In medieval Arabo-Islamic culture, as with pre-Enlightenment Europe, literary theory and religious discourse are never far apart. Take for instance the miraculous nature (iʿjāz) of the Qurʾān, a concept that galvanized discussion in fields like scriptural hermeneutics, grammar and poetics. In fact an entire branch of literary theory — ʿilm al-maʿānī, roughly “the semantics of syntax”— owes its existence to theorizing about Qurʾānic iʿjāz. Yet while scholars have long acknowledged how theological debates affect medieval Arabic literary theory, they sometimes overlook the other side: how rhetoric and poetics move debates forward in religious circles. As an example, we still have no study of the relationship between Qurʾānic exegesis (tafsīr) and literary commentary (sharḥ) seen in the 11th-century author al-Wāḥidī, who famously glossed both the Qurʾān and the collected verse of the praise poet al-Mutanabbī. By the Mamluk era (ca. 1250-1517 AD) of Arabic literature, the two discourses feed off each other interchangeably, making the lack of studies about literary influences on religious discourse a compelling need for academic study. My paper intervenes at this gap in scholarship. Specifically, I am curious about how a group of 10th- and 11th-century Sunni Muslim theologians rely on practical literary criticism (naqd al-shiʿr) to talk about emulation (muʿāraḍa) of the Qurʾān, within broader discussions of the Qurʾān's miraculous nature. To tackle this question, I start by surveying works of practical criticism - i.e. close analysis of literary texts, as opposed to abstract theory - from early literary scholars like Qudāma ibn Jaʿfar, Ibn Rashīq, al-Āmidī, and al-Marzubānī, to see how they talk about emulation (muʿāraḍa) in poetry. Then I turn to four 10th- and 11th-century Sunni theologians writing about Qurʾānic iʿjāz: al-Khaṭṭābī, al-Rummānī, al-Bāqillānī, and ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī. All of them use practical criticism to argue that it is impossible to emulate (yuʿāriḍu) the Qurʾān, citing examples of poetry and analyzing them to prove their point. What I find is that the literary theorists want to actually weigh the artistic merits of any given poet, even if only to support their own idiosyncratic tastes. This is different from the theologians, who use practical criticism to show the futility of weighing merits when it comes to the Qurʾān. In this sense, practical criticism itself becomes a useless enterprise, which ironically serves a quite useful purpose in helping advance religious discourse and its cultural authority.