Medieval Western scholars judged the Qur’an human because its style failed scholastic standards

Evidence

This excessively small-minded carping sprang from a genuine divergence of Western and Eastern traditions. The form and the manner of the Qur’an remained always alien to the scholastic age which so specially honoured the systematic classification of arguments. It was supposed that its style gave a strong presumption of its human origin; it was too badly written to be of God. In this way the attitude of the Arab and the Muslim, and the assertion of the Qur’an itself, were exactly reversed. It is the Qur’an that says that it is its own proof, that issues the challenge to produce one revelation equal, in matter and expression, to those that it contains. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 330

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of cross-cultural aesthetic judgments and how style standards differ across traditions — relates to the rubric’s interest in concrete claims about how incommensurable cultural criteria collide. — connects to: Scholastic Christians judged the Qur’an by alien stylistic criteria and inverted its self-understanding; Medieval attacks on the Qur’an obscured its evident piety to unlearned readers
• DEFINE: Clarifies the Islamic doctrine that the Qur’an’s inimitability of style is its own proof of divine origin, reversing the Western critique.