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Surah Ar-Raḥmān is widely known as the “bride of the Qur’an” (‘arūs al-Qur’ān), yet studies of its inimitability often stop at admiring its beauty without offering a structured rhetorical analysis. This article tries to fill that gap by examining the rhetorical (balāghah) elements in Surah Ar-Raḥmān and how they work together to shape the Qur’an’s linguistic inimitability. The study is a library research project using a descriptive-analytical approach. Its primary sources are the text of the surah and classical works on rhetoric, namely al-Jurjānī’s Dalā’il al-I’jāz and Asrār al-Balāghah and al-Bāqillānī’s I’jāz al-Qur’ān. Secondary sources include Ibn ‘Āsyūr’s Al-Taḥrīr wa al-Tanwīr, Sayyid Quṭb’s Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān, and articles from accredited journals. The data were examined through content analysis across the three branches of balāghah: bayān, ma’ānī, and badī’. The findings show that the 31-fold repetition (tikrār) of the refrain fa bi’ayyi ālā’i rabbikumā tukażżibān functions as taqrīr, reinforcing meaning rather than merely repeating it. The analysis also identifies tawāzun (a balance between worldly and eternal blessings), iltifāt (shifts from third to second person), vivid tashbīh and isti’ārah in depictions of paradise and hell, and the musicality of the fāṣilah that ties these elements together. The study concludes that the linguistic beauty of Surah Ar-Raḥmān is objective and verifiable through the tools of balāghah, not a matter of personal aesthetic taste.
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Sesharia et al. (2026) studied this question.
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