The Exclusive Eloquence of the Quran?
The Prophet of Islam began conveying his heavenly messages in the midst of society where people’s minds revolved exclusively around eloquent speech and the composition of beautiful and attractive poetry and literary excellence. Under these conditions, God equipped His prophet with a weapon, the Quran, that apparently belonged to the same category as the literary works of the age but possessed unique and astonishing characteristics that were beyond the capacity of the human being to reproduce.
a) The Role of Poetry in the lives of the Pre-Islamic Arabs
To understand why Muhammad's strongest argument or miracle was a book, the Holy Qur'an, it is necessary to understand the role language and linguistic composition played in the lives of the pre-Islamic Arabs. It is also important to understand the nature of the Arabic language itself during the pre-Islamic period. This understanding will help to show why the revelation of the Qur'an through Muhammad (saww) found attentive ears among his contemporaries, who not only were articulate users of the language but held those skilled in the arts of linguistic composition in high esteem.
Before the rise of Islam, Arabic was mainly a spoken language with an oral literature of elaborate poetry and, to a lesser extent, prose. Writing had not yet fully developed and memorization was the most common means of preserving the literature. Both poetry and prose in the pre-Islamic era dealt with a rather limited range of topics which included in the case of poetry praise, eulogy (panegyric), defamation, and love, and in the case of prose superstition, legends, parables, and wisdom tales.
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