A Review of the Inimitability of the Holy Quran with an Emphasis on the Analysis of its Guidance Aspects

The Holy Quran is considered the most important miracle of the Prophet of Islam (p.b.u.h.) and is the proof of his prophethood. This is the book that one can produce neither something like it nor something like a part of it – even like a surah from it. This issue is seen in several verses of the Quran in the form of ‘challenge phrases’ termed ‘tahaddi’. The inimitability of the Quran has various aspects among which one may point out the extraordinary rhetoric, fantastic beauty, symmetry and harmony among the verses, lack of disparity between the content of the surahs, the illiteracy of its introducer, and its unique style. However, in verse 49 of Surah al-Qasas, the term tahaddi has been explicitly used about the ‘guidance aspect’ of the Holy Book. It appears that this characteristic of the Quran is one of the main factors of its miraculousness in terms of content and meaning, which, in many respects, has been neglected and has not been mentioned as one of the tahaddi verses. This view is supported not only by the explicit tahaddi in Surah al-Qasas, but by such issues as finding the meaning of ‘mesliyyat’ (sameness) in the Quran through the Quran interpretation method, the addressees of the tahaddi verses’ not being limited to a particular place or time, the inability of the Arab eloquent speakers and poets in expressing transcendent and guidance concepts like those of the Quran, as well as the special emphasis of the Quranic verses and the narrations from the Infallible (a.s.) on the ‘guidance aspect’ of the Quran