The poetry of the Quran

At one point during the prophet's mission, particularly after the events of the night journey/israa' and mi'raaj, the Meccans intensified their pressure on Muhammad, his followers and supporters. Instead of attacking him upfront they agreed to ostracise completely the Bani Hashim and Muttalib by organizing a severe social and economic blocade on them, until they hand them over Muhammad. They also commissioned the most eloquent of their poets to ridicule him, his followers and his message and propagate false rumors on him to all pilgrims coming in and out of the city who were his main audience, as well as in the markets. They maintained that the reason why the Quran appealed to people was not that it was revealed by God but because Muhammad possessed such a strong eloquent expression he could charm the people 21:3. They held that he fabricated the verses of the Quran with the help of some Satanic Jinn and presented these before the people in the garb of divine inspirations. The Quran mentions these charges at various places and then answers them 

26:210-212"And the Shaitans have not come down with it. And it behoves them not, and they have not the power to do (it). Most surely they are far removed from the hearing of it". 

The words "it behoves them not" imply that Satan would not do something against his own mission. This is the same kind of argument, as was adopted by Jesus in response to the Pharisees in Lk11. Evil forces have no power over it and it shows from the idolators and their jinns' failure to the Quran's repeated challenges to come up with 3 sentences like it. And on the accusations of him being an eloquent and demon possessed poet, the Quran would use simple observation to refute their claims, firstly by pointing to the well known and undisputed upright character of Muhammad 

36:69-70"And We have not taught him poetry, nor is it meet for him; it is nothing but a reminder and a plain Quran. That it may warn him who would have life, and (that) the word may prove true against the unbelievers". 

The Quran would also contrast those who followed the prophet and those who listened to and followed these kinds of mad, demon possessed poets 

26:224-226"And those who are strayed follow the poets. Did you not notice that they wander everywhere? And they say what they practice not". 

Not every poet is condemned in this passage. A group is singled out, those who use such powerful media as an instruments of evil and wickedness. Before and during the advent if Islam some of them posted their sexually explicit verses on the walls of the Kaaba. They were highly revered and believed to be under the power of jinns. This type of poetry darkened the people's emotions and intellects, instigated wars and hatred among different parties who otherwise would not have even fought eachother on the battlefield. 

During Islam's early battles, these blood thirsty propaganda machines were rightfully considered combatants like any soldier in a time where threats and treason were coming from all side against the nascent Muslim community, aiming at its extinction. The verse raises also the point that those who followed these poets had a sinful nature, because of the nature of the poems the likes of those of Imrul-Qays, and what these poems incited in their hearts. Those who were captivated by the Quran's eloquence on the other hand, were a different kind of people. What the prophet was reciting was obviously more than poetic lofty thoughts, and some predictions like those of the sooth-sayers, and those who will keep opposing him will be deprived of its wisdom 10:1-2.

As a side note, demon possession, a calumny among many others that the prophet Muhammad and prophets before him, including Jesus, were charged with was unrelated to the satanic verses polemic. It was in relation to what his opponents perceived as the Quran's supernatural eloquence. They werent ready to accept that it could come from a human, much less from God, so they settled for demonic agents.

In a similar situation, Moses who was accused of being a magician with the motive of 

20:57"turn us out of our land by your magic" 

as he came to them with the "truth", pointed to the absurdity of their charge; a sorcerer or magician can never come, as he did, to a bloody tyrant the like of Pharao with the bold truth, effective arguments and speech, use his set of skills (which they believed was magic while they were manifest miracles) against the tyrant, humiliating him to such an extent that he was condemned to be executed 

10:76-7"Musa said: Do you say (this) of the truth when it has come to you? Is it magic? And the magicians are not successful". 

Such accusation was all the more absurd considering that Pharao, and the Quraysh who accused Muhammad of sorcery and magic, knew it had never happened in history that a magician had conquered a country through such means. Magicians were common in ancient Egypt. They boasted of their feats all over the empire so as to acquire wealth and esteem. But what distinguished Moses with the magicians above all was their demand for worldly reward in contrast to Moses' moral, selfless stance. He embodied courage and confidence, was not seeking any reward in spite of belonging to an enslaved nation. Neither was the murder accusation against him a reason for his bold move, he had been living for long beyond Egyptian territory where he had established himself and his family. Yet he came back to Pharaoh's court to proclaim that he had been sent by the Lord of all Creation, boldly demanding the release of the Israelites 26:18-51. Such an individual couldnt be internally animated by evil intentions or demonic agents.  

Seeing that their smearing campaign was failing against Muhammad, the Quraysh appealed to the services of Nadr ibn al Harith. He did not rise up by himself and begin his public defamation. He was learned in the history, religion, wisdom, theories of good and evil, cosmology, and other literature of the Persians and he would rise after Muhammad's speeches calling the people to the Persian religions. He convinced the Quraysh this was the only way they could try defeating his purpose in public. Just as with Moses before, their villification campaign stood no ground considering the nature of the message and the message bearer himself, him being known for his moral integrity prior to beginning his mission. Some historians say Nadr ibn al Harith was captured and executed following the battle of badr in which he personally participated in, among other pagan and Quraysh notables. A wide range of reasons are given for his execution including defamation and incitement to assassination attempts against the prophet, persecution through appeals to boycott, and torturing of Muslims. Not much certainty can be established surrounding the circumstances of his death. Other reports even show him present among the defeated delegation of the battle of ta'if which occured later than Badr, even accepting Islam among other notables who then were gifted with camels as a sign of peace and good will. 

