As Muslims, we know understand that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was not the author of the Qur’an. Rather, he ﷺ was its recipient and transmitter.

The Qur’an itself repeatedly describes him not as an originator of the message but, instead, as one commanded to convey what is revealed to him. It instructs him to declare that he follows only what is revealed to him by his Lord (Qur’an 6:50, 10:15), warns him against altering revelation on his own authority (10:15), and states that had he falsely attributed words to God, God would have seized him and severed his aorta (69:44–46).

Likewise, it has been narrated from the Prophet ﷺ that he described himself as merely conveying the message that had been entrusted to him. He asked his audience during the Farewell Pilgrimage whether or not he had faithfully delivered the message, and they all testified that he had.

The fundamental Islamic position, therefore, is not merely that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ claimed divine inspiration but also that the entire Qur’anic discourse consistently distinguishes between the speaker (God) and the messenger transmitting the speech.

Self-Criticism

One of the strongest internal arguments supporting this claim is the instances in the Qur’an where the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is directly reproached by Allah.

If the Qur’an were a literary production authored by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, we would reasonably expect it to only reinforce his authority, protect his reputation, and present him in a consistently favorable light. Throughout history, founders of religious, political, and ideological movements have generally sought to legitimize their leadership, minimize their mistakes, and strengthen their public image. Yet the Qur’an often does the opposite.

In Surah ‘Abasa (80:1–10), the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is openly reproached for turning away from the blind believer, Ibn Umm Maktum, in favor of influential Makkan elites. The passage is remarkable because it begins with a third-person rebuke (“He frowned and turned away”) rather than a more flattering direct address. Elsewhere, after the Battle of Badr, the Qur’an criticizes the decision regarding prisoners of war, declaring that it was not fitting for a prophet to take captives before thoroughly subduing the enemy (8:67). In Surat al-Tawbah, God questions his permission granted to certain individuals who sought exemption from military participation, asking why he allowed them to stay behind before their sincerity had become clear (9:43). In Surat al-Tahrim, he is reproached for prohibiting something lawful for himself in an effort to please his wives, with the revelation asking why he would forbid what God had made lawful (66:1).

These are not obscure passages that are hidden away in some appendix. They became part of the permanent sacred text, memorized by believers, recited in prayer, and transmitted across generations.

The significance of these passages is often underestimated. Critics sometimes respond that an intelligent author can deliberately include self-criticism as a literary device. In principle, this is true. History provides examples of leaders who acknowledge minor flaws to appear more trustworthy. However, this observation does not adequately explain the specific character of the Qur’anic rebukes. The issue is not if self-criticism is theoretically possible for a human author. The issue is whether or not it constitutes the most plausible explanation for the evidence before us.

Several features distinguish the Qur’anic corrections from ordinary rhetorical self-criticism:

• First, they are public, not private. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ recited these revelations before followers and opponents alike, fully aware that they could be used against him.
• Second, they are frequently “unnecessary” from a literary or political perspective. The Qur’an could have omitted these episodes entirely without weakening its theological message.
• Third, some of the criticisms concern matters directly related to leadership, judgment, and public conduct, the very areas in which a claimant to prophethood would normally seek to project confidence and authority.
• Finally, the criticisms were not temporary admissions that were later edited out of the record. They were permanently canonized as divine revelation and became an enduring part of Islamic scripture.

This point becomes even more striking when viewed against the broader historical context. Throughout history, forged revelations and pseudepigraphical religious texts tend to magnify the stature of their purported authors, not subject them to repeated public correction. Human beings naturally possess incentives to conceal mistakes, reinterpret failures, or elevate their own status. The Qur’an, by contrast, repeatedly places the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in the position of being corrected, instructed, warned, and reminded. The text portrays him not as the ultimate authority but, rather, as a servant who remains accountable to the authority speaking through the revelation.

A determined skeptic can always propose alternative explanations. Yet, historical reasoning does not operate by asking whether or not an alternative explanation is conceivable. It operates by asking which explanation best accounts for the totality of the evidence.

Therefore, the relevant question is not, “Could a human author have written passages criticizing himself?”

The relevant question is whether or not a seventh-century Arabian religious leader, consciously “inventing a scripture” (as they would put it) to establish his authority, would be likely to preserve numerous politically inconvenient, reputationally costly, and publicly recited rebukes against himself as an immutable part of the very book upon which that authority rested.

