No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

  CHAPTER 38

  THE RESPONSE

  IN WHAT WAY IS THAT MIRACULOUS?

  When I began my investigation of the Quran, I was more than convinced that it was the Word of Allah, but I needed to be able to show that an objective investigator would also find the case convincing.

  That is where the case started crumbling.

  THE LITERARY EXCELLENCE OF THE QURAN: A FLAWED TEST

  One of the first things that became apparent was that the Quran’s own defense of its inspiration—the challenge to write a revelation like it—is virtually impossible to assess.

  I vividly remember Mike Licona’s response when I told him of the Quran’s challenge. “I’ve seen better writing than the Quran,” he responded nonchalantly. “Have you ever read Psalm 23?” Shocked at his brazen assertion, I retorted that Psalm 23 was not of the caliber of the Quran, but he simply disagreed with me, saying it was one of the most powerful passages ever composed, more moving than anything he had read in the Quran.

  That is when I took a step back and reassessed the test. What is it really asking? I began to think that it must be the Arabic of the Quran that was inimitable, not the English translation or interpretations. But did that mean that this test was limited to Arabic speakers?

  That could not be the case either. People who had specifically set out to respond to the Quran’s challenge had already composed a book of Christian teachings in Arabic called the Furqan al-Haqq, “The True Discernment.” They included many teachings of the Psalms in this Arabic book, writing them in the style of the Quran. Their results were so convincing that they read the text aloud, chanting it in Quranic style, in the middle of Arab Muslim cities. Many who passed would hear the recitation and, confusing it for the Quran, thank the readers for reciting it. Clearly, then, the test did not work for Arabic speakers either, not even Arab Muslims.

  Researching the issue online, I found Muslim apologists arguing that the Arabs who had mistaken the Furqan al-Haqq were probably unlearned, so they had not grasped the lofty beauty of the Quran. An expert in Arabic would find the text of the Quran inimitable.

  It was then that I found the assessment of a scholar, Gerd Puin, whose expertise is on the Arabic orthography of the Quran. Puin argued that “every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense.”1 Preemptively defending his assertion, Puin adds, “Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.”2 To this, Muslim apologists responded that Gerd Puin was not a native Arabic speaker; the Quran needed to be assessed by an expert in Arabic who is himself an Arab and has grown up speaking Arabic.

  With every step, it seemed that the test was being redefined to somehow protect it from scrutiny, but this leads us to ask the question: In what way is this challenge pertinent to us? If it is only for Arabic speakers, it serves no proof for the vast majority of people in the world today; if people have to be experts in classical Arabic, then it is relevant only to a very small number of people in human history.

  Of course, all this is apart from the subjectivity of the test and its ultimately non-sequitur nature: Who is to say whether one composition is more excellent than another? By what measure? The Quran certainly does not set the parameters the apologists do. And even if it were ascertained that the Quran is the best writing mankind has ever seen, that does not mean it is inspired. Stradivarius, a man who lived from the mid-1600s to the 1700s, is reputed to have made the most acoustically perfect violins the world has ever heard; not even with our modern technology have we been able to reproduce their perfection.3 Were he to have said that his violins were made by God and offered their matchless quality as evidence, we would have thought him a lunatic or a liar. In what way does an excellent product prove divine origin?

  For these reasons, the literary excellence of the Quran is a flawed test, and as I found with Mike, it is unconvincing to non-Muslims—the very people for whom it is intended. An objective investigator would not be convinced.

  THE PROPHECIES OF THE QURAN: NOT REALLY PROPHECIES

  When we consider the prophecies of the Quran carefully, we conclude there are virtually none to even test. As an example, let us consider the claim that 41.20 is a prophecy about fingerprints. The full context of the verse reads, “And (make mention of) the day when the enemies of Allah are gathered unto the Fire, they are driven on till, when they reach it, their ears and their eyes and their skins testify against them as to what they used to do. And they say unto their skins: Why testify ye against us? They say: Allah hath given us speech, Who giveth speech to all things” (41.19–21).

