expression to their
thoughts. It is in this very particular that superior excellence is claimed
for the Quran.[6] It is to the Muhammadan mind a sure evidence of its
miraculous origin that it should excel in this respect. Muslims say that
miracles have followed the revelations given to other prophets in order to
confirm the divine message. In this case the Quran is both a revelation and
a miracle. {6} Muhammad himself said:--"Each prophet has received manifest
signs which carried conviction to men: but that which I have received is
the revelation. So I hope to have a larger following on the day of
resurrection than any other prophet has." Ibn Khaldoun says that "by this
the Prophet means that such a wonderful miracle as the Quran, which is also
a revelation, should carry conviction to a very large number."[7] To a
Muslim the fact is quite clear, and so to him the Quran is far superior to
all the preceding books. Muhammad is said to have convinced a rival, Lebid,
a poet-laureate, of the truth of his mission by reciting to him a portion
of the now second Sura. "Unquestionably it is one of the very grandest
specimens of Koranic or Arabic diction.... But even descriptions of this
kind, grand as they be, are not sufficient to kindle and preserve the
enthusiasm and the faith and the hope of a nation like the Arabs.... The
poets before him had sung of valour and generosity, of love and strife and
revenge ... of early graves, upon which weeps the morning cloud, and of the
fleeting nature of life which comes and goes as the waves of the desert
sands, as the tents of a caravan, as a flower that shoots up and dies away.
Or they shoot their bitter arrows of satire right into the enemy's own
soul. Muhammad sang of none of these. No love-minstrelsy his, not the joys
of the world, nor sword, nor camel, nor jealousy, nor human vengeance, not
the glories of tribe or ancestor. He preached Islam." The very fierceness
with which this is done, the swearing such as Arab orator, proficient
though he may have been in the art, had never made, the dogmatic certainty
with which the Prophet proclaimed his message have tended, equally with the
passionate grandeur of his utterances, to hold the Muslim world spell-bound
to the letter and imbued with all the narrowness of the book.

So sacred is the text supposed to be that only the {7} Companions[8] of the
Prophet are deemed worthy of being commentators on it. The work of learned
divines since then ha