Mark of Toledo found the Qur’an’s very words inherently defective, not merely mistranslated

Evidence

There seems as little appreciation here of the language of the Qur’an as understanding of the Arab admiration of it. 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. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 333

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ironies of translation and cultural incommensurability — Mark could mimic Arabic style yet still judged the scripture’s language defective, a paradox of understanding-without-appreciation. — connects to: Mark of Toledo presented the Qur’an as self-evidently the speech of a madman