Critiques of Earlier Theories of I'jaz

A significant portion of Dala'il al-I'jaz is devoted to critical engagement with earlier theories of Quranic inimitability. Al-Jurjani's method was not simply to present his own theory but to show why previous accounts failed and how his theory of nazm overcame those failures. This critical engagement gives the book a dialectical quality that rewards careful reading — the arguments are not just stated but tested, and the testing illuminates the real difficulty of the problem al-Jurjani was addressing.

The most common earlier account held that the Quran's inimitability lay in its content — the truths it conveyed about God, the afterlife, law, and history that no human source could have known. Al-Jurjani acknowledged that Quranic content was extraordinarily valuable but argued that content alone could not constitute inimitability, because the claim of i'jaz is specifically about the language, not the information. An inimitable text is one whose literary form cannot be matched; a text whose content cannot be independently discovered is simply rare knowledge, which is a different kind of achievement. The challenge to produce a surah 'like it' (Q 2:23) is a challenge about linguistic form.

A second common account held that the inimitability was a matter of style — that the Quran achieved a level of stylistic excellence in its prose and diction that no human writer could reach. Al-Jurjani found this account more promising but ultimately insufficient. Style without analysis of what constitutes the style — what syntactic and semantic properties make the style excellent — is merely a subjective judgment. To say the Quran has incomparable style is to make a claim that demands linguistic grounding, and without that grounding, it cannot respond to a skeptic who disputes the aesthetic evaluation.

The theory of sarfa ('diversion') held that the Quran's inimitability was not intrinsic to its language but was the result of divine intervention: God prevented the Arabs from producing equivalent literature by diverting their capacity or will to attempt it. Al-Jurjani found this theory inadequate on multiple grounds. It made the challenge hollow — if humans were prevented from producing the equivalent, then the failure to do so proves nothing about the Quran's intrinsic quality. And it was inconsistent with the Quran's own presentation of its challenge as an argument from literary excellence.

By systematically ruling out these alternatives, al-Jurjani made space for his own theory of nazm as the only account that could ground a genuine claim of literary inimitability. This negative clearing of the field is an important part of the book's argumentative structure and shows al-Jurjani as a philosopher as much as a linguist.