God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran
by navid kermani
wiley, 400 pages, $45
According to the Islamic doctrine of iʿjāz, the Qur’an is an inimitable book, a miracle. Western scholars, pointing out grammatical errors and other infelicities in the text, have long criticized this doctrine. In God is Beautiful, Navid Kermani responds to this criticism by focusing on the reception of the Qur’an by Muslims as a perfect—and beautiful—book.
Reading Kermani’s book brought to my mind a moment about twenty years ago when I was sitting in a taxi in Damascus along with a Syrian Muslim man. I found myself increasingly bothered by the loud volume of the Qur’an recitation blaring out of loudspeakers at a nearby mosque. My fellow passenger had a different experience. He turned to me and shouted blissfully, “Praise God! Do you hear that? It’s the word of God!”
Kermani also has a story about taxis in God is Beautiful. He recounts hearing Qur’an recitation in Cairo’s cabs and asking the drivers why they liked to listen to it. He continues: “The answer I heard again and again was, ‘It’s so beautiful!’” Kermani argues that this sentiment is nothing new. Muslims have long valued the Qur’an for its aesthetic value, particularly when it is recited. To this effect he tells the story of an early ascetic, Muslim ibn Yasār, who, entranced by a Qur’an recitation, kept still even when his house caught on fire.
Kermani also argues that the Muslim’s relationship to the Qur’an is fundamentally different from the Christian’s relationship to the Bible. While Muslims tell stories such as that of Muslim ibn Yasār or of those who converted (most famously, the second caliph, ʿUmar) upon being entranced by the beauty of the Qur’an, Christians do not tell such stories about the experience of hearing the Bible. In fact, some Christians—notably the German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann—emphasize the poverty of the Bible’s language, celebrating the Bible as a sermo humilis (“a lowly discourse”) which reflects the humility of Christ himself.
