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Litterary miracle?

TERMINA

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Infamouns for his debate with PZ Myers, muslim apologist Hamza Tzortzis also brands himself in muslim circle as a defender of the alleged "inimitable character of the Quran", that is the tenet that no human could even write a single surah with a style superior or comparable to the Quran.

To reinforce his point, he has published an article named 3 lines that changed the world (google would easily find it) dedicated to analysing the original version of the shortest surah which is 3 verses long and contains only a dozen of words.
How short, man! And yet, Hamza manages to spot about 16
stylistic/rheotircal devices in it!
His conclusions: putting so many stylistic features in so short a text is unprecedented and requires a superhuman intelligence.


What do you think of that conclusion? Does it really hold water?
Litterature-loving people welcomed:)
 
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TERMINA said:
What do you think of that conclusion? Does it really hold water?
Litterature-loving people welcomed:)
Click to expand...

Highly, highly unlikely. He wouldn't even be the first to try to make similar arguments, either way, nor is the Quran the only book that the arguments are trying to prove divine.
 
So using this idea, we are to infer that Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Mark Twain are all true prophets of Allah?
 
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before. ~E. A. Poe, The Raven

It's impressive that the Koran has a surah with that much going for it, but hardly superhuman.

It does, however, present a concrete test of the notion that the Koran is supernatural, which is a rather nice change of pace. It's something we atheists can sink our teeth into. All we need to do, in order to prove that the Koran is not the work of a deity, is present a human-written three-line poem of no more than 12 words with 16 different literary devices in it. A tall order, to be sure, and one that I'm not nearly a good enough word-smith to accomplish (too much time on technical writing corrodes the literary side of your brain, apparently), but some of our more creative types almost certainly could do so.
 
The supposed miraculous inimitability of the Qur'an (iʻjāz al-Qurʼān) isn't a claim that's new or unique to this particular apologist. It's been a standard part of most Muslim theology for at least a thousand years (based on the "Challenge Verses" - Q 2:23-4, 10:38, 11:13, 17:88, and 52:33-4).

It wasn't always a feature, though - before Sunni dogma on the matter was fully established, the argument of khalq al-Qurʼān, the idea that the Qur'an was merely a created thing rather than an Eterrnal Heavenly Book, was actually predominant (the khalif Al-Ma'mun even ordered an inquisition against any scholar who said otherwise). The argument that the Qur'an was inimitable by humans formed a large part of the rhetorical support used by the Hanbalī and Ash'arī that the Qur'an was not a created thing.

On a more literary basis, the particular argument described in the OP is part of the branch of Arabic rhetoric called ījāz, or "succinctness" (as differentiated from iʻjāz, "miraculousness"), the idea that the most ideal sentence is one that conveys the most semantic meanings possible using the fewest words.
 
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Little Ole lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again
AhhhOoooh, werewolves of London, Ahhhoooh . . .
 
For Sale
Baby Shoes
Never Worn

-Ernest Hemingway

I should note that I hate most of Hemingway's work but even I recognize this is a work of amazing emotion and power. I doubt that anything in the Quran comes even close to the evocation of this simple six word set.
 
Language and literary devices are human inventions. How could this prove divine authorship? It's like saying "Only God can make a Buick."
 
I'm reminded of Jimmy Carr's shortest joke:
Venison's dear, isn't it? (has to be spoken out loud for the ambiguity)
 
ANTPogo said:
... the idea that the most ideal sentence is one that conveys the most semantic meanings possible using the fewest words.
Click to expand...


Isn't that kind of the point of poetry, generally?
 
hgc said:
Isn't that kind of the point of poetry, generally?
Click to expand...

It depends on the poem...generally the point is to convey multiple meanings in the particular words selected for a poem, yes, but some poems can be quite flowery, elaborate, and verbose in their attempts to convey those many meanings.

In Arabic rhetoric, on the other hand, being as brief as possible is far more important, being kind of an end in itself. In terms of the Qur'an, it's basically the scriptural equivalent of data compression, which is why it's so emphasized by apologists like the one in the OP, since it supposedly represents how the Qur'an is miraculously inimitable since ostensibly no human could write a book as short as the Qur'an and yet still manage to convey all the same information the Qur'an does. This can get metaphysical, too, since certain types of Qur'anic exegesis (tafsīr), like those practiced by the Shia and the Sufis, focus on the "inner meaning" (batin) of the Qur'an in addition to its outward semantic meaning (zahir).

Ījāz is why English translations of the Qur'an often have parts of the verses in parentheses (like, to pick at random, Q 4:53 in Asad's translation, "Have they, perchance, a share in [God's] dominion? But [if they had], lo, they would not give to other people as much as [would fill] the groove of a date-stone!"). The words marked out there aren't actually in the Qur'an, but are interpolated and understood to be there. This is ījāz hadhf, elliptical succinctness, the deliberate deletion of words from a sentence while still relying on those missing words for the sentence to be completely understood.

The other kind of ījāz, ījāz qasir (brevity succinctness), is simply using as few words as possible in a sentence, but without actually chopping out otherwise-gramatically-important words - it's basically allusions and metaphor and imperatives and pronouns and other brief, if otherwise normal, grammatical constructions (such as, to pick a standard example in Arabic rhetoric this time, Q 7:199, "Take forgiveness, command goodness, and turn away from the ignorant.").

You can see why the kind of argument used by the apologist in the OP kind of loses its intended impact when it can't rely on the minutiae of the kind of things written about in publications like this - it's basically an artifact of the circular reasoning used in the creation of the rules of classical Arabic rhetoric.
 
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Resume said:
Like cooking, a verse of concentrated flavor versus an open pot of pages risking the piquancy to evaporation.
Click to expand...

And while there's a certain poetry in a styrofoam cup of Lipton Tea and it takes two minutes to make, I think you'd find considerably more nuance, quality and substance in my Bouillabaisse, which can take a full day to make.

There are all sorts of variations on poetry. Was T.S. Eliot a verbose windbag because he didn't write Haiku or two-line verses? I remember reading somewhere that Eliot wanted to make The Wasteland a truly "long poem" but kept it to a mere 400 or so lines.

I realize that this is a fruitless argument and that it should appropriately be pointed out that every single line in The Wasteland or Prufrock could've probably been an entire verse or a paragraph if it was prose. I realize the point you're making (I think), but I don't think that brevity alone is the hallmark of good poetry.
 
The shortest short story in literature is thought to be The Dinosaur by Guatemalan writer Augusto (Tito) Monterroso. Here is the complete story:

''When (he,she,it) woke up, the dinosaur was still there.''

Who woke up? A man? A woman? The dinosaur itself? Is the beast capable of traversing millions of years in one night. Or to move from the realm of dreams to the real world? Who is the narrator? The dreamer? Why does the story inspire a sense of hopelessness more than that of panic? A sense that the dreamer can not escape destiny. Why do we know that the beast materialized sometime during the early morning, that it wasn't there last night before sleep?
 
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