Answering Islam

Muslims grow up hearing that the Torah and the Gospel were corrupted, while the Qur’an reached us without a letter changed. The Qur’an itself says nothing of the kind. It treats the books Jews and Christians had in its own day as the word of God. It tells them to judge by those books, and tells Muhammad that if he is ever in doubt, he should ask the people who read them.

How did Muhammad treat the Torah?

Every Muslim agrees that no one understood the Qur’an better than Muhammad. So how did he treat the Torah the Jews actually had? Look at what happened when the Jews of Medina asked him to settle a case:

“They placed a cushion for the Messenger of Allah and he sat on it, then he said, ‘Bring me the Torah.’ It was brought. He withdrew the cushion from beneath him, placed the Torah on it and said, ‘I believed in you and in Him who revealed you.’”

Abu Dawud 4449 (al-Albani: hasan)

The book Muhammad placed on the cushion was not some ancient Torah lost over time. It was the copy in the hands of the Jews of Medina, and Muhammad touched it with his own hands.

In another hadith Muhammad says that knowledge will be taken away from his community. A companion objects: “We recite the Qur’an, and our women and children recite it too. How can knowledge be taken from us?” Muhammad answers: “Are not the Torah and the Gospel in the hands of the Jews and the Christians? What good has it done them?” (Tirmidhi 2653). In Muhammad’s eyes their problem was not that their books had been corrupted. Their books were in their hands, and still they had lost their way.

The first person to convince Muhammad that he was a prophet was Waraqa, Khadija’s Christian cousin. According to Bukhari, Waraqa used to write from the Gospel in Hebrew (Bukhari 3). The Gospel was right there, being read in Mecca.

The Qur’an even quotes a parable from the Gospel: the likeness of Muhammad’s companions “in the Gospel is as a plant which produces its shoots and strengthens them, so they grow firm and stand upon their stalks” (Qur’an 48:29). This is Jesus’s parable of the seed that grows by itself, and it appears only in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 4:26-29). Many Muslim translations also point the reader to Mark in their footnote to this verse. So the book the Qur’an calls “the Gospel” is the Gospel we read today.

This is the dilemma, and there is no way out of it:

• If the Torah and the Gospel are God’s preserved word, as the Qur’an claims, then the Qur’an is wrong, because the Qur’an rejects the most basic teachings of these books: it does not accept that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died on the cross and rose again, or that the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
• If the Torah and the Gospel were corrupted, the Qur’an is still wrong. In that case it has vouched for corrupted books as the word of God, even though it says itself that no one can change God’s words.

David Wood and Sam Shamoun made this dilemma famous, and today it is the question Muslim apologists dread most. In a debate held for young people who doubt their religion, one Muslim apologist asked openly: “Do you think the imam at your local mosque can answer the Islamic dilemma?” He can’t, because the answer is not in the Qur’an.

The Qur’an’s own test

The Qur’an sets a clear rule for telling whether a prophet is genuine (Qur’an 3:81). By this rule, a newly arrived prophet counts as genuine only if he confirms the books that came before him. If someone comes who contradicts the earlier books, then by the Qur’an’s own rule he is not a true prophet.

The Qur’an also says that Jews and Christians will find Muhammad written in the Torah and the Gospel in their own hands (Qur’an 7:157). So to confirm Muhammad, the Qur’an names the earlier books themselves as the judge. Some commentators explain “those who have been reading the Book” in Qur’an 10:94 as Jews and Christians who had become Muslims, but the result is the same, because the source they were reading was still the same Torah and Gospel.

Let’s run the test:

• The New Testament clearly says that Jesus died on the cross and rose again (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).
• The Qur’an, however, claims that Jesus was never killed and never crucified (Qur’an 4:157).

The result is plain: by the very test the Qur’an sets, Muhammad fails. And we are doing exactly what the Qur’an commands: as people who believe in the Gospel, we make our judgments by looking to the Gospel (Qur’an 5:47).