The Qur’an Itself

Another line of evidence concerns the extraordinary literary character of the Qur’an itself. Regardless of one’s theological commitments, there is broad agreement that the Qur’an occupies a unique position within the history of Arabic literature. From the earliest Islamic period until the present day, Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike have struggled to classify it within any pre-existing literary category.

The Qur’an is not poetry in the conventional Arabic sense. It does not conform to the established metrical systems codified in classical Arabic prosody, nor does it follow the conventions of the pre-Islamic qasidah. Yet it is equally distinct from ordinary prose. It employs rhyme without being reducible to rhymed prose (saj’), narrative without becoming a historical chronicle, legislation without becoming a legal manual, exhortation without becoming a sermon, and theological discourse without becoming a systematic treatise. Rather than fitting comfortably within existing genres, the Qur’an appears to transcend them, combining multiple modes of expression into a literary form that is recognizably its own.

This uniqueness was recognized even by the Qur’an’s earliest opponents. The text repeatedly records accusations that it was poetry, magic, stories of the ancients, or the words of a soothsayer, only to reject each categorization and challenge its audience to produce something comparable (2:23, 10:38, 11:13). Whatever one’s view of the challenge itself, its significance lies in the fact that the Qur’an presents itself as occupying a literary category distinct from those familiar to seventh-century Arabs.

Modern literary scholarship has further highlighted this phenomenon. Scholars such as Raymond Farrin have argued that the Qur’an exhibits remarkably sophisticated patterns of composition, including large-scale ring structures, intricate thematic symmetries, and deliberate architectural coherence spanning entire chapters and, in some cases, larger textual units. In works such as Structure and Qur’anic Interpretation, Farrin contends that the Qur’an’s organization reflects a level of literary design that was long overlooked by both critics and admirers. Similar observations have been made by scholars including Michel Cuypers, whose studies of Semitic rhetoric identify elaborate concentric and parallel structures throughout the text; and Neal Robinson, who emphasized the coherence of chapters once dismissed as disconnected collections of passages.

Obviously, Muslims do not claim that literary excellence, by itself, proves divine origin. Human beings are certainly capable of producing works of extraordinary beauty and influence.

The question, however, is not if humans can produce great literature. The question is whether or not the emergence of the Qur’an is adequately explained by what we know of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself.

Unlike Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Goethe, or virtually any other figure associated with a literary masterpiece, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ left behind no developmental literary career through which historians can trace the gradual maturation of his style. No collection of youthful poems survives. No earlier essays, speeches, treatises, or experiments in composition exist from which the Qur’an can be seen to evolve. There is no evidence of a school of literary training, a circle of rhetorical mentors, or a prolonged period of artistic development comparable to that observed in other major literary figures.

Instead, the historical record presents something unusual. A man who was not known among his contemporaries as a poet suddenly began reciting a text that not only differed radically from the literary conventions of its environment but ultimately became the single most influential work in the history of the Arabic language. Within a few generations, the Qur’an had reshaped Arabic grammar, rhetoric, lexicography, literary criticism, law, theology, philosophy, and education. Classical Arabic itself came to be standardized largely around the language of the Qur’an. Few, if any, texts in world history have exerted a comparable influence on the development of an entire civilization.

A common objection is that exceptional geniuses occasionally appear without obvious precedents. This is true. History does contain extraordinary individuals whose talents seem disproportionate to their backgrounds. Yet this observation merely establishes possibility, not probability. The historical question remains: what explanation best accounts for the available evidence? It is one thing for a gifted individual to produce a remarkable work after years of literary activity. It is another thing entirely for a figure with no known literary corpus to produce a text that simultaneously inaugurates a new literary form, transforms an entire linguistic tradition, and sustains fourteen centuries of detailed literary, theological, and linguistic analysis. (Not to mention that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was also unlettered – he could not read or write.)

None of this constitutes a mathematical proof of divine authorship. A skeptic may still attribute the Qur’an to an extraordinary act of human genius. Nevertheless, the phenomenon remains historically unusual to say the very least. The issue is not if a human being could, in principle, produce a text of exceptional quality. The issue is whether or not the known historical circumstances surrounding the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ provide a sufficient explanation for the appearance of a work whose literary form, linguistic influence, structural sophistication, and enduring impact continue to distinguish it from virtually every other text produced in Late Antiquity.

