This paper analyzes Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013) approach to the issue of Qur’ānic inimitability as presented in his book entitled I‘jāz al-Qur’ān. Al-Bāqillānī is known as the foremost Mālikī jurist of his day and an Ash‘arī theologian who contributed to the major theological debates of the time. Given his stature, it is surprising that his work on Qur’ānic style has received limited attention. G.E. von Grunebaum translated a section of al-Bāqillānī’s treatise, I‘jāz al-Qur’ān, and penned a short introduction to it, however his work deals with only one part of al-Bāqillānī’s long and complex text. This paper amplifies our understanding of al-Bāqillānī’s contribution to the debate about the Qur’ān’s uniqueness by investigating neglected parts of his treatise and emphasizing his theological perspective. Through a fresh and more comprehensive analysis of the text, this paper seeks to contextualize al-Bāqillānī’s text and situate it more precisely in i‘jāz discussions. I also make use of al-Bāqillānī’s other treatises to contextualize his thought on i‘jāz al-Qur’ān, including al-Intiṣār li’l-Qur’ān [Victory Belongs to the Qur’ān] and al-Inṣāf fī-mā yajib al-i‘tiqād wa-lā yajūz al-jahl bihi [The Just Treatment of What It Is Necessary to Believe and Ignorance Is not Allowed]. Indeed, I argue that as a theologian rather than a literary critic, al-Bāqillānī draws the i‘jāz al-Qur’ān discourse away from the domain of the literary by rejecting the claim that the Qur’ān’s uniqueness can be captured in literary theoretical terms. In his treatise on the subject, al-Bāqillānī provides extensive literary analysis of classical Arabic poems in order to show the Qur’ān’s linguistic superiority in comparison to human-authored texts. He concludes, however, that although the Qur’ān is in ‘clear Arabic’ understandable to humans, it has a unique quality that cannot be described in terms of human-made categories such as particular literary devices and rhetorical figures. While such categories may be able to describe in technical terms what items are found in the Qur’ān, they cannot account for the miraculous inimitability of the text. In emphasizing the ineffable quality of the Qur’ān, al-Bāqillānī is making a theological point that inherently limits its applicability in the realm of literary analysis. This positions his treatise in contrast to those of some of his contemporaries who engage wholeheartedly in taxonomical interpretations of the Qur’ān’s literary devices. This paper argues for reading al-Bāqillānī’s treatise as an Ash‘ari response that focalizes the unfathomable Divine source of the text.