Miracles of the Quran

Short answer: Muslims call the Quran the miracle (mu'jizah) of the Prophet ﷺ. Earlier prophets were given signs people saw once, such as the staff of Musa. The Quran is a sign that can still be read and tested. The classical scholars pointed above all to its language, which the best poets of Arabia could not match when challenged, and then to its preservation, its prophecies that came true, and its effect on those who heard it. This page goes through each, with sources, and explains why careful scholars are wary of many modern "scientific miracle" claims.

The Prophet ﷺ said: "Every prophet was given signs because of which people believed. What I have been given is revelation that Allah revealed to me, and I hope to have the most followers on the Day of Resurrection."¹

The challenge: produce something like it

The Quran does more than claim to be from Allah. It invites anyone who doubts it to produce something like it, and the challenge narrows over time: first the whole Quran (52:34), then ten surahs (11:13), then a single surah (10:38, 2:23).

The challenge was made in Makkah to people whose culture was built on spoken poetry, who held poetry fairs and hung prize poems in honour. Its opponents had every reason to answer it: answering it would have ended the Prophet's ﷺ message without a battle. The sources record that they called the Quran poetry, sorcery and soothsaying, and fought the Muslims for years, but did not produce a surah to set beside it.

The language

Classical scholars wrote whole books on what makes the Quran's language inimitable (i'jaz al-Quran), among them al-Khattabi, al-Baqillani and Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani.² Points they and later scholars make:

• Its form is its own. It is not poetry, which follows set metres, and not ordinary rhymed prose (saj'). The Arabs of the time had names for every kind of speech and could not place it in any of them.
• Meaning and sound work together. Word choice, word order and rhythm carry meaning, which is one reason recitation moves people who do not know Arabic.
• It is consistent. It came over about 23 years, in war and peace, in public and in private moments, yet keeps one voice. The Quran itself makes this an argument: "Then do they not reflect upon the Quran? If it had been from other than Allah, they would have found within it much contradiction" (4:82).

One early reaction is reported from al-Walid ibn al-Mughirah, a leader of Quraysh and an opponent of Islam. After hearing it he is reported to have said that it had a sweetness and grace, and that it was not the speech of a man, before he was pressured to call it sorcery.³

Preservation

The Quran was preserved in two ways at once: in memory and in writing.

• Memory. It was recited aloud in every prayer from the start, and many Companions knew all or most of it by heart. That chain of memorisation, teacher to student with certificates (ijazah), continues today, and the recitation of Hafs from Asim taught in one country matches the one taught everywhere else.
• Writing in the Prophet's ﷺ lifetime. Scribes such as Zayd ibn Thabit wrote down revelation as it came, on parchment, bone and palm stalks.
• One compiled copy under Abu Bakr. After many reciters were killed at Yamamah, Umar urged Abu Bakr to gather the Quran into one volume, and Zayd ibn Thabit was given the task. He accepted only what was both written and memorised.⁴
• Standard copies under Uthman. When differences in how people recited appeared in distant provinces, Uthman had official copies made from Abu Bakr's volume and sent to the main cities.⁵

Early manuscripts support this account. The Birmingham Quran manuscript, two leaves held at the University of Birmingham, was radiocarbon dated in 2015 to between 568 and 645 CE, with 95.4% confidence.⁶ The Tübingen fragment (Ma VI 165) was dated to between 649 and 675 CE.⁷ Radiocarbon dates the parchment, not the ink, so the writing can be somewhat later than the animal's death. Both texts match the Quran read today, apart from the spelling conventions of early Arabic script, which was written without dots or vowel marks. The Sana'a palimpsest, found in Yemen in 1972, has an erased lower layer with variants in wording, and researchers still discuss what it shows about the earliest copies. A fair summary is that the manuscript evidence fits the traditional account of an early, fixed text.

Prophecies that came true

The clearest example is at the start of Surah Ar-Rum.

These ayat came in Makkah, when the Byzantine (Roman) Empire was losing badly to Persia. The Persians took Jerusalem in 614 CE and later reached Egypt. To the Makkans, who sided with the Persians, a Roman recovery looked impossible, and the Muslims, who sided with the Romans as people of a scripture, were mocked. The Arabic word bid', "a few years", is used for three to nine. Emperor Heraclius began his counter-attack in 622, defeated the Persians at Nineveh in 627, and Persia sued for peace in 628.⁸ Abu Bakr is reported to have made a wager with the Makkans on the outcome, and the ayat were recited as proof when the Romans won.⁹ "The believers will rejoice" is linked by commentators to the Muslims' victory at Badr in 624, around the same time.

