Minute with a Muslim #148 – The Book That CANNOT Be Replicated

But

there's a couple things about the Koran that make it impossible to be replicated. And one of those is that it's free from error. Any human work, if you get even one page, right, it's going to likely have errors. And if you get beyond 10 pages, and you can bet there's going to be errors. And just because human, you know, as we are, we're imperfect by definition. And so our produce is going to be, you know, the product of our labor is also going to be imperfect, there's going to be oversights, there's going to be places where you wrote one word twice, you thought you wrote it once or you thought you wrote it, you didn't write it at all right? These sorts of things. Okay, now, if

you have a work, that's 604 pages long, okay. And there's not a single error that grammatically, syntactically an error of diction, right, how do you explain it? Right, you can't. Another thing that makes the Koran unable to be replicated, is its directness. Okay, so it's interesting that the Koran is sort of like a halfway between prose and poetry, there is sometimes meter there's often rhyme, and yet, it's not bound by those sorts of rules, right? Because there's, there's a trade off, if you subject your work, or your literary work to the strict rules of meter and rhyme, then in order to satisfy those rules and sound a certain way, you're gonna have to compromise on the meaning

at some point, you're gonna have to make a sound sentence sound a little bit funny, even if you go to Shakespeare and Pope or the big, you know, poets of any language, you know, there's tuffeau, it's like, there's some, some of their lines are great. And those are the ones that are on the coffee mugs. And there's other lines, it's like, you know, it's like, well, he just had to get through that until he got later, right. And so the style is restrictive, and it affects the meaning, okay, and that's the opposite of the Koran is that the meaning comes first. And so there is a style to the court. And that's very different from everything else, unprecedented, honestly, when you look at the

sort of Arabic poetry in the history of Arabic poetry, but also is that it's a text that is singularly geared towards the meaning, right? And so it uses poetic devices, especially to demonstrate and to grab attention on these sorts of things, but not ever at the expense of the meaning, right, the meaning is always there guiding you, instructing you exhorting you, you know, all these sorts of things. And so Allah subhanaw taala, you know, he, he challenges people, he says, Look, if you say that this is from a human author, then you should be able to reproduce, that's the telltale sign of, you know, human endeavors that somebody else should be able to reproduce it but if

you can write and he challenges us to not just do it as an individual homework assignment, but to get everybody worked together to help you. If you can't, he says then you have to submit to the fact that this is not a human authored work. This is actually from the Divine