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.
The book Divine Speech: Exploring the Quran as Literature by Nouman Ali Khan and his student Sharif Randhawa 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: Exploring the Quran as Literature 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.
