MIRACLE OF THE QURAN

The Quran

  This day [the day of the Prophet's 'Farewell Address' on
  which the last verse of the Quran was revealed] have I
  made perfect for you your religion, and have completed
  My favour towards you, and am satisfied with Islam for
  you as your religion. -- V:3

  Do not dispute with the people of the Book [Jews,
  Christians, Sabeans], unless it be in a way that is
  better, save with such of them as do wrong; and say: We
  believe in that which has been revealed unto us, and
  revealed unto you; our God and your God is One, and unto
  Him we surrender. -- XXIX:46

Roger du Pasquier, Unveiling Islam

 The central miracle of Islam was, and remains the Quranic
 revelation. To this day no one has put forward a defensible
 explanation of how an unlettered caravan merchant of the early
 seventh century might have been able, by his own devices, to
 produce a text of such inimitable beauty, of such capacity to stir
 emotion, and which contained knowledge and wisdom which stood so
 far above ideas current among mankind at that time. The studies
 carried out in the West which try to determine the 'sources used
 by Muhammad', or to bring to light the psychological phenomenon
 which enabled him to draw inspiration from his 'subconcious', have
 demonstrated only one thing; the anti- Muslim prejudice of their
 authors. -- p. 53

  We reveal to you as We revealed to Noah, and the
  prophets after him, and as We inspired Abraham and
  Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and Jesus,
  Job and Jonah, Aaron and Solomon, and as we imparted the
  Psalms unto David.

  Messengers We have mentioned unto you before, and
  Messengers We have not mentioned to you. And God spoke
  unto Moses directly. (iv:163-64)

 Thus, by the revealed word of the Quran, is the mission of
 Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, situated within the framework of
 the universal revelation. He came to remind men, always inclined
 to forget or distort it, of the eternal message of the divine
 Truth which had not changed since the Creation -- for that which
 changes cannot be Truth -- a message which God had from time to
 time reaffirmed in a way which permitted all people in every age
 and nation, without exception, to know of it.

 But with Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets (xxxiii:40), the cycle
 of revelation came to an end. And sure enough, no major religion
 has been founded since his death, and no personality comparable to
 his has appeared in the annals of mankind. -- p. 33 to 34

Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography Of The Prophet

 The Quran came to Muhammad line by line, verse by verse, chapter
 by chapter. Sometimes the messages dealt with a particular
 situation in Mecca or Medina. In the Quran, God seems to answer
 some of Muhammad's critics; He explains the deeper significance of
 a battle or of a conflict within the Muslim community. As each new
 message was revealed to Muhammad (who, like many Arabs of the
 Hijaz, was said to be illiterate) he recited it aloud, the Muslims
 learned it by heart and those who could wrote it down. The Arabs
 found the Quran quite astonishing; it was unlike any other
 literature they had encountered before. Some, as we shall see,
 were converted immediately, believing that divine inspiration
 alone could account for this extraordinary language. Those who
 refused to convert were bewildered and did not know what to make
 of this disturbing revelation. Muslims still find the Quran
 profoundly moving. They say that when they listen to it they feel
 enveloped in a divine dimension of sound. . .

 Western people find this difficult to understand. We have seen
 that even the likes of Gibbon and Carlyle, who were reasonably
 sympathetic to Islam, were baffled by the Quran. . .

 In the case of the Quran there is also the problem of translation.
 The most beautiful lines of Shakespeare frequently sound banal in
 another language because little of the poetry can be conveyed in a
 foreign idiom; and Arabic is a language that is especially
 difficult to translate. . . Even Arabs who speak English fluently
 have said that when they read the Quran in an English translation,
 they feel that they are reading an entirely different book. -- p.
 48 to 49