Qur’an is the True Scripture revealed by the One All-Knowing of the Unseen to His Noble Messenger Muhammad, Upon whom be the best of peace and blessings, to set humanity on the path of truth and to illumine men’s vision with the light of belief and the understanding and certainty to become sincere bondsmen of the Lord and Sustainer of all the worlds.

Ustad Nursi wanted to develop his unique gifts by studying the Islamic sciences, and ancient philosophy, and the humanities and modern sciences, as well as learning Arabic literature and rhetoric from the works of such masters as al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Zamakhsharī, al-Sakkākī, and especially the outstanding works on grammar and rhetoric of Imam ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī. For Nursi believed in his famous theory concerning the Qur’an’s composition (naẓm) and indicated his admiration for it in this work.

The theory of its composition was not new; al-Jurjānī did not invent it and it was not without precedents. For al-Jāḥiẓ had turned his attention to it in his work Naẓm al-Qur’ān, and so had al-Wāsiṭī, in his I‘jāz al-Qur’ān fi Naẓmihi, and al-Bāqillānī, in I‘jāz al-Qur’ān; it was that al-Jurjānī, clarified it fully in respect of grammar and rhetoric and formulated a complete theory based on the absence of any disjunction between the words and their meaning and the form and its purport, and he established that the eloquence of the composition lay neither in individual words nor in detached meanings, but in what the words and phrases depicted. In consequence, he defined the composition as “some words being affixed to others and some being placed because of others; that is, words being positioned as required by the science of grammar, in accordance with its rules and principles, and methods, without deviation from them.”

It seems to me that Ustad Nursi studied this theory of the Qur’an’s composition thoroughly and then it became clear to him that the earlier commentators like al-Zamakhsharī, al-Rāzī, and Abū Su‘ūd had not attempted to apply it as a complete system treating all the suras, verses, and words one after the other, in all its details. So he wanted to emulate these great commentators, but to compose a commentary in which the theory was applied in detail and comprehensively in respect of the structures and meanings, and the wording and its related sciences, both rational and intuitive, universal and particular. He relied on all these while disclosing the Qur’an’s systematic ordering, through which its miraculousness and inimitability become apparent. He disclosed too and elucidated the subtle qualities of the literary styles and devices of the Qur’an, which when it first appeared opposed some current usages of Arabic, and astounded the Arab orators and silenced their eloquent masters. It confronted them with the challenge of its miraculousness, and so it will till the Last Day.

It was not only to prove the Qur’an’s miraculousness in respect of elo-