) in the 112th chapter of the Qur'an, entitled 'Oneness', is a good example. Previously it had been used in the genitive to express 'one of us' for example, or for the 'first day' of the week, Saturday or Yaum al Ahad. It was used for general negations, as in 'Ma Ja'ni ahadun' 'no one came to see me.' But in using ahad as an attribute of Almighty God, the Qur'an put the word to an entirely novel use. The Qur'an brought many foreign words into Arabic usage, for instance istabraq from Persian, qaswara from Abyssinian, sirat from Greek, 'yamm' from Syrian, ghassaq from Turkish, qistas from Latin, 'malakut' from Armaic and 'kafoor' from Hindi. The Qur'an tells us (25:60) that the idolators of Mecca were baffled at the word 'rahman'. They used to say 'What is this 'rahman'? This is because the word was not Arabic: it has been taken from the Sabean and Hamiri languages. The Christians of Yemen and Abyssinia used to call God 'rahamnan'. The Meccans considered the word foreign when it appeared in the Qur'an in an Arabicized form. They enquired what 'rahman' meant, being unaware of its linguistic background. Over one hundred non-Arabic words of this nature were used in the Qur'an, taken from languages as far apart as Persian, Latin, Nabataean, Hebrew, Syrian, Coptic and many others.

Although the Qur'an was revealed mainly in the language of the Quraysh, words used by other Arab tribes were also included. Abdullah ibn 'Abbas, a Qurayshi Muslim, was puzzled when the word fatir appeared in the Qur'an. 'I did not know what the expression 'Originator of the heavens and the earth' meant,' he explained. 'Then I heard an Arab saying that he had 'originated' a well, when he had just started digging it, and I knew what the word 'fatir' meant.' Abu Huraira said that he had never heard the word 'sikkin' until he heard it in the chapter, 'Joseph', of the Qur'an. 'We always used to call a knife 'mudiya', he said.

As Jalaluddin Suyuti has pointed out in Al-Itqan, many words were pronounced differently by various Arab tribes. The Qur'an took some of these words, and used them in their most refined literary form. The Quraysh, for instance, used the word a'ata for he gave', while the Himyaris used to pronounce it 'anta'. The Qur'an preferred a'ata to anta. Likewise it chose 'asabi' rather than shanatir and dhi'b instead of kata. The general trend of preferring Qurayshi forms was sometimes reversed, as in the phrase 'layalitkum min a'amalikum' - 'nothing will be taken away from your actions' which was borrowed from the Bani' Abbas dialect.

In giving old Arabic words and expressions new depth and beauty, the Qur'an set a standard of literary excellence which no future writer could improve on. It revised certain metaphors, rephrasing them in a more eloquent form than had been heard before. This was how an ancient Arab poet described the impermanence of the world:

"Even if he enjoys a long period of secure life, every mother's son will finally be carried aloft in a coffin."

The Qur'an put the same idea in the poignantly succinct words: 'Every soul shall taste death' (3:185). Killing and plundering presented a major problem in ancient Arabia. Certain phrases had been coined to express the idea that only killing could put an end to killing, and these were considered highly eloquent in pre-Islamic days. 'To kill some is to give life to the whole,' one of them went. 'Kill more, so that there should be less killing,' and 'Killing puts an end to killing,' were some other examples. The Qur'an expressed the idea in these words: 'In retaliation there is life for you, O men of understanding.' (2: 179).

In pre-Qur'anic days, poetry held an important place in Arabic, as in other languages of the world. Poetical expression of ideas was given pride of place in the literary arena. The Qur'an, however, left this beaten track, and used prose instead of poetry. This in itself is proof that the Qur'an came from God, for in the 7th century AD who, save God - who knows the future just as He knows the past - could know that prose rather than poetry should be chosen as the medium for divine scripture that was to last for all time. The Qur'an was addressed to future generations, and soon poetry was going to become less important as a mass medium of communication. Rhetorical language was also very much in vogue before the Qur'an, but for the first time in literary history, the Qur'an introduced a factual rather than a rhetorical style. The most famous topics for literary treatment had previously been military and romantic exploits. The Qur'an, on the contrary, featured a much wider spectrum, including matters of ethical, legal, scientific, psychological, economic, political and historic significance within its scope. In ancient times, parables were a popular mode of expression. Here too, the Qur'an trod new ground, adopting a more direct method of saying things. The method of reasoning employed in the Qur'an was also considerably different from that used in pre Qur'anic times. Whereas purely theoretical, analogical proof was all that the world had known prior to this, the Qur'an introduced empirical, scientific reasoning. And to crown all its achievements, the Qur'an expressed all this in a refined literary style, which proved imperishable in times to come.