Unity in Time

A further consideration concerns the remarkable continuity of the Qur’an across the 23 years during which it was revealed.

If the Qur’an were the product of the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ own reflections, experiences, and intellectual development, one might reasonably expect to observe significant shifts in its underlying worldview as his circumstances changed. Yet, despite being proclaimed across radically different phases of his life, the Qur’an exhibits a striking degree of theological and moral consistency.

The historical circumstances under which the Qur’an emerged could hardly have been more diverse: its earliest passages were proclaimed when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ possessed neither political power nor military strength and belonged to a small, vulnerable community facing persecution in Makkah; later revelations were delivered during periods of migration, state formation, warfare, diplomacy, victory, and governance. Few individuals in history have experienced such dramatic transformations in social position. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ moved from being a marginalized preacher to the leader of a rapidly expanding religious and political community. Yet throughout these changes, the central themes of the Qur’an remain remarkably stable.

From its earliest chapters to its latest, the Qur’an consistently emphasizes absolute monotheism, divine sovereignty, moral responsibility, accountability before God, prophecy, resurrection, judgment, mercy, repentance, and the transient nature of worldly power. The language and emphasis may vary according to circumstance, but the underlying worldview remains recognizably the same. The God proclaimed in the earliest Makkan revelations is the same God who speaks in the Madinan revelations. The moral vision remains anchored in the same fundamental principles. The eschatological horizon never disappears. The central message retains its identity despite being expressed across more than two decades of changing historical contexts.

The significance of this consistency becomes clearer when compared to the intellectual development of other major figures, since many who are considered to be history’s greatest thinkers underwent substantial transformations over time: Wittgenstein developed philosophical positions in his later work which differed so dramatically from those of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that scholars commonly distinguish between an “early” and a “later” Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus, language was presented as a logical picture of reality governed by an underlying formal structure; in the Philosophical Investigations, he largely abandoned this framework in favor of the idea that meaning arises from practical linguistic usage within various “language games.”

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Likewise, Plato does not appear to maintain a perfectly static philosophical outlook throughout his writings. Many scholars have noted significant developments between the so-called early, middle, and late dialogues. The early dialogues are primarily concerned with ethical inquiry and frequently end in aporia or unresolved uncertainty; the middle dialogues introduce mature metaphysical doctrines such as the Theory of Forms, the immortality of the soul, and the philosopher-king; in the later dialogues, Plato revisits and critically examines some of these earlier formulations, refining, qualifying, and sometimes subjecting them to difficulties not previously explored. Whether one interprets these developments as revisions or elaborations, they nevertheless reveal a philosopher engaged in an evolving intellectual project.

The same pattern can be observed in the writings of Nietzsche. His early work, particularly The Birth of Tragedy, was deeply influenced by the aesthetics of Greek tragedy and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, as well as by his admiration for Richard Wagner; in his middle period, represented by works such as Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche distanced himself from both Schopenhauer and Wagner, adopting a more skeptical, psychological, and historically oriented approach; his later writings, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, developed themes such as the Übermensch, the will to power, and the revaluation of values with a radically different literary style and philosophical ambition. While certain concerns remained constant throughout his career, the manner in which he articulated and developed them changed considerably.

Augustine of Hippo devoted an entire work, the Retractationes, to revisiting and correcting aspects of his earlier writings.

The same phenomenon is visible among literary figures. The youthful works of Tolstoy differ substantially from the religious and moral vision that characterizes his later writings after his spiritual crisis; the early novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky differ markedly from the philosophical and theological depth of his mature masterpieces; WB Yeats underwent profound transformations in style, symbolism, and worldview over the course of his literary career; even Shakespeare displays clear development from his earlier histories and comedies to the mature tragedies and romances of his later years.

Such evolution is not necessarily evidence of “weakness.” It is precisely what historians expect when examining the work of creative and intellectual geniuses over extended periods of time. Human beings acquire new experiences, revise previous judgments, refine concepts, abandon old assumptions, and respond to changing circumstances. Intellectual development is the norm rather than the exception.

