Qur’an­ic Com­men­tary on Sura’ Al-Ikhlas (112)

Ques­tion (from an atheist):

Qul huwa llaahu ahad llaahu s‑samad
lam yalid walam yuu­lad walam yakun lahu kufu’an ahad 

What’s so spe­cial about the Ara­bic in this Sura’? You Mus­lims say the Ara­bic of the Qur’an is proof of its divin­i­ty. But I find the Ara­bic of Suratu l‑Ikhlaas to be quite reg­u­lar, like some­thing any con­tem­po­rary Arab writer could draw of his pen. Where’s the Allah’s great­ness here ? 

Reply

The secret about Sura’ Al-Ikhlas is more than can meet the shal­low thoughts of athe­ists and crit­ics of Islam. This very short chap­ter con­tains in it the sum­ma­ry of many con­cepts that are to lead peo­ple to The One True God and to refute the mis­guid­ed notions about God.

The Sura’ states the following :

• Say that He Is One God, Alone = Wor­ship only The One True God Who has no Equals nor Associates ; 
• He did not beget (any off­spring): to refute the Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian notions of being the children/​sons of God, and to fur­ther rebuke the Trini­tar­i­ans notion of Jesus being the ​“begot­ten” son of God ; 
• Nor was begot­ten : the eter­nal God of no begin­ning and no end, rebuk­ing those who say that God became man through birth from a vir­gin or that God was incar­nat­ed into a man born of a virgin ; 
• He has no equals : rebuk­ing those who mixed between God and His crea­tures such as angels as in the case of the Jews call­ing the speak­er The Lord and then the angel of The Lord ; and those mix­ing between God and His mes­sen­ger, Jesus(P) and His trust­ed spir­it Gabriel in what they call God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. 

Although the Sura’ is very short, yet it re-stat­ed the Orig­i­nal True Mes­sage of God that was sent to all His prophets from the begin­ning of cre­ation and to cor­rect the mis­guid­ance that built-up with time.

The above is based on the mean­ing part of the Sura’, as for the lin­guis­tic part, if you were an Arab, you ought to know that the mes­sages of this Sura’ are vast and more detailed than the above sum­ma­ry, how­ev­er, they are stat­ed in just a few words. Addi­tion­al­ly, the beau­ty of the Qur’an is not in stack­ing of poet­ic vers­es, rather it is in the use of words, style and mean­ings. Many attempts were made at pro­duc­ing a Sura’ like it, but any sin­cere per­son will real­ize that all those attempts were noth­ing more than copy­ing Qur’an­ic vers­es and chang­ing a word here and there. In the case of the Chris­tians, they twist­ed vers­es rebuk­ing their doc­trines into ones rebuk­ing Mus­lims, where­as peo­ple like you, who­ev­er you are, are twist­ing the vers­es by replac­ing the name of God with the name of your mas­ter, ​“Satan”. There­fore, no one was able to pro­duce any­thing like it, and you can­not call pla­gia­rism as cre­ative writ­ing, can you ?

If any­one claims that the Qur’an is poet­ry and con­tains bor­rowed text from ear­li­er poet­ry, I will answer them then and they know who they are ! If men were able to meet the Qur’an in style and beau­ty, we would have seen a much bet­ter OT & NT Ara­bic trans­la­tions instead of the weak, com­mon Ara­bic used in all the cur­rent trans­la­tions of the Holy Bible, and we know the his­tor­i­cal efforts put into the trans­la­tions of such scrip­tures over many cen­turies by many Bib­li­cal and Ara­bic schol­ars ; they even used the aid of Arab Mus­lim schol­ars to check the trans­la­tions (in Lebanon) for approval before releas­ing them to print.

Hope that the above answers your ques­tion, and tak­ing it to be a sin­cere one, if not, then my reward shall be from God for doing my best to clar­i­fy some­thing about His word and I do not expect any reward from humans on this.