Escape routes

For years Muslim apologists have tried one way out after another. The debates always look the same: the Christian reads out what Allah and the prophet actually said, and the Muslim retreats to commentators who lived centuries later. David Wood sums this up as a contest between “Team Allah” and “Team Defense”.

Here they are, one by one:

1. “It was corrupted after Muhammad”

The most common claim is this: the Torah and the Gospel were intact in Muhammad’s time and were corrupted afterwards. That doesn’t get them out of the corner; it backs them further into it. We have manuscripts from centuries before Muhammad’s birth: the Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd century BC to 1st century AD), the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament (3rd to 1st centuries BC), and the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, which contain the whole Bible (4th century). Muhammad was born in 570. So the texts he confirmed in his own day are exactly the same as the books we hold today.

Then there’s simple logic. Jews and Christians were rivals for centuries, scattered across different countries. How would they have rewritten the same text together? If one side had tampered with it, the other would have said so at once. And the Hebrew text both groups use today is the same. Of course the manuscripts have small differences of spelling and copying; but none of them creates an alternative Jesus who did not die on the cross, did not rise, or was not the Son of God. Islam’s claim needs a massive rewrite of the core beliefs, and not one manuscript shows a trace of it.

2. “Muhammad picked and chose”

Some Muslim apologists argue that the Qur’an confirms not the whole Gospel but only the parts that suit it. The Qur’an itself answers this claim directly: “Do you believe in part of the Book and disbelieve in part? What is the recompense of those among you who do that, but disgrace in the life of this world, and on the Day of Resurrection being sent to the severest punishment?” (Qur’an 2:85). The Qur’an also tells Muslims plainly to make no distinction between the revelations (Qur’an 3:84).

And think about it: any cult leader could say “I confirm your scriptures, but only the parts I like.” The Qur’an’s main argument to Jews and Christians is that it confirms the books they hold. A confirmation that picks and chooses proves nothing.

3. “The Qur’an’s Torah is not your Torah”

The escape route most often used lately is this: the Torah and the Gospel that the Qur’an confirms are the original books Allah sent down to Moses and Jesus, and they have nothing to do with the ones we have today. One Muslim apologist took this idea all the way in his debate with David Wood. According to him, the Torah of Moses was lost, sent down again to Jesus, lost again together with the Gospel, turned up in seventh-century Medina, was confirmed by Muhammad, and then vanished once more without a trace. There is not a single manuscript, translation or quotation of these books. That isn’t history. It’s “trust me”.

This escape also demolishes Islam’s own evidence. The Qur’an gives Jews and Christians two great proofs for believing in Muhammad: Muhammad confirms their books, and their books foretell Muhammad (Qur’an 7:157; 2:146). If the books are nowhere to be found, both proofs collapse.

The Qur’an also promises that Allah will keep the followers of Jesus on top until the Day of Resurrection (Qur’an 3:55), and says that this promise was fulfilled: “We supported those who believed against their enemy, and they became dominant” (Qur’an 61:14). The Christians who prevailed in history are the Church that holds today’s Gospel. If Jesus’s true book remained in no Christian’s hands, then Allah failed to keep His promise.

4. “Allah’s words” only means His promises

Some argue that the verses “none can change the words of Allah” (Qur’an 6:34; 6:115) mean not the written books but only Allah’s promises. But Qur’an 18:27 uses the same words about the book itself: “Recite what has been revealed to you of the Book of your Lord; there is none who can change His words.”

And even if it did mean promises, it wouldn’t help. Allah says He sent down the Torah and the Gospel “as guidance for mankind” (Qur’an 3:4). If these books were completely corrupted and lost, then that promise of guidance was not kept either.

5. “The Qur’an says the text was corrupted”

This one is a simple misreading. The Qur’an never says the text of the Torah and the Gospel was corrupted. It says people twisted what the text meant.

