When The Stars Prostrated: Meditations On Surat Yusuf

The Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam, is revered as the spoken word of God by approximately one-fifth of the world’s population. Since its inception, the power of the Quran has derived not only from its message, but also from the inimitable literary style and rhetorical impact that the Arabic scripture has on its audiences. Divine Speech: Exploring the Quran as Literature attempts to make some of the most recent Arabic and European-language scholarship on its literary features accessible to a wider, English-speaking audience. These features include its language and word choice, its use of figures of speech and other rhetorical devices, its manner of narrating parables and stories, and the structure, coherence, and the order of its “chapters”-aspects that typically remain mysterious to readers of English translations of the text. Divine Speech furnishes its readers with a better appreciation of the Quran from a literary perspective, and in the process stimulates interest in, and provides tools and resources for, further study of the scripture.

The tenets of Islam cannot be grasped without a proper understanding of the Qur’an. In this book, Muhammad Abdel Haleem examines its recurrent themes and for the first time sets them in the context of the Qur’an’s linguistic style. Haleem examines the background to the development of the surahs (chapters) and the ayahs (verses) and the construction of the Qur’an itself.

This study illustrates why the language of the Qur’an is miraculous, unique, and evidence of divine authority. The author compares the language of the Qur’an with the language of pre-Islamic poetry, the Prophet’s words (hadith), and the language of the Arabs both past and present, to demonstrate that although the Qur’an was revealed in Arabic it was at the same time an Arabic which was entirely new. Original and early Muslim audiences viewed this as miraculous and responded to the Qur’an’s words, sounds, rhythms, etc. in a manner consistent with a deeper appreciation of its beauty and majesty which modern ears, trained by familiarity, and despite being surrounded by all manner of dictionaries and studies, are at a loss to capture. The author attempts to remove this veil and present the Qur’an to readers as if hearing it for the first time, to bring to life some of this wonder. In doing so he guides readers to appreciate the beauty of the Qur’an, to become more immersed in it, and to have a clearer understanding of its structure and flow. Devoting special attention to Surah Al Muddaththir, to underpin his analysis, Saeh thus brings the Revelation to life, to demonstrate that each surah has distinct features and characteristics that make it stand out uniquely within the design and sweep of the whole.