Power to Incapacitate
\r\nIf anything is art, the Quran certainly is. If the minds of the Muslims have been affected by anything, it was certainly affected by the Quran. If this affecting was anywhere deep enough to become constitutive, it was so in aesthetics. There is no Muslim whom the Quranic cadences, rhymes, and awjah al balaghah (facets of eloquence) have not shaken to the very depth of his being; there is no Muslim whose norms and standards of beauty the Quran has not re-kneaded and made in its own image.
\r\nThis aspect of the Quran the Muslims have called its ijaz (power to incapacitate), its placing the reader in front of a challenge to which he can rise, but which he can never meet. In fact, the Quran itself defied its audience, the Arabs, with their highest literary excellence, to produce anything like the Quran, and chided them for their failure to do so. Some of the enemies of Islam among the Prophet's contemporaries rose to the task and were humiliated by the judgement of their opponents as well as by that of their own friends. Muhammad (peace be upon him) was called a man possessed and the Quran a work of magic precisely on account of its effect upon the consciousness of its hearers.
\r\nEverybody recognized that although the Quranic verses did not conform to any of the known patterns of poetry, they produced the same effect as poetry, indeed, to a superlative degree. Every verse is complete and perfect by itself. It often rhymes with the preceding verse or verses and contains one or more religious or moral meanings embedded in literary expressions or articulation of sublime beauty. So mighty is the momentum it generates that the recitation impels the audience irresistibly to move with it, to expect the next verse and to reach the most intense quiescence upon hearing it. Then the process starts again with the next one, two or a group of three or more verses.
\r\n Compiled From:
\r\n \"Al Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life\" - Ismail Raji al Faruqi, pp. 206, 207