Divine Speech - Exploring The Qur'an As Literature

The Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam, is revered as the spoken word of God by approximately one-fifth of the world's population. Since its inception, the power of the Quran has derived not only from its message, but also from the inimitable literary style and rhetorical impact that the Arabic scripture has on its audiences. Divine Speech: Exploring the Quran as Literature attempts to make some of the most recent Arabic and European-language scholarship on its literary features accessible to a wider, English-speaking audience. These features include its language and word choice, its use of figures of speech and other rhetorical devices, its manner of narrating parables and stories, and the structure, coherence, and the order of its "chapters"-aspects that typically remain mysterious to readers of English translations of the text. Divine Speech furnishes its readers with a better appreciation of the Quran from a literary perspective, and in the process stimulates interest in, and provides tools and resources for, further study of the scripture. Divine Speech allows Muslims and non-Muslims to read, study, and appreciate the scripture and its message on equal footing and using the same tools of analysis, without demanding any prior faith commitment. Excerpts from the Book:"Since the Qur’an is a revelation intended for people of all times and places until the Day of Judgment, a miracle that could only be witnessed and experienced for a single generation would not be sufficient