The issue is not merely regarding style either. Human authors frequently revise their views in response to success, failure, changing circumstances, new information, and personal experience. Political leaders often moderate earlier positions after gaining power. Revolutionaries frequently become pragmatists once they assume responsibility for governing. Religious founders may alter priorities as their communities expand and institutionalize. The transition from persecution to political authority often produces significant changes in rhetoric and ideology.

Yet the Qur’an displays an unusual continuity across precisely such transitions. The same fundamental warnings about human pride that appear when Muslims are weak continue to appear when Muslims are victorious. The same insistence upon divine judgment remains present whether the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is confronting persecution in Makkah or is governing in Madinah. The same emphasis on God’s sovereignty persists regardless of whether the community is experiencing hardship or success. Victory does not produce triumphalism. Power does not displace accountability. Political authority does not replace eschatological concern.

Contemporary scholarly studies concur that the Qur’an constitutes an exceptionally unified linguistic corpus. In his influential study “The Chronology of the Qur’an: A Stylometric Research Program” (Brill, 2011), the scholar Behnam Sadeghi subjected the entire Qur’an to large-scale stylometric analysis and concluded that the evidence supports the unity of the text. Summarizing the results of his investigation, he states that his analysis “demonstrates the stylistic unity of many large passages” and furthermore “shows that the Qur’an has one author.”

A skeptic may object and say that disciplined authors are capable of maintaining consistency over long periods. That is certainly true. However, the relevant comparison is not with a modern author carefully drafting and revising a manuscript over many years. The Qur’an was not composed in that manner. It was proclaimed orally in response to changing circumstances, questions, disputes, crises, victories, defeats, and social developments occurring over a period of more than two decades. Individual passages emerged at different times and in different contexts, yet they were eventually incorporated into a single scripture whose central theological vision remained coherent.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply explaining consistency but, rather, explaining a particular kind of consistency: the preservation of a unified theological worldview, a stable moral framework, a distinctive rhetorical voice, and an enduring spiritual intensity across twenty-three years of oral proclamation under some of the most dramatic changes of circumstance imaginable.

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Different “Voices” in the Qur’an and the Hadith

Modern linguistic research has provided an additional perspective on the relationship between the Qur’an and the hadith literature. For centuries, Muslim scholars maintained that the Qur’an possesses a linguistic character fundamentally distinct from ordinary human speech, including the speech of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself. While classical scholars based this judgment on literary and rhetorical analysis, recent computational studies have attempted to examine the question using statistical methods.

One of the most frequently cited studies is Halim Sayoud’s article, “Author Discrimination between the Holy Quran and Prophet’s Statements,” published in Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford University Press, 2012). Using stylometric techniques that analyze unconscious linguistic habits rather than overt content, Sayoud compared the Qur’an with hadith reports attributed to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. For example:

Later, he concludes:

Results of all experiments have led to two main conclusions:

 

(1) First, the two investigated books should have different authors;

 

(2) Second, all the segments that are extracted from a unique book appear to have a certain stylistic similarity.

 

Consequently, we can conclude, according to this investigation, that the Quran was not written by the Prophet Muhammad and that it belongs to a unique author too. Muslims believe that it is written by Allah (God) and sent to his messenger (the prophet Muhammad). We will not extend our research work into an etymological point of view: this is not the main topic of this work, but we think that it may be interesting to mention this point.

 

The result of this investigation rejects, then, the doubts assuming that the Quran was written by the Prophet and it confirms what has been stated by Muhammad: that the Quran has been transmitted to him (by Allah).

In a later study entitled “Was the Quran Written by the Prophet? A Stylometric Analysis” (2023), Sayoud again found that statistical models consistently separated Qur’anic discourse from prophetic reports.

These findings are noteworthy because stylometry does not focus on theological claims, rhetorical beauty, or doctrinal content. Instead, it examines patterns that authors generally produce unconsciously: preferred word combinations, grammatical habits, function-word usage, and recurring linguistic structures. Such methods are routinely employed in authorship attribution studies throughout the humanities.

Thus, the Qur’an consistently presents itself as a unique form of discourse, neither poetry nor ordinary prose, and both traditional literary analysis and modern computational methods have repeatedly identified a linguistic profile that is distinguishable from the hadith corpus.

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No Dynastic Theology

One of the most overlooked features of the Qur’an concerns what it does not contain.