  By reading the context we find that the Quran is actually speaking about the day of judgment, that skin will speak with a voice, along with eyes and ears. It is not a prophecy of something that will happen on earth but an apocalyptic description of judgment. Only by wrenching this verse from its context and forcing a contrived meaning upon it can this verse be made to sound like a prophecy for our time.

  Of course, we can do this with just about any text if we try hard enough, and it is easier with apocalyptic texts such as this one. For example, I have just now opened the Bible to a random section of the book of Revelation, and my finger landed on 11:8, which says, “Their bodies will lie in the public square of the great city—which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt.” I can argue that this was a miraculous prophecy of the Arab Spring that describes the aftermath of the Tahrir Square demonstrations that took place in January 2011, leading to over eight hundred people killed. Moreover, the city of Cairo, where Tahrir Square is located, is often referred to figuratively as Egypt in the Arabic language (Misr). Thus, eight hundred bodies laid in Tahrir Square, a public square in the great city that is figuratively called Egypt. Revelation 11:8 prophesies the event with extreme precision almost two thousand years ahead of time.

  Of course, that is not what the text is prophesying, and I have just made all this up on the spot, but I could make the case appear convincing if I really wanted to, especially if I take the verse out of context. This is exactly what we see with the vast majority of so-called prophecies in the Quran. There is no reason to think the Quran is making any of these so-called prophecies. That is not to say there may not be hidden prophetic meaning in the text of the Quran, but in order to be a prophecy that convinces an objective investigator, it needs to meet the minimum criterion that it is obviously a prophecy, not text that can be turned into one.

  For example, the passage about the Roman victory in 30.2–4 actually does appear to be a prophecy, the clearest example of a prophecy in the Quran, so it is worth considering more carefully. There are two minor problems with considering this a fulfilled prophecy, and two major problems. Briefly, the first minor problem is the nature of the prophecy; it is not much of a prediction. Given the ongoing nature of the Byzantine-Persian conflicts at the time, there was bound to be a Byzantine victory at some point. It is almost like saying, “The Chicago Bulls have just lost to the LA Lakers, but the Bulls will be ultimately victorious.”4

  The second minor problem is the number of years it took for the Byzantines to be victorious; the verse of the Quran uses a word that implies ten years or less, but it took seventeen years for the Romans to ultimately defeat the Byzantines.

  There are two much more significant problems with using this as prophetic fulfillment. First, Quranic verses were regularly abrogated, and the Byzantine victory came during Muhammad’s lifetime. Had it looked as if it were not going to happen, the text could easily have been abrogated.5

  Second, and along the same vein, the Quran was not collected in a book until even later. Had this prophecy failed, it could have been left out of the final collection of the text, as other verses had.6

  So this example of a Quranic prophecy, the best that the text has to offer, is not convincing. It is essentially a 50/50 prediction that could have easily been taken back, and if we consider the text literally, it appears that it did not come true any
way, as the Byzantines did not defeat the Persians until after the prophesied time had elapsed.

  THE MIRACULOUS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE: CONSIDERING TEXT AND CONTEXT

  While considering the prophethood of Muhammad, we already saw that the Quran contains scientific inaccuracies—such as the setting of the sun in water and the production of sperm between the backbone and the ribs—which are enough to cause serious doubt that the Quran is scientifically miraculous. As before, simply investigating the text and the context of such supposed miraculous knowledge is usually enough to conclude that this is not a convincing argument.

  That rule of thumb turns out to be true here as well. Looking again at 21.30 of the Quran, the text actually reads, “Have not those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the earth were of one piece, then We parted them.” It does not say that the universe was a singularity, but rather that the heavens and earth were joined and God separated them. This is actually just an approximation of what God was doing in Genesis 1:6—nothing new or specific to the Quran. Similarly, the notion that all living creatures are made of water is not that difficult to postulate, as humans and animals all drink water, and very little survives in the desert where there is not much water. Finally, it might be worth knowing that the Quran frequently asserts that jinn were made from fire, not water, and some would consider this a contradiction within the Quran.7

  So these examples, as before, are shown to be far from convincing when we consider the actual text of the verse, the historical context of the science claims, and the accuracy of what the Quran asserts. There is no miraculous scientific knowledge in the Quran.