The very verses quoted for the claim show it:

• Twisting words: Qur’an 4:46 says some Jews shifted the meaning of words. But right after it, Qur’an 4:47 calls on them: “we confirm the book you have; believe in it.” So the problem is not in the book but in the tongues of those who read it. Qur’an 3:78 makes this plain: “They twist their tongues with the Book so that you may think it is from the Book.”
• Concealment and forgery: Qur’an 5:13-15 says certain things were hidden. Hiding something does not destroy the text. Qur’an 2:79 condemns forgers who sell what they themselves wrote as “from Allah”. Condemning forgers does not mean the true Torah is gone. And Qur’an 2:41 and 2:91 both repeat that the Qur’an confirms the book they hold.

The classical sources also confirm that the text was not corrupted:

• Bukhari’s view: Bukhari (Sahih, Book of Tawhid) writes that no one can remove even a single word from Allah’s book, and that distortion means only misinterpreting the text.
• The Ibn Abbas contradiction: Ibn Abbas says, “The Jews and Christians changed their books; why do you ask them anything?” (Bukhari 7363). But this saying contradicts Allah’s command. Allah tells Muhammad, “If you are in doubt, ask those who have been reading the Book before you” (Qur’an 10:94). A companion’s word cannot override Allah’s verse.

The claim that the text was changed wholesale is not in the Qur’an. Those who turned this claim into doctrine were Ibn Hazm in the 11th century and Ibn Taymiyya in the 14th. So what’s being defended isn’t the Qur’an; it’s a theory from centuries later.

6. “Jesus and the Qur’an both abrogated laws”

This claim confuses “abrogating a law” with “corrupting a book”.

Abrogating a law does not corrupt the text: According to the Qur’an, Jesus confirmed the Torah while lifting some old prohibitions (Qur’an 3:50). The Qur’an too says it later changed the ruling of some of its own verses. But renewing a rule does not show that the old book was fabricated or corrupted. For Muslims, after all, even a Qur’anic verse whose ruling was abrogated is still God’s holy word.

The real point of the dilemma: The dilemma does not claim that Muslims must follow the rules of the Torah and the Gospel. The real issue is this: the Qur’an confirms these books as God’s unchangeable word. That a rule changes with the times does not mean the confirmed book was corrupted.

Millions of Muslims rest their faith on one claim: that the Qur’an has come down from Muhammad to today without a single letter or dot changed. Islam’s own sources contradict that claim seven different ways.

1. Aisha’s lost verse

In Muslim’s authentic hadith collection, Muhammad’s wife Aisha says:

“It had been sent down in the Qur’an that ten clear sucklings make marriage unlawful. Then this was replaced by five clear sucklings. When the Messenger of Allah died, it was among what was recited of the Qur’an.”

Muslim 1452a

Aisha says it plainly: when Muhammad died, this verse was part of the Qur’an and was being recited. Yet today it is in no Qur’an, no mosque, no manuscript. So Aisha’s Qur’an was different from today’s. The Muslim has two options: either Aisha, “the mother of the believers”, was wrong, or the Qur’an was not preserved letter for letter. There is no third option.

So where did this verse go? Aisha answers that too, in a report in Ibn Majah: “The verse of stoning and the verse of breastfeeding an adult ten times were revealed. The page they were written on was under my pillow. When the Messenger of Allah died, we were busy with him, and a domestic animal of the house (a sheep or goat) came in and ate the page” (Ibn Majah 1944).

And this business of suckling isn’t a minor detail. In another report in Muslim, a woman named Sahla said her husband was uneasy about the grown man Salim coming in and out of their home. Muhammad told her, “Suckle him.” When she asked, “He is a grown man; how can I suckle him?”, Muhammad smiled and replied, “I know that he is a grown man” (Muslim 1453a). This is in the core sources of a religion that calls itself God’s final, flawless revelation. Judge for yourself.

2. The forgotten surah

Abu Musa al-Ash’ari, one of Muhammad’s close companions, told the Qur’an reciters of Basra: “We used to recite a surah as long and as severe in its words as Surat al-Tawba. I have forgotten it; I remember only this part of it: ‘If the son of Adam had two valleys full of wealth, he would want a third…’” (Muslim 1050). That sentence is not in today’s Qur’an. A surah as long as al-Tawba vanished from the memories of those who had learned it by heart.