If the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ were consciously constructing a religious-political movement intended to secure authority for himself and his descendants, we would expect the Qur’an to contain some mechanism for preserving that authority within his family. Historically, this is not merely a common phenomenon. It is arguably the norm. Founders of religious and political movements frequently designate heirs, privilege their bloodline, establish hereditary offices, or embed dynastic legitimacy into the foundational texts upon which their authority rests. Such arrangements provide continuity, reduce disputes over succession, and preserve influence beyond the founder’s lifetime.

Yet the Qur’an is strikingly devoid of such provisions.

Nowhere does it explicitly designate a successor to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. There is no clear appointment of Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, and Ali (may Allah be pleased with them). Indeed there is no appointment of any individual whatsoever. More remarkably, there is no Qur’anic doctrine of hereditary religious leadership descending through the family of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. The text establishes prophethood, revelation, worship, law, morality, and communal obligations in great detail, yet it never sets forth a hereditary institution through which divine authority is to pass after the death of the Prophet ﷺ.

This silence is particularly significant in relation to later theories of dynastic succession. If God had intended the leadership of the Muslim community to remain permanently within a specific bloodline, one might reasonably expect such a principle to be stated with the same clarity that characterizes the Qur’an’s teachings on prayer, fasting, inheritance, marriage, or monotheism. Instead, nowhere does the Qur’an identify the descendants of ‘Ali (may Allah be pleased with him) and Fatimah (may Allah be pleased with her) as divinely appointed leaders, nowhere does it establish a perpetual line of imams (i.e., like the heterodox belief of the Shi’ah), and nowhere does it teach that guidance after the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is contingent upon allegiance to a specific hereditary office.

Indeed, the Qur’an consistently undermines the notion that kinship alone confers spiritual privilege: the son of Prophet Noah (peace be upon him) is not saved by his lineage; the father of Prophet Abraham (peace be upon him) is condemned despite his relationship to a prophet; the wives of Prophet Noah (peace be upon him) and Prophet Lot (peace be upon him) are cited as examples of unbelief despite their proximity to righteous men; conversely, Pharaoh’s wife (may Allah be pleased with her) is praised despite her connection to one of history’s greatest tyrants. Throughout the Qur’an, moral and spiritual standing depends upon faith and righteousness rather than bloodline.

The treatment of the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ own relatives follows the same pattern. Surat al-Masad permanently condemns his uncle Abu Lahab despite his close familial relationship to the Prophet ﷺ. His wives are repeatedly admonished and warned that proximity to the Messenger ﷺ does not exempt them from accountability. The Qur’an never suggests that belonging to the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ family guarantees salvation, confers religious authority, or grants a special status before God independent of personal piety.

This point has important implications for competing explanations of the Qur’an’s origin. If the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ were inventing a scripture in order to establish personal or familial power, the absence of dynastic provisions is difficult to explain. One would expect a founder seeking to secure his legacy to strengthen the position of his descendants, not leave the question of succession entirely open. Likewise, if one argues that the Qur’an was intended from the outset to establish a hereditary line of divinely guided leaders, the absence of any explicit doctrine to that effect becomes historically significant. (In fact, there are prophetic reports where the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ explicitly declared it unlawful for his descendants to receive zakat.)

The remarkable fact is that the Qur’an consistently directs attention away from lineage and toward individual responsibility before God. It does not construct a sacred dynasty. It does not establish a hereditary priesthood. It does not confer infallibility upon a bloodline. Instead, it repeatedly insists that no human being, regardless of ancestry or family connection, possesses intrinsic religious privilege before God. In a text that frequently addresses matters of far lesser institutional importance, this absence is striking and demands explanation.

Anyway, the arguments presented here represent only a small portion of the broader discussion. We have not examined in detail the Qur’an’s preservation and manuscript history, its relationship to Late Antique religious debates, its extraordinary civilizational impact, the psychological evidence regarding the sincerity of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the Qur’an’s radical theocentrism, the absence of founder-centered mythology, or numerous other considerations explored by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike. Each of these subjects could warrant an independent study.

The purpose of this article has simply been to show that the traditional Muslim claim, i.e., that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was the recipient and transmitter of the Qur’an rather than its author, cannot be dismissed as a “naïve” or “historically untenable belief.” On the contrary, even from “secular” perspectives, there are substantial literary, historical, linguistic, and theological reasons why that claim has continued to persuade not only believers but also many serious students of the Qur’an.

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