Christian polemicists deemed the Qur’an’s style itself inherently defective, not merely untranslatable

Evidence

Mark knew that Muslims argued from the style of the Qur’an on the lips of an illiterate prophet to its divine origin; and the whole of his prefatory summary of Qur’anic teaching, which in précis of the Qur’an he put into the mouth of the Prophet, is a tour de force of mimicry that makes it impossible to suppose him insensitive to Arabic style. Yet it was not just that he felt that good Arabic made bad Latin. For Mark, the very words of the Qur’an were inherently and perniciously defective. Thus he could even conceive that Ibn Tiimart’s reasoning might be invalidated, although in itself particularly sound, by the frequent citation of the ‘disorderly and extremely confused’ words of the Qur’an. The Qur’an reproached and threatened idolators, but not clearly, rationally or usefully. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 333

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to vault claims about how ‘Islam’ gets constructed as Europe’s constitutive outside - here an aesthetic-religious disqualification of the Qur’an itself, complementary to Anidjar’s enemy-genealogy work.