In the prologue of his gloss on al-Taftāzānī’s Mukhtaṣar, the late theologian and rhetorician al-Dasūqī opined that kalām is not the primary field establishing the Qur'an's inimitability. Commenting on al-Taftāzānī’s assertion that iʿjāz al-Qurʾān is a fruit of the study of balāgha, al-Dasūqī entertains but ultimately rejects the possibility for kalām to be another source for such fruit, remarking that Kalām “only aggregately” discusses iʿjāz and does so “by way of conformism and compliance”. Al-Dasūqī’s contention reflects centuries of polemics identifying why the linguistic purity of the Qurʾān overpowered the Arabs, concomitant to developing theological and rhetorical theories of discourse. To late theologians, balāgha, and not kalām, is the determining criteria for the locus of iʿjāz inexplicably embedded in the Qurʾānic text. Unveiling the objectives of al-Dasūqī’s disciplinary positioning of iʿjāz necessitates rewinding ten centuries prior to his time to identify when and how kalām was first involved in proving iʿjāz al-Qurʾān. As implied in the Qurʾān, iʿjāz can be acknowledged by merely hearing its speech: “and if any one of the polytheists seeks your protection, then grant him protection so that he may hear the words of Allah.” Safety, legally contingent on one’s belief in the Divine nature of “the words of Allah,” is attained by simply “hearing” such words. Hence, hearing the text is sufficient for an Arab “polytheist” to conclude that the Qurʾān is miraculous and, therefore, the claimant of prophecy is truthful. However, the aesthetics and rhetoric of the text have not been a focus of Qurʾānic studies in Western scholarship. Instead, the issue of iʿjāz is merely treated as part of “the historical perspective of growing Islamic theology or in the dialectical experience of developing Muslim community.” While this remark is relatively old, its truth is unlikely to be outdated. Early Muslim theologians formed different theories to conceptualize the miraculous nature of the Qurʾān. Some sought to distinguish the Qurʾān’s eloquence from that of poetry, which represented “the loftiest example of humanly produced eloquence”, while others grappled with the subjectivity of tasting the rhetorical flair. The formidable task of comprehensively understanding Qurʾānic literary aesthetics provoked others to consider whether God incapacitated the pre-Islam Arabs from emulating the Qurʾān. Focusing on early competing theological and rhetorical engagement with iʿjāz, this paper seeks to: I) trace the 9th-10th century definitional development of the terms inimitability (iʿjāz) and incapacity (ʿajz), in relation to the keywords of sign (āyah), miracle (muʿjizah), challenge (taḥaddī), and counter-response (muʿāraḍah), and II) lay out the theological framework triggering the Muʿtazili doctrine of ṣarfah which obfuscated these terms’ connotations and the disciplinary locus of iʿjāz al-Qurān discourse.