Signs & Miracles · The Language Argument in Full

Sarfah: Did God Simply Prevent Them?

Handle with care. Sarfah was held by respected Muslim scholars. Present it as a rejected minority position, not as a heresy or an embarrassment.

In short

1.Sarfah (literally 'turning away') was argued by al-Nazzam and some Mu'tazilites.
2.On this view the miracle is in the prevention, not in the composition.
3.Al-Khattabi objects that the Qur'an describes itself as inimitable in kind, not merely unattempted.
4.If sarfah were true, the text's literary quality would be irrelevant — which contradicts how the Qur'an argues.

The claim being examined

One classical theory holds that the Qur'an is matchable in principle, and that God miraculously turned people away from producing a match.

The Islamic position

Al-Khattabi rejects sarfah: it relocates the miracle away from the text and makes the Qur'an's own praise of itself hollow.

Analysis

Sarfah is the most serious internal alternative to a literary account of i'jaz, and it matters because it changes the whole argument. On sarfah, a critic who says 'this passage does not move me' has said nothing against Islam, but neither has a Muslim who says 'this passage is sublime' said anything for it. Al-Khattabi's objection is textual: the Qur'an repeatedly points at itself — its clarity, its arrangement, its freedom from discrepancy (Q 4:82) — as the thing to inspect. He also notes the practical problem that sarfah makes an unfalsifiable claim about the mental states of people long dead, whereas the literary account can be examined by anyone who learns Arabic.

From the Qur'an

Qur'an 4:82

أَفَلَا يَتَدَبَّرُونَ ٱلْقُرْءَانَ ۚ وَلَوْ كَانَ مِنْ عِندِ غَيْرِ ٱللَّهِ لَوَجَدُوا۟ فِيهِ ٱخْتِلَٰفًۭا كَثِيرًۭا

Do they not reflect upon the Qur'an? If it had been from other than God, they would have found in it much discrepancy.

Sources

Al-Khattabi, Bayan I'jaz al-Qur'an · al-Nazzam (as reported by al-Baqillani and al-Jurjani) · al-Baqillani, I'jaz al-Qur'an · Al-Khattabi, The Miracle of the Qur'an (Sapience Publishing, 2022), on the theories of i'jaz

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