3. Different surahs: Umar and Hisham

Umar heard Hisham reciting Surat al-Furqan differently from the way he had been taught it. He barely held himself back until the prayer was over. Then he seized Hisham by the collar and took him to Muhammad. Muhammad had both of them recite the surah and said to each, “It was revealed like this.” Then he said the Qur’an was revealed in “seven letters” (Bukhari 4992). Both men were from the same tribe; so the issue was not dialect, but the very words being recited. Muslim scholars have offered dozens of explanations and still don’t agree on what the “seven letters” are.

4. The compilation: verses left with a single man

When Muhammad died, the Qur’an was not a single text gathered into a book. When many of those who knew the Qur’an by heart died at the Battle of Yamama, Umar grew worried and put to Abu Bakr the idea of collecting the Qur’an. Abu Bakr at first objected, “How can we do something the Prophet did not do?”, but in the end he gave the task to Zayd ibn Thabit.

Zayd gathered the pieces of the Qur’an from palm stalks, flat stones and people’s memories. But he could find the last verses of Surat al-Tawba (9:128-129) with only one man, Abu Khuzayma (Bukhari 4986). A verse of Surat al-Ahzab, too, was held by only one man, Khuzayma ibn Thabit (Bukhari 2807). Normally two witnesses were required to record a verse. Khuzayma was accepted as a lone witness because in his lifetime Muhammad had counted Khuzayma’s word as equal to the word of two men.

So the word of God, supposedly preserved word for word, depended on the memories of men killed in battle, and in places on one man.

5. The burned Qur’ans

About twenty years after Muhammad’s death, the caliph Uthman noticed that people were reciting the Qur’an in different ways. He had a single master text prepared and sent it to the cities. Then he ordered every other Qur’anic text in people’s hands, whether a single page or a whole book, to be burned (Bukhari 4987).

If the copies were all the same, why burn them? Because they weren’t. Uthman picked one and burned the rest. That isn’t divine preservation; it’s the state imposing one text.

6. Different texts, different meanings

The most widely printed Qur’an in the world today is the Hafs text, standardized in Cairo in 1924 (the Hafs transmission of Asim’s reading). But in Morocco, Algeria and West Africa, the Warsh text is read. There are others too, such as Qalun, Duri and Khalaf. These are not translations; they are all Arabic, and they differ from one another in letters, words and even meaning.

An example: in the Hafs text, Qur’an 37:12 reads, “No, you wonder, while they mock”; so here the one who wonders is Muhammad. In the readings of Hamza, al-Kisa’i and Khalaf, the same verse reads, “No, I wonder”; in that case the one who wonders is God Himself. Since Muhammad and God are not the same being, who actually wondered? Two different meanings mean two different Qur’ans.

On a YouTube live stream, Avery Austin (GodLogic Apologetics) showed a Moroccan Muslim two different Qur’an texts side by side. Pointing to the Hafs text, the most widely used in the world today, the Moroccan said, “This is not the correct Qur’an.” If there were only one Qur’an, a Muslim would not need to choose between versions of his own book.

7. The manuscripts

In 1972, during restoration work at the Great Mosque of Sanaa in Yemen, one of the oldest known fragments of the Qur’an was found. It is a palimpsest, a parchment that was scraped clean and written over. Under the visible text lies an older, erased Qur’an text, and that lower text has words and phrases that differ from today’s Qur’an. So the same parchment page holds two different Qur’an texts.

The Birmingham manuscript, which Muslim apologists so often cite as proof, consists of only two leaves. From a fragment of just two leaves, no one can claim that an entire book was preserved without a single letter changing.

How was the Bible preserved?

Now the Bible. No caliph ever gathered up every copy and burned all but one. From the first centuries on, thousands of copies in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and Armenian were reproduced by communities in different regions.