What was being recited by Muhammad, the illiterate man living among them for 40 years without them ever noticing any poetry skills, did not use confounding words or phrases, neither did it employ strange Arabic dialects. Its choice of words produced the maximum impact in the hearts and intellects of those that heard it. Its content was far from the decadent depictions of various common themes of Preislamic poetry. Arab poetry varied from vivid lustful language, to history, soothsaying, propaganda, incitements against other tribes, to epic tales of honor, mentions of Abraham and the sacrifice, praise of the holy sanctuary etc. Yet when the Quran addressed each of those themes, it did so with refinement and a meaningful choice of words and structure that gave a multifaceted, intricate moral and spiritual dimension to the issue. The masters of eloquence of the time could not classify it in any genre due to many factors, including contents and form. The many intricate types and subtypes of the Jahiliyya poetry are well known, and it is the Quran's particular structure, not belonging to any of the established pattern, that made them unable to counter it. This baffled its audience, compelling the opponents to find nothing better to say than to call it magic, inspired by demons and so forth. 

Thomas Bauer "There is yet another reason why scholars of the Quran are deterred from looking more closely at contemporary literature  even the briefest of examinations of the two bodies of texts reveals that they share little in common  so different are the Quran and contemporary poetic literature that one can hardly come up with a better example of difference if one tried  From their different ways of using language to their notable differences in content, hardly any similarities are to be found  This distinction is so marked that it might well seem virtually pointless to claim that Arabic poetry can make any serious contribution to an understanding of the Quran".

Ibn Ishaq recorded al-Walid bin Mugira's reaction to the Quran: 

"They said, "He is a kahin." He said, "By God, he is not that, for we have seen the kahins, and his (speech) is not unintelligible murmuring (zamzama) and rhymed prose (sajc) of a kahin." "Then he is possessed (majnun)," they said. "No, he is not that," he said. "We have seen and known the possessed state, and here is no choking, spasmodic movements, and whispering." "Then he is a poet," they said. "He is not that," he replied. "We have known poetry in all its forms and meters, and this is not poetry." "Then he is a sorcerer," they said. "No, he is not that," he said, "for we have seen sorcerers and their sorcery, and here is no spitting and no knots." 

Rhymes do appear in the Quran, but the establishment of a rhyming scheme is absolutely not the objective nor one of the purposes of Quran syntax. There are reports even of the prophet warning against the attitude of being concerned in trying to make one's prayers and supplications fit a certain rhythmic or rhyming pattern. 

As a side note, some critics have asserted that the Quran in places, in order to preserve a rhyming pattern, spells the same word differently. For example the prophet Elias that becomes Ilyasin 6:86,37:130 or Mt Sinai/sayna that becomes sinin 23:20,95:2, or the Arabicized names Harun and Qarun (Aaron/Korah). A simple observation however will demonstrate that this isnt necessarily the case for in the Quran itself people and places have been given different names regardless of the rhyming pattern. The prophet Yunus is also called dhunnun and even Mt sinai is sometimes just referred to as Tur or Tur sayna. It isnt uncommon in any language or culture for people or places to be known by several names. Ilyasin has in addition been said to be the name given to the followers of the prophet Ilyas. A peculiarity of Elijah in the HB is that he had a following of prophets 2Kings2. There is no sensible reason for a text to introduce a new, unknown name and confuse the audience for the sake of prose, while it would be easier to make an already well established name rhyme with a convenient word instead. Also if one looks at the verses in question, they are surrounded by verses unconcerned with establishing a rhyming scheme, even when ending with a prophet's name.

The poets of Quraysh, failing to classify Muhammad and what he was reciting in any of the known mystical, demonic or oral phenomena, thus agreed on calling him a magician whose craft was eloquence that by means of eloquent words he was capable of dividing the man against his father, his brother, his spouse and his own tribe 46:7,21:3,34:43,54:2,74:24,10:76,11:7,37:15. The fact is that truth always causes a separation ultimately as seen in the nations and families of the prophets of old, from Nuh who had to abandon his own disbelieving son to be taken by the deluge, to Ibrahim who left his disbelieving father, Lut who left his wife behind him as the town was about to be destroyed etc, and the same is related in the scriptures of old, from the HB to the NT 

Micah7:6,Matt30:21-36"Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved..Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law a man's enemies will be the members of his own household". 

Just as the moral reforms brought by Jesus and Muhammad were met with the staunchest opposition, so was the Book given to Musa 

11:110-112"And certainly We gave the book to Musa, but it was gone against; and had not a word gone forth from your Lord, the matter would surely have been decided between them; and surely they are in a disquieting doubt about it. And your Lord will most surely pay back to all their deeds in full; surely He is aware of what they do. Continue then in the right way as you are commanded.."