There was an ancient Arab saying that 'the sweetest poem was the one with the most lies.' The Qur'an changed this, introducing a new mode of 'articulate speech' (55:4) based on verifiable facts rather than on hypothetical fables. Now Arabic followed the Qur'an's lead. Pre-lslamic Arabic literature was collected and compiled, keeping the preservation and understanding of the language of the Qur'an in mind. Great departments of learning, facilitating understanding of the Qur'an and explaining its orders and prohibitions came into existence. The learning of Arabic grammar, syntax and etymology, Islamic theology and traditions, as well as Qur'anic studies, were all aimed at helping us to understand the message of the Qur'an. Even the subjects of history and geography were originally taken up as part of the Arabs' attempt to understand and practice the teachings of the Qur'an. There is no other example in the history of the world of any single book having such an enormous impact on a people and their language.

Through its development and improvement of the Arabic language, the Qur'an became a superb literary masterpiece. Anyone who knows Arabic can appreciate the unique quality of the Qur'an's style as compared to that of any other work of Arabic literature. The Qur'an is written in a divine style vastly superior to anything humans can aspire to. We will close this chapter by relating a story which clearly portrays the difference between the work of God and that of man. It is taken from Sheikh Tantawi's commentary of the Qur'an, Al-Jawahir fi Tafsir Al-Quran Al-Karim.

'On 13 June 1932,' Tantawi writes, 'I met an Egyptian writer, Kamil Gilani, who told me an amazing story. One day he was with an American Orientalist by the name of Finkle, with whom he enjoyed a deep intellectual relationship. 'Tell me, are you still among those who consider the Qur'an a miracle?' whispered Finkle in Gilani's ear, adding a laugh to indicate his ridicule of such belief. He thought that Muslims could only hold this belief in blind faith. It could not be based on any sound, objective reasoning. Thinking that his blow had really gone home, Finkle was visibly pleased with himself. Seeing his attitude, Gilani too started laughing. 'Before issuing any pronouncement on the style of the Qur'an,' he said, 'we should first have a look and see if we can produce anything comparable to it. Only when we have tried our hand, shall we be able to say conclusively whether humans can produce anything comparable to the Qur'an or not.' Gilani then invited Finkle to join him in putting a Qur'anic idea into Arabic words. The idea he chose was: Hell is extremely vast. Finkle agreed, and both men sat down with pen and paper. Between them, they produced about twenty Arabic sentences. 'Hell is extremely vast,' 'Hell is vaster than you can imagine,' 'Man's intellect cannot fathom the vastness of Hell, ' and many examples of this nature, were some of the sentences they produced. They tried until they could think of no other sentence to express this idea. Gilani looked at Finkle triumphantly. 'Now that we have done our best, we shall be able to see how the Qur'an stands above all works of men,' he said. 'What, has the Qur'an expressed this idea more eloquently?' Finkle enquired. 'We are like little children compared to the Qur'an,' Gilani told him. Amazed, Finkle asked what was in the Qur'an. Gilani recited this verse from Surah Qaf: 'On that Day We will ask Hell: 'Are you full?' And Hell will answer: 'Are there any more?' (50:30) Finkle was startled on hearing this verse. Amazed at the supreme eloquence of the Qur'an, he openly admitted defeat. 'You were right, quite right,' he said, 'I unreservedly concede defeat.' 'For you to acknowledge the truth,' Gilani replied, 'is nothing strange, for you are a man of letters, well aware of the importance of style in language.' This particular Orientalist was fluent in English, German, Hebrew and Arabic, and had spent all his life studying the literature of these languages. (Sheikh al-Tantawi al-Jauhari, Al-Jawahir fi Tafseer AI-Qur'an AI-Kareem, Vol. 23, pp. 111-12).