That is why no one was ever able to change the text on their own. Even if a scribe miswrote a word, the thousands of copies in other regions exposed the error at once. With the Qur’an, however, because the other texts were burned on Uthman’s orders, traces of different readings can only be sought inside the one text he chose.

The test in reverse

Faced with the evidence, many Muslims now say: “There may be differences in the details, but the main message was preserved.”

Yet this is exactly what Christians have always said about the Bible: the manuscripts may have small scribal errors or differences, but the main message, the truth of who God is and what Christ has done, has been preserved in full.

Once a Muslim says that, he can no longer call the Bible “corrupted”. Same standard, both books.

“Produce something like it”: the verses of Umar

The Qur’an counts being a unique text as proof that it came from God, and issues this challenge: produce a surah like it (Qur’an 2:23; 10:38), produce ten surahs (Qur’an 11:13), produce the like of this Qur’an (Qur’an 17:88), “let them produce a statement like it” (Qur’an 52:34). The bar is low: one sentence would do.

Now open Bukhari, the most trusted book in Islam after the Qur’an. Umar, Muhammad’s closest friend and the second caliph, says:

“My Lord agreed with me in three things. I said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, I wish we took the station of Abraham as a place of prayer’, and the verse came down: ‘Take the station of Abraham as a place of prayer.’ I said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, good and bad people come in to your wives; I wish you would order them to veil themselves’, and the verse of the veil came down. When the Prophet’s wives banded together against him out of jealousy, I said to them, ‘It may be that if he divorces you, his Lord will give him in your place wives better than you’, and this verse came down in exactly those words.”

Bukhari 402

These three verses are Qur’an 2:125, 33:53 and 66:5. Umar said it first, and then the Qur’an repeated the same words. Inside a book that says “you cannot produce the like of it”, the words of an ordinary man became verses.

Faced with this, a Muslim is left with only two options:

• Umar was a prophet and received revelation: But according to the Qur’an, Muhammad is the last of the prophets (Qur’an 33:40). Muhammad himself says, “There is no prophet between me and Jesus” (Bukhari 3442).
• Umar was not a prophet: Then some verses in the Qur’an are human words, and the book’s great challenge collapses.

“But the Arabic isn’t word for word the same” doesn’t help. The challenge was to produce something like it, not an exact copy. Umar did, three times, while Muhammad was alive.

It didn’t know the book it confirmed

Behind the dilemma lies a very simple fact: the Qur’an confirms the Torah and the Gospel, but it does not know what is written in them.

• Muhammad’s name: The Qur’an claims that Jews and Christians find Muhammad “written in the Torah and the Gospel they have” (Qur’an 7:157). It even says that Jesus announced “a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad” (Qur’an 61:6). Yet no such name appears in either the Torah or the Gospel.
• The promise of jihad: According to the Qur’an, God has promised Paradise to the believers who fight, kill and are killed in the cause of Allah, and this promise is written in the Torah, the Gospel and the Qur’an (Qur’an 9:111). There is no such promise of war in the Gospel. On the contrary, in Matthew 5:39 Jesus says, “But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Elsewhere He told His disciple who drew his sword, “Put your sword back into its place” (Matthew 26:52). The central theme of the New Testament is forgiveness and love (John 13:34).
• The claim of recognition: The Qur’an says that the followers of the Gospel know Muhammad “as they know their own children” (Qur’an 2:146; 26:197). This claim was repeated for years in Mecca. But when Muhammad went to Medina, the Jews there did not recognize him. So the Qur’an began accusing them of concealing the truth.

Muhammad and his companions could not read these books themselves. A report in Bukhari makes the situation clear: “The People of the Book used to read the Torah in Hebrew and explain it to the Muslims in Arabic. And Muhammad would say: ‘Neither believe them nor disbelieve them’” (Bukhari 4485). The Qur’an knew the Gospel by hearsay, not by reading it.

