Christian polemicists rejected Quranic metrical style as proof of divinity, citing scripture’s prose.

Evidence

The same passage was pitched more strongly still in the rendering of Peter de Pennis: the style constituted ‘so beautiful and adorned a way of speaking, that is, metrical’ and the Muslims ‘argue from this that Muhammad was true Prophet’ as well as that God made this Book. Ricoldo, however, followed by Peter, replied that in fact the very opposite is true: divine laws are not like this at all; neither the Old Testament nor the New is metrical [szc]; of ‘the other prophets who heard the voice of God’, we are told that ‘none said that God spoke in verse; which also the wise philosophers disdained’. The Qur’an itself admitted that the Prophet was accused of being a dreamer and a poet, and not a prophet. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 339

Categorization

• SHARE: The irony that Christian polemicists treated rhythm as a mark of falsehood while Muslim theology treated it as a mark of truth — a nice symmetry for a medievalist friend.