  MATHEMATICAL MARVELS: IN WHAT WAY ARE THEY SPECIAL?

  Although many Muslims find the argument from mathematical patterns compelling, I honestly never did. All sorts of amazing patterns can be found in the world around us if we simply look for them. This is true of the natural world, as anyone who has considered the golden ratio will attest, and it is true of manmade products as well. Searching for patterns in Moby Dick, for example, one can find predictions of the future, including the assassinations of Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Princess Diana.8 If you look hard enough, and if you can fudge the parameters, you will find patterns.

  And we know that the person who “discovered” the pattern of the number nineteen in the Quran was doing just that. Rashad Khalifa, the person who first published the pattern of the number nineteen, used about 250 pages to defend fifty-two different ways that the number nineteen was found in the text of the Quran. According to a popular Muslim scholar, Bilal Philips, “Most Muslims readily and unquestioningly accepted Khalifa’s claims as they had the aura of ‘scientific fact’ about them.” But some Muslims emphatically decried the argument from the number nineteen, pointing out the great flaws in Khalifa’s arguments and reasoning. Philips himself penned an entire treatise against it, called “The Qur’an’s Numerical Miracle.”9

  In it, Philips says, “The Theory of Nineteen is a shoddily concocted hoax unable to withstand serious scientific scrutiny.”10 Part of Philips’s response to Khalifa pertains to the Quranic verse Khalifa quotes, 74.30–31. Reading the full text in this case clarifies that the number nineteen refers to the number of angels who are wardens over the hellfire, not at all to miraculous patterns in the text of the Quran. As we have seen others do with Quranic “prophecies,” Khalifa simply wrenched the words out of their context and tried to fit them to his theory.

  Another part of Philips’s response relates to the inconsistent method and arbitrary selections required to argue for the number nineteen. “By Using Dr. Khalifa’s inconsistent method of concocting multiples,” argues Philips, “it is also possible to establish 8 as the axis of the Qur’an’s miraculous numerical code,” and he goes on to give eight reasons why.

  The majority of Philips’ response to Khalifa’s argument, though, is systematically analyzing Khalifa’s publications and calculations, concluding that Khalifa had “fabricated data in order to artificially create letter totals which are multiples of nineteen.” Not only does Khalifa inconsistently count letters and verses, following “a haphazard system of word identification that totally contradicts both classical and modern rules of Arabic grammar,” but also he is willing to go as far as discarding two verses from the Quran in order to make his calculations work. Philips’s arguments against the “miraculous pattern” are convincing, as is his conclusion that Khalifa was willing to tamper with the Quranic text simply to make the data fit.

  In a similar way, the arguments of marvelous numerical parallels appear to treat the text inconsistently and tamper with the wording. The Quran does not use the word day 365 times, for example. It uses it 360 times, and to make the other five work, proponents of the argument have to fudge the data, allowing words to count that are not exactly the word day. The same is true for the number of times month is used, and the supposedly parallel occurrences of man/woman and this world/hereafter. Since Arabic is a Semitic language and uses a triliteral root system for its words, different words are very similar to one another in spelling, and this is often used to the advantage of those who would be willing to “massage the data” to make their argument work.

  To summarize our response to the argument from marvelous mathematical patterns, I will quote Philips’s final words: “It may be concluded that the theory of nineteen as a miraculous numerical code for the Qur’an has no basis in the Qur’an itself and the few instances where nineteen and its multiples do occur are merely coincidences which have been blown out of proportion.”11 The same can be said for all the mathematical marvels found in the Quran.

