God is beautiful

As a poetic text and musical recitation, the Koran has always been at the center of Arab-Islamic cultures. The extent to which the revelation is experienced artistically by Muslims can still be observed today in the cultural life of cities such as Cairo or Damascus. In Western literature, however, the Qur'an as an aesthetic phenomenon has so far received little attention.

Muslim authors throughout the ages have repeatedly emphasized the literary quality of the Qur'an as a decisive factor in the rapid spread of Islam. They point to countless stories in Muslim literature that tell of the overwhelming effect of the Qur'anic recitation on Muhammad's contemporaries, of people who spontaneously convert upon hearing a Qur'anic verse, who cry, scream, go into raptures, faint, or even die. Navid Kermani does not intend to prove the beauty of the revelation in literary terms. Rather, he tells the exciting story of the Quran's aesthetic reception, a story that is little known in the West. Thus, Navid Kermani examines the relevance of the aesthetic to Muslim salvation history and discusses the complex, tense relationship between revelation and poetry, prophet and poet in the Islamic tradition. He shows that the relationship between religious message and musical production is central to the reception of the Qur'an and outlines how its "divine composition" is used by Muslim theology as aesthetic proof of God. Finally, the aesthetic experience of the Qur'an is determined by the example of Islamic mysticism.