Other examples scholars give:

• Abu Lahab (111): the surah says he will burn in the Fire, which means he would die a disbeliever. He lived for about ten years after it was revealed and could have refuted it by simply professing Islam, even falsely. He never did.
• The defeat of the Makkan army (54:45): "The assembly will be defeated, and they will turn their backs", revealed in Makkah when the Muslims were a weak minority. Umar is reported to have understood it only on the day of Badr.¹⁰
• The return to Makkah (48:27): the Muslims would enter the Sacred Mosque in safety, revealed after they had been turned away at Hudaybiyyah. They performed Umrah the following year.

Its effect on the first hearers

The Quran's first proof was what it did to people who heard it.

• Jubayr ibn Mut'im came to Madinah as a non-Muslim to negotiate for prisoners after Badr and heard the Prophet ﷺ recite Surah At-Tur in Maghrib. When he reached "Or were they created by nothing, or were they the creators?" (52:35), he said his heart nearly flew, and that this was the first time faith settled in his heart.¹¹
• The Quraysh leaders Abu Sufyan, Abu Jahl and al-Akhnas ibn Shariq each crept to listen to the Prophet ﷺ reciting at night, met on the way home, promised not to come back, and returned the next night, as Ibn Ishaq reports.¹²
• The Negus of Abyssinia, a Christian king, wept until his beard was wet when Ja'far ibn Abi Talib recited the opening of Surah Maryam to him, and he refused to hand the Muslims back to Quraysh.¹³
• When the Prophet ﷺ recited Surah An-Najm in Makkah and prostrated at its end, the Muslims and the idolaters who were present prostrated with him.¹⁴
• The jinn themselves are quoted: "Indeed, we have heard an amazing Quran. It guides to the right course, and we have believed in it" (72:1-2).

Umar ibn al-Khattab's conversion after reading the opening of Surah Ta-Ha at his sister's house is well known from the sirah. Its chains are discussed by hadith scholars, so it is best told as a famous report rather than an established hadith.

An unlettered prophet

The Quran calls the Prophet ﷺ al-nabi al-ummi, the unlettered prophet (7:157), and points out that he did not read or write a scripture before it, "otherwise the falsifiers would have had cause for doubt" (29:48). He was known in Makkah for forty years as honest, but not as a poet or a speaker, and then brought a book that the poets could not match.

What about science?

Many websites list "scientific miracles": embryology, the expanding universe, mountains as pegs, barriers between seas. The Quran does call people to look at creation as signs of Allah (3:190, 41:53), and many Muslims find these ayat moving. But careful scholars raise real cautions about using them as proof:

• Meanings get stretched. Arabic words with a broad meaning are often read in a narrow modern sense that earlier commentators never gave them, and only after the science was known.
• Science changes. Tying an ayah to a current theory means that if the theory is revised, the ayah looks wrong. The Quran is not a science textbook. It is guidance.
• Some claims are simply wrong, or rest on quotes from scientists taken out of context, which harms trust when people check them.

A sound approach, followed by many scholars, is that the Quran does not contradict established reality, and its descriptions of nature are signs to reflect on. Its miracle, as the classical scholars understood it, lies in its language and guidance, not in matching the latest paper.

Number patterns

Another popular list counts words: "day" 365 times, "month" 12 times, the number 19. These counts depend on which forms of a word are included or left out, and different people arrive at different totals. The "code 19" theory came from Rashad Khalifa, who went on to remove two ayat to make his count work and later claimed to be a messenger. Muslim scholars rejected both. Numbers like these are not part of the miracle as the Quran itself describes it.

FAQ

Sources

1. Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, from Abu Hurayrah.
2. Al-Khattabi, Bayan I'jaz al-Quran; al-Baqillani, I'jaz al-Quran; Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, Dala'il al-I'jaz.
3. Reported by al-Hakim in al-Mustadrak and by al-Bayhaqi in Dala'il al-Nubuwwah, from Ibn Abbas. Al-Hakim graded it sahih. See also the tafsir of 74:11-25.
4. Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab Fada'il al-Quran, from Zayd ibn Thabit.
5. Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab Fada'il al-Quran, from Anas ibn Malik.
6. University of Birmingham, announcement of the radiocarbon dating of the Birmingham Quran manuscript (Mingana 1572a), July 2015, tested at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.
7. University of Tübingen, Coranica project, radiocarbon dating of manuscript Ma VI 165, 2014.
8. Walter E. Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
9. Jami at-Tirmidhi, Kitab al-Tafsir, on Surah Ar-Rum, from Ibn Abbas and from Niyar ibn Mukram.
10. Reported in the tafsir of 54:45 by Ibn Kathir, from Ikrimah, with similar wording in Sahih al-Bukhari from Ibn Abbas, who reports the Prophet ﷺ reciting it at Badr.
11. Sahih al-Bukhari, in Kitab al-Tafsir (Surah At-Tur) and Kitab al-Maghazi, from Jubayr ibn Mut'im.
12. Ibn Hisham, al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah, from Ibn Ishaq.
13. Musnad Ahmad, from Umm Salamah, in the account of the migration to Abyssinia.
14. Sahih al-Bukhari, from Ibn Abbas.