  PERFECT PRESERVATION OF THE QURANIC TEXT: IN WHAT WAY HAS IT BEEN PERFECTLY PRESERVED?

  Finally, though we had firm faith in the perfect preservation of the Quran, the fact is that it is impossible to prove. When Uthman produced an official, edited copy of the Quran and destroyed all the other copies, he left future historians no means to determine whether today’s Quran actually goes back to Muhammad.12 Uthman destroyed all the evidence, and it appears he did so precisely because there were variants.13

  Despite the fact that perfect preservation cannot be proven, it can be disproven to a significant degree. In the first place, the Quranic text was not always written but sometimes just known by memory. It was for this reason that Umar convinced Abu Bakr to collect a copy of the Quran in the first place. Many Qurra (reciters of the Quran) were dying on battlefields, and Umar said, “I am afraid that more heavy casualties may take place among the Qurra’ on other battlefields, whereby a large part of the Qur’an may be lost.”14 If the Quran had been written, why would he fear its loss by the death of its reciters?

  The fact is that portions of the Quran were not in writing, and it had to be collected from people’s memories. This is said explicitly in Sahih Bukhari: The Quran was collected from “palmed stalks, thin white stones and also from the men who knew it by heart.” The same hadith tells us that at least two verses were known by only one person: “I started searching for the Qur’an till I found the last two Verses of Surat at-Tauba with Abi Khuza’ima Al-Ansari and I could not find these Verses with anybody other than him.”15 In other words, two verses of the Quran have been included on the testimony of just one individual.16 Had he not remembered those verses, they would have been lost, and we would all have been none the wiser.

  Sahih Bukhari mentions that a verse was missed the first time the Quran was written, and it had to be found later: “A verse from Surat Ahzab was missed by me when we copied the Qur’an and I used to hear Allah’s Messenger reciting it. So we searched for it and found it with Khuza’ima bin Thabit Al-Ansari.”17 It appears that verses kept being forgotten and lost, just barely being recovered.

  Muhammad himself used to say that Muslims tended to forget Quranic verses very easily. “Keep on reciting the Qur’an because it escapes from the hearts of men faster than camel do.”18 He was not exaggerating, as even he forgot verses of the Quran.
Upon hearing a man reciting the Quran at night he said, “May Allah bestow His Mercy on him, as he has reminded me of verses which I forgot.”19

  If, according to the most trustworthy traditions, parts of the Quran were known by only one person, and other parts were missed, and indeed Muslims forgot verses, could it not be that some parts of the Quran were left out altogether? Can we really say such a precarious text has been perfectly preserved?

  Unfortunately, we cannot. Sahih Bukhari puts the nail in the coffin by recording this hadith: “Umar said, ‘Ubay was the best of us in the recitation of the Qur’an yet we leave out some of what he recites.’ Ubay says, ‘I have taken it from the mouth of Allah’s Messenger and will not leave it out for anything whatever.’ ”20 So the very best reciter of the Quran was adamant that verses of the Quran have been left out.21 Muhammad himself chose Ubay as one of the best teachers of the Quran,22 and yet he disagreed with today’s Quran.

  To summarize, not only is there no way to prove that the Quran has been perfectly preserved, but it appears to have been disproved: Portions are missing, and one of the greatest teachers of the Quran, hand selected by Muhammad, disagreed with today’s edition of the Quran. There is much, much more to be said against the argument from perfect preservation, but we have confined ourselves to just that evidence present in Sahih Bukhari, and not even all of that.23

  Finally, as we saw in chapter 14, the text of the Quran was undergoing abrogation. Muhammad would cancel certain older verses and replace them with newer verses. The Quran itself testifies to this in 2.106 and 16.101. Muslims may be able to accept this phenomenon as a divine mandate, and they are well within their rights to do so, but to an objective investigator it strongly challenges the case of perfect preservation. Rather, the phenomenon of abrogation makes the text of the Quran appear very artificial and man-made.