Nearly all of the scholars we've read on the Qur'an refer to its emotional effect on Muslim believers when they recite or hear it being recited. Its sacred qualities as revelation have been described by Muslims as wahy "a sort of idea-word inspiration that came upon Muhammad's 'heart,' as the Qur'an itself declares (26:192-195) [Corrigan et al., p. 60], or ijaz "inimitability," or the Quranic "voice" nazm (its distinctive style of sound and composition) [Sells (2005), p.184]- qualities that apparently are accessible more on an experiential level than a purely analytical or intellectual one. And also, accessible only in its original Arabic.
That being said, Michael Sells in Approaching the Qur'an (and many others), still tries to point to specific features in the form and sounds of the text of the Qur'an, and the ways it is recited and heard, that convey these rather intangible qualities of what Andrew in class called the Qur'an's "sacrality." What are the specific, precise features we can point to in the Qur'an itself, and/or the way Muslims relate to it, that both Muslims and non-Muslims could equally recognize as features of a sacred scripture? How would you as a critical interpreter of religions explain to a non-Muslim what in the text itself makes the Qur'an sacred? Is the experience of the Qur'an as a sacred scripture something only Muslims can know or feel?
Sells suggests that the Qur'an's understanding of "spirit" - ruh in Arabic - is a particularly good example of the distinctively sacred way the Qur'an conveys its message:
One key aspect of Qur'anic articulation is the sound figure. The sound figure is particularly subtle. It is developed within particular Suras (intratextually) and across Suras that are widely separated in the written version of the Qur'an (intertextually)...The Qur'anic sound figures occur in connection with three moments: prophecy, creation, and the day of reckoning. These are boundary moments, points of contact between eternal and temporal realms, in which the structures of language (with temporality built into them) are transformed through contact with a realm beyond temporality. In each moment, the Qur'an invokes the spirit (ruh). [p. 185, my emphasis].
What is he talking about? What are examples of these "sound figures?" (E.g., in Sura 97, the Sura of Destiny "al-Qadr" [go to pages 31 and 32]) And are the "sound figures" structures of language that are universally accessible, i.e., for which one need not be a Muslim to see, hear, and experience? Is the expression of ideas through sound figures the Qur'an's distinctively sacred mode of expression? Is this similar or different to the main ways Jews have classically related to the Torah as a sacred scripture?
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