The Third Section, Which Is the Third Treatise
I wrote this section in order to present an important intention of mine to my brothers of the hereafter for their consideration. It concerns the writing of a Qur’an in a way that will show one of the two hundred sorts of the Qur’an of Miraculous Exposition’s miraculousness – a sort pertaining to its patterns – with the pages specified in accordance with the style of Hafız Osman and taking the Mudāyana Verse as the measure, and taking Sura al‑Ikhlas as the standard for the lines. This Third Section, which I wrote to consult them concerning this matter and to learn their ideas, and also as a reminder to myself, consists of nine matters.
First Matter
It is established with proofs in the Twenty‑Fifth Word, called The Miraculousness of the Qur’an, that the varieties of the Qur’an of Mighty Stature’s miraculousness number forty. Some of these are demonstrated in detail, and some briefly, so as to convince even the obdurate.
Also, the different sorts of miraculousness the Qur’an shows to each of forty of the classes of humanity were explained in the Eighteenth Sign of the Nineteenth Letter, and the shares received by ten of those groups were proved. The remaining thirty classes consist of the followers of all the different ways of sainthood and the scholars of all the various sciences, who demonstrated their certain, verified belief to the degrees of knowledge of certainty, vision of certainty, and absolute certainty that the Qur’an is the true Word of Allah the Most High. That is to say, each of them discerned a different aspect of its miraculousness in a different way.
Yes, just as the miraculousness a saint who seeks knowledge of Allah the Most High understands will not the same as the beauty of the miraculousness a saint who is a lover of Allah the Most High witnesses, so the manifestations of the beauty of its miraculousness vary according to the different ways and paths. And the aspect of miraculousness a profound scholar of the principles of religion sees will not be the same as that seen by an authoritative interpreter of the secondary matters of the Shari‘a sees; and so on.
I am not able to show in detail all these different aspects; my comprehension cannot encompass them; my view falls short of them. For this reason only ten classes were explained and the rest were alluded to briefly. Now, of those, two that were inadequately described in The Miracles of Muhammad although they needed to be elucidated, were the following:
The First Class is the uneducated mass of people, whom we call “the listening class;” they only listen to the Qur’an, understanding its miraculousness by means of their ears. They say: “The Qur’an, which I hear, does not resemble any other books, so it must either be inferior to all of them, or superior. No one could say that it is inferior, nor have they said it, nor could the Devil even say it. So it must be superior to all of them.”
It was written briefly like this in the Eighteenth Sign and is further explained in the First Topic of the Twenty‑Sixth Letter, called A Dispute with the Devil, which illustrates and proves that class’s understanding of the miraculousness.
The Second Class is “the seeing class.” That is to say, it is claimed in the Eighteenth Sign that an aspect of the Qur’an’s miraculousness which may be seen with the eyes looks to the uneducated common people or to materialists whose minds see no further than their eyes. This claim needs much explanation in order to elucidate and prove it. It was not explained there due to an important instance of dominical wisdom which only now we understand. Only a few very minor particulars were pointed out. The wisdom in in this is now understood and we are certain its postponement was preferable.
In order to facilitate this class’s understanding, we had a Qur’an written that shows this observable aspect, one of the forty aspects of its miraculousness.
The remaining matters of this Third Section together with the Fourth Section are about coincidences (tevâfukat). They have been included in the Index and not repeated here. Included here are only a reminder concerning the Fourth Section and its Third Point.