And what they heard included many folk legends that are not in the real Gospel:

• Clay birds: According to the Qur’an, Jesus makes birds out of clay, breathes on them, and the birds come to life (Qur’an 3:49). This story is not in the Gospel. It comes from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, written in the 2nd century and regarded by the Church as spurious (chapter 2).
• The palm tree: According to the Qur’an, while in labor pains Mary takes refuge at the foot of a palm tree; fresh dates fall from the tree and water flows beneath her (Qur’an 19:23-26). This account is not in the Gospel either. It is a legend from apocryphal texts such as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, where it originally belongs to the story of the flight into Egypt (chapter 20). The Qur’an took this legend and moved it to the moment of birth.
• A rabbi’s commentary: Right after the story of Cain and Abel, the Qur’an says: “Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel: whoever kills a person, it is as if he had killed all mankind; and whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved all mankind” (Qur’an 5:32). This sentence does not appear in the Torah. It is a comment the rabbis made on the story of Cain, and it is found in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5). The Qur’an passed off a rabbi’s commentary as God’s command.

Muhammad’s contemporaries noticed this too. The Qur’an quotes their words: “These are legends of the ancients; he has had them written down, and they are read to him morning and evening” (Qur’an 25:5). They even said of him, “He believes everything he hears” (Qur’an 9:61). The Qur’an denies it, but the sources are there for anyone to check: a prophet who had never read the book he confirmed told people, in God’s name, what was in it.

Scientific miracle, or muddy spring?

Muslim apologists claim to find many “scientific miracles” in the Qur’an, from the Big Bang to embryology. The argument: scientific truths in the Qur’an prove it came from God.

Fine. Then the same logic cuts the other way: one clear scientific error proves it didn’t. One is enough.

“Until, when he reached the setting place of the sun, he found it setting in a spring of black mud, and he found near it a people.”

Qur’an 18:86

The verse does not say “he saw it as if it were setting”; it says “he found it setting” (Qur’an 18:86). Dhul-Qarnayn reaches the place where the sun sets and meets a people living there. The Muslim apologists’ claim that “this was only his point of view” is refuted by Muhammad’s own words:

Abu Dharr said: I was behind the Messenger of Allah as the sun was setting. He asked: “Do you know where this sets?” I said: “Allah and His Messenger know best.” He said: “It sets in a spring of hot water.”

Abu Dawud 4002

Nobody asked him. Muhammad raised the question himself, and answered it: the sun sets in a spring. According to another hadith, in Bukhari, after setting the sun goes and prostrates beneath the Throne and asks permission to rise again (Bukhari 3199). That is not a point of view; it is a description of the cosmos. And that description is wrong.

“You don’t know Arabic”

The usual answer to criticism is: “You don’t know Arabic.”

If that were true, the hundreds of millions of Muslims who don’t read Arabic couldn’t understand their own religion either. The argument backfires on whoever uses it.

Besides, the Arabic of these verses is quite clear, and the meanings above are given by Islam’s greatest commentators themselves. Just as we look to the Hebrew and Greek sources when a translation question comes up about the Bible, for the Qur’an too we look to the Arabic text and to the Muslim scholars’ own commentaries.

The Qur’an is not enough on its own

The Qur’an presents itself as “a detailed explanation of all things” (Qur’an 12:111; 6:114; 16:89). But the five daily prayers are not in the Qur’an; they come from the hadith of the Night Journey (Bukhari 349). Qur’an 17:1 speaks of God, “who took His servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa”. But the Qur’an does not explain who this servant is or where these mosques are. Likewise, the return of Jesus, the Antichrist (Dajjal) and the signs of the Last Day are told not in the Qur’an, but in the hadith.

Which leaves a Muslim with a second dilemma:

• If he accepts the hadith: then Aisha’s age at marriage, the lost suckling verse, the suckling of a grown man, Umar’s words becoming verses and the sun setting in a hot spring also become part of his religion. A Sunni Muslim cannot reject authentic hadith; if he does, he is counted as rejecting the prophet’s Sunnah.
• If he rejects the hadith and takes refuge in the Qur’an alone: he must admit that the book that “explains everything in detail” does not even explain how to perform the daily prayers. On top of that