bygone nations and take warning from them. Moreover, he can benefit from the excellent virtues and the lofty branches of knowledge, and learn aspects of injunc‌ tions concerning the forms of worship and the rules of transactions. All this is achieved while preserving the sequence of the discourse, and doing justice to its clarity, and observing the requirements of the situation. These benefits could not be derived from the Quran if it had been divided into topical sections and chapters, because the reader would not have been able to encompass the goals of the Quran except by reading it in its entirety. And if an obstacle were to prevent him from completing it, he would not benefit except from a sura or two.
Indeed, this is one of the excellent [aspects] of the Quranic style, a style which
gives it beauty and value. For, although it shifts from subject to subject, it has pre‌ served a perfect cohesion between them, as if each sentence is a pearl in a matched necklace. But hatred of Islam has blinded and deafened this critic to the extent that he imagines the Qurans beauty to be ugliness, and its virtue to be a vice.
Moreover, the Quran repeats some of its stories in different wordings, according to the appropriate occasions for the repetition. If these stories, with their different wordings, were to be gathered in one section, that would weaken this obvious bene‌ fit, and this repetition would be without tangible benefit for the reader.

Myths and Absurdities

The author of the pamphletijusn al-ljaz [The Beauty of Conciseness], mentions that it is possible to counter the Quran with its like.٤ He lists a number of sentences from the Quran and alters some of their wordings, and asserts that he has countered the Quran with them. In doing this, he merely demonstrated the limits of his knowledge and his poor expertise in the art of eloquence. Here, we shall mention these sentences to the reader, and explain to him the errors of this illusory matching. We have dealt with these at length in our book Nafa/:tat al-I}az [The Fragrance of Miracle].
In countering the Opening (al-Fati/:za) Sura, this deluded person tries to match it
by saying:

Praise be to the Merciful, Lord of existences (akwan), the Judging King. For You alone is the worship, and from You alone is the help. Show us the path of the faith.

Having written this, he deluded himself [into thinking] that it meets fully all the sig‌
nifications of the Opening Sura, though he actually encompasses far less.
I am at a loss as to what to say to the author of these sentences, when he has such a limited ability to distinguish between meager and stout speech. If only he had pre‌ sented these words to Christian scholars knowledgeable about the style of speech, and the skills of eloquence, before disgracing himself with this claim. Was he not aware that in countering a speech with its like, the author or poet must produce a speech that would be in harmony with the contested speech in some of its aspects or goals? Instead, he produces a speech independent in words, phrases, and style? A contest does not mean imitating the contested speech in its structure and style, and freely altering and replacing some of its words with others; otherwise, it would be possible to counter any speech in this manner. Such a thing would have been very