The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 1) — Page 73
PT. 1 AL-BAQARAH been met by calling upon them to bring similar Surahs which they should represent as the word of God. The latter demand, i. e. that pertaining to the representation of the required production as the word of God, has a reference to the objection of the disbelievers that no angel has come down to the Prophet. They are told that if no angel has really come to him and his claim to receive divine revelation through the medium of angels is false, then let them also produce ten Surahs, claiming, like him, that they have been brought down to them by angels, and then see what their end would be. If they had not the courage to forge a lie against God, how could they think that the Prophet could be guilty of such fabrication or, if he had dared to commit this forgery, why had he remained secure from God's punishment? The reason why the disbelievers in this verse have been called upon to produce ten Surahs and not the whole Quran is that the question here did not relate to the perfection of the Quran in all respects, but to that of only a portion of it. The disbelievers had objected to some parts of it being defective, as is evident from the words: They imagine that thou art now perhaps going to abandon part of that which has been revealed to thee (11:13). Hence, they have not been required here to bring a complete book like the whole Quran, but only ten Surahs in place of those parts of the Quran which they deem to be defective, in order that the truth of their assertion may be tested. As for the selection of the specific 73 CH. 2 number 10 for this purpose, it should be noted that in Arabic 10 represents a complete number. As the object was to refute the assertion of the disbelievers that certain portions of the Quran were defective, therefore the disbelievers were given the option of making as many as ten efforts to substantiate their claim. They were thus asked to produce ten Surahs not because they could produce less than that number but because the best way to refute their objection was to afford them several opportunities to substantiate the truth of their assertion. In short, since in 17:89 the whole Quran was claimed to be a perfect Book, its opponents were called upon to produce the like of the whole Quran; but since in 11:14 the point was that certain portions of it were objected to, so they were asked to choose ten such portions as appeared to them to be most defective and then, produce a composition even like those portions. The third verse where the Quran has been declared to be matchless is 10:39. Here disbelievers have been called upon to produce the like of only one Surah of the Quran. This is so because, unlike the above- mentioned two verses, the challenge made in this verse is in support of a claim made by the Quran itself and not in refutation of any objection on the part of disbelievers. In the verses preceding 10:39, it was claimed that God possessed full authority over all things (see 10:32-36), and as a proof of this, in 10:38 the Quran was put forward as possessing the following excellences: (a) it contains teachings which could not be devised by man;