“That the best of Arab writers has never succeeded in producing anything equal in merit to the Holy Qur’ān itself is not surprising”.48
“The earliest Mekka revelations are those which contain what is highest in a great religion and what was purest in a great man.”49
“However often we turn to it, at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence … Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim, is stern, grand, terrible — ever and anon truly sublime … Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence”.50
“We may well say the Holy Qur’ān is one of the grandest books ever written … Sublime and chaste, where the supreme truth of God’s unity is to be proclaimed; appealing in high-pitched strains to the imagination of a poetically-gifted people where the eternal consequences of man’s submission to God’s holy will, or of rebellion against it, are pictured; touching in its simple, almost crude, earnestness, when it seeks again and again encouragement or consolation for God’s Messenger, and a solemn warning for those to whom he has been sent, in the histories of the prophets of old: the language of the Holy Qur’ān adapts itself to the exigencies of everyday life, when this everyday life, in its private and public bearings, is to be brought in harmony with the fundamental principles of the new dispensation.
“Here therefore its merits as a literary production should, perhaps, not be measured by some preconceived maxims of subjective and aesthetic taste, but by the effects which it produced in Muḥammad’s contemporaries and fellow-countrymen. If it spoke so powerfully and convincingly to the hearts of his hearers as to weld hitherto centrifugal and antagonistic elements into one compact and well-organized body animated by ideas far beyond those which had until now ruled the Arabian mind, then its eloquence was perfect, simply because it created a civilized nation out of savage tribes, and shot a fresh woof into the old warp of history.”51
“From time beyond memory, Mecca and the whole Peninsula had been steeped in spiritual torpor. The slight and transient influences of Judaism, Christianity, or philosophical inquiry upon the Arab mind
48 Palmer, Intro., p. IV.
49 Lane’s Selections, Intro., p. cvi.
50 Goethe — Hughes’ Dictionary of Islam, p. 526.
51 Steingass — Hughes’ Dictionary of Islam, pp. 527, 528.