The most significant aspect of the Quran as a being miracle is its source. The Quran says that it was revealed by God Almighty to His Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).
Of all the divine books from the world's religions that exist today, the Quran is the only book that is still in its original form as revealed by God to His Prophet. What exactly do we mean when we discuss the Quran being a miracle?
To answer this question we need to know what a miracle is. One definition given in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary states a miracle is "an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs."
There is no doubt that the revelation of the Quran by God Almighty is a miracle in this sense, for Allah Almighty says:
{And truly this (the Quran) is a revelation sent down by the Lord of all that exists.} (Ash-Shu`ara' 26:192)
{The revelation of the Book is from Allah, the Almighty, the All-Wise.} (Az-Zumar 39:1)
The same dictionary gives a second definition, which states that a miracle is "an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment."
We can see that the Quran has various aspects that may qualify as a miracle in the second sense too. We know that the prophets of old, such as Moses and Jesus, performed many miracles in their life — Moses transformed a wooden stick into a snake, and Jesus brought a dead man back to life. The question arises, did Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) perform any miracles?
Muslims admit that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was given his own miracles by Allah, like any other prophet. Yet, scholars don't give much attention to them.
On the other hand, a spectacular miracle such as parting the sea, for instance, was a divine gift given to Prophet Moses (peace be upon him). But none of us saw the parting of the sea. We read about it and believe in it.
What do we find of the people of Moses, even then, after the performance of that miracle? Did they accept Moses as the Prophet of God? Yes, they did, but some only for a short period. Some of his followers' belief in him only lasted until they were able to escape from the clutches of Pharaoh. After that, some of them forgot everything and abandoned Moses to become idolaters.
What about Jesus (peace be upon him)? He walked on water and calmed the stormy sea, he restored a dead man to life, and did much more. But even after all this, some of his people did not believe in him. The Gospel of Mark says, "they all forsook him and fled" when he most needed their support and help.
This means that showing miracles of the kind described above did not always have a lasting effect on people. On the other hand, the miracle of the Noble Quran is a lasting miracle, the effect of which can be tested even now. The Quran came at a time when a new age was dawning in the world.
At the time of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), humanity was in a critical juncture in the history of mankind, passing from an age of ignorance to an age of enlightenment.
Miracle-working of the old kind was not enough. What was required was an appeal to the rationality of humans, to arouse in them a thirst for study and research and an eagerness to delve into the secrets of nature. This is what the Quran does through verses that encourage people to observe and contemplate the phenomena of nature:
{In the creation of the heavens and earth, and the alternation of the night and day, and the ships which sail the seas to people's benefit, and the water which Allah sends down from the sky — by which He brings the earth to life when it was dead and scatters about in it creatures of every kind — and the varying direction of the winds, and the clouds subservient between heaven and earth, there are signs for people who use their intellect.} (Al-Baqarah 2:164)
To read more about the scientific miracles of the Quran, see Harun Yahya: An Invitation to the Truth
The essential message of the Quran says that we must lead a life of complete and unconditional submission to the One True God and Creator of all existence. Everything else in the Quran is secondary after this fundamental teaching, for God says what means:
{This is a Book We have sent down to you so that you can bring mankind from the darkness to the light, by the permission of their Lord, to the Path of the Almighty, the Praiseworthy.} (Ibrahim 14:1)
{This (the Quran) is a communication to be transmitted to mankind so that they may be warned by it and so that they will know that He is One God and so that people of intelligence will pay heed.} (Ibrahim 14:52)
An important aspect of the Quran is its unity and coherence in spite of the fact that its verses were revealed in the course of 23 years. Allah says in the Quran what means:
{Do they not ponder on the Quran? If it had been from anyone other than Allah, they would surely have found therein many a discrepancy.} (An-Nisaa' 4:82)
We may say that the Quran can be viewed as a running commentary on the prophetic career of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). The miracle is that through the Quran, Allah groomed Prophet Muhammad to mold a cultured and disciplined society of the time out of a savage group of tribes. Before the advent of Islam, they knew little about law and order, social justice, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.
At a time when religion meant running away from the contentious world of everyday reality, the Quran trained the Prophet to struggle with the problems of life in the cities of Makkah and Madinah to build there a model society. The progressive revelaton of the Quran, which corresponded to the needs of the emerging society, the continuation of the revelation until the society attained a perfection unimaginable in those days — this was a miracle in its own right.
Another miracle of the Quran, which was revealed 14 centuries ago, is the fact that it can be read and understood by the Arabic-speaking people today. Every language undergoes changes as time passes, and one or two hundred years is long enough for a language to undergo substantial changes.
The English of 600 years ago is an entirely different language from the English of today. This is well known to anyone who has tried to read the 14th-century poet Chaucer in the original. If that is so, what about the Arabic of the Hijaz region, spoken 14 centuries ago?
Anyone who knows the rudiments of the history of languages knows that logically it should be impossible for Arabic-speaking people of today to read and understand a book 14 centuries old. And yet, every day, every hour, every minute, and in fact every second of the 24 hours of the 365 days of every year of the past centuries has been alive with the reading and studying of the Quran. The volume and scope of it multiplies in every imaginable way with the arrival of modern information technology.
Thus we see that the Quran is the ever-present miracle of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), rivaling all other miracles that came before. Add to this the astounding fact that, in spite of all the hostile propaganda unleashed against Islam by some of the most powerful organizations in the world today, Islam is yet the fastest growing religion in the world.
And Allah knows best.
-onislam.net
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