Reddit reply in r/DefendingIslam: isnt the quran underwhelming — October 14, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

The Quran is underwhelming to you because you're not reading it in it's native language, which means you're not reading the actual Quran at all, and it seems you're pitifully ill-equipped to understand it. Do you really think 1500 years of the most brilliant minds humanity has ever produced wouldn't have noticed if their core text wasn't... valuable?

You should try reading a tafsir. It will help you grasp what's going on in the Quran. You could start with Nouman Ali Khan's lectures, ibn Juzayy's Sufic tafsir, Mawdudi, or In the Shade of the Qur'an.

There's a unique intersection between epic poetry, founding mythology, legal code, theological/philosophical discourse, history, and song in the Quran.

The Bible which has several books, some of which are law, others founding myth, others performative music (Hebrew psalms), some theological discourse, etc. But it's much more segmented. Western tradition also doesn't identify the Bible as an epic poem, use it as the basis of legal code, or have it as a central shared piece of music.

The genre issue of the Quran extends beyond academic Quranic studies I feel. If we are just looking at it like apocrypha or a homily we are missing the artistic value of the Quran.

It's also a geopolitical, cultural, and civilizational issue. The Quran still holds supreme importance for billions of people, holding the roles that spiritual music, shared history, constitutional law, origin myths, poetry, basis of philosophical outlook, and day-to-day morals.

Muslims see the Quran like: the Odyssey, Biblical Genesis, the US Constitution, Herodotus' Histories, their greatest opera, Confucian practical wisdom, Nichomachaen ethics, and spiritual catchecisms/koans. Where a student of Western classics and literature would access 10 texts, or listen to a poem, or attend an opera, to draw from their tradition - religious Muslims invariably first return to the Quran.

I don't know of any other one text that currently features so prominently in the mind of so many people in such a way.

You're reading the greatest text humanity has ever seen by every metric and totally not getting it.