On the 9th July 2025, Dr Wahid M. Amin presented at the Islamic Colloquia of Edinburgh (ICE) organised by the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. He presented a paper titled “Shīʿī Accounts of the Qurʾān and Its Inimitability: From al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d. 436/1044) to Sayyid ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1401/1981).”
This paper investigated the doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān in Shīʿī-Imāmī theology and philosophy. While many consider the Qurʾān’s inimitability to lie in its aesthetic-linguistic properties, this paper highlighted alternative accounts within the Shīʿī tradition of how best to interpret and understand the Qurʾān’s miraculous nature. The research focused primarily on two key figures: al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d. 436/1044) and Sayyid ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1401/1981), studying their views on Qurʾān 2:23 in which God challenges the non-believing Meccans to produce a single chapter like a chapter of the Qurʾān (āyat al-taḥaddī).
Contrary to the dominant view that locates the Qurʾān’s inimitability in its rhetorical, linguistic, or literary excellence, al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā argued that its inimitability arose not from any inherent stylistic features, but from a divine act of prevention (ṣarfa). On this view, human beings possess the linguistic competence to imitate the Qurʾān, but God prevents them from doing so. By contrast, Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s al-Mīzān fī Tafsīr al-Qurʾān contained a more philosophically inflected account of iʿjāz, contending that the Qurʾān’s inimitability lies in its existential nature as divine speech—its content, form, and revelatory function being inextricably linked in a way that transcends ordinary linguistic expression.
The paper aimed to highlight the internal diversity of Shīʿī approaches to iʿjāz and contributed to broader debates on the nature of miraculousness in Islamic thought.
