Eloquence or Intervention? Explaining the Miracle of the Qur’an
Join us on Monday, October 19th, 2026, at the Toronto School of Theology at 6:00PM, where we will gather for a presentation by Dr. Hussein Abdulsater (University of Notre Dame), the 2026–2027 Distinguished Scholar Fellow at SRI.
All are welcome to this engaging and thought-provoking discussion, to be held in the Jay Room on the first floor, at the Toronto School of Theology, at the University of Toronto. This event is co-sponsored by the Shi’a Research Institute and the Toronto School of Theology.
It is a mainstream Islamic belief that the Qurʾān is itself a miracle, the standing proof of the Prophet’s message. Most scholars have located that miracle in the Qurʾān’s supernatural eloquence, a beauty beyond human capacity to match.
Yet from the earliest centuries of Islam, some thinkers took a strikingly different view: that the Qurʾān’s eloquence lies fully within human reach, and that the Prophet’s Arab adversaries failed to produce a rival text only because God intervened to divert them from doing so. This is the ṣarfa, or “diversion,” doctrine, held by major Shiʿi and Sunni figures alike.
In this lecture, Dr. Hussein Abdulsater traces the intellectual origins and the varieties of the ṣarfa doctrine, and asks what this centuries-old debate means for how Muslims understand the miraculousness of the Qurʾān today.
Dr. Hussein Ali Abdulsater is Associate Professor of Arabic Culture and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history, particularly the development of theological schools, the formation of sectarian identities, and the various modes of rationalism expressed in Islamic theology and Arabic literature. He is the author of Shiʿi Doctrines, Muʿtazili Theology: al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā and Imami Discourse (2017) and Al-Jāḥiẓ and Religious Knowledge: A Forgotten Islamic Rationalism (2025), both published by Edinburgh University Press.
Event Location:
Jay Room, 1st Floor
Toronto School of Theology
47 Queen’s Park Cres E,
Toronto, ON
M5S 2C3