The question that needs to be addressed here concerns the reason why a holy book...

The question that needs to be addressed here concerns the reason why a holy book, a composition of language, should be hailed as Islam's (and Muhammad's) strongest argument. [^4] The point has sometimes been made that other prophets had more tangible miracles. In the case of Muhammad, however, the miracle was not comparable to Moses' staff or Christ's healing powers, but was simply the expression in language of the Qur'an.

To understand why Muhammad's strongest argument or miracle was a book, the Holy Qur'an, it is necessary to understand the role language and linguistic composition played in the lives of the pre-Islamic Arabs. It is also important to understand the nature of the Arabic language itself during the pre-Islamic period.

This understanding will help to show why the revelation of the Qur'an through Muhammad found attentive ears among his contemporaries, who not only were articulate users of the language but held those skilled in the arts of linguistic composition in high esteem. [^5] The role played by language in pre-Islamic Arabia Before the rise of Islam, Arabic was mainly a spoken language with an oral literature of elaborate poetry and, to a lesser extent, prose.

[^6] Writing had not yet fully developed and memorization was the most common means of preserving the literature. [^7] Both poetry and prose in the pre-Islamic era dealt with a rather limited range of topics which included in the case of poetry praise, eulogy (panegyric), defamation, and love, and in the case of prose superstition, legends, parables, and wisdom tales.

[^8] Pre-Islamic Arabs took great pride in their language and in articulate and accurate speech, the latter being one of the main requisites for social prominence. On this particular point, Professor Hitti writes:No people in the world manifest such enthusiastic admiration for literary expression and are moved by the word, spoken or written, as the Arabs. Hardly any language seems capable of exercising over the minds of its users such an irresistible influence as Arabic.

[^9] What made this phenomenon even more remarkable is the near absence of other forms of artistic expression such as music, painting, and drama. The sole elaborate form of artistic expression available to the pre-Islamic Arabs was the art of the spoken word. [^10] Eloquence and the ability to compose articulate prose or poetry were foremost among the traits of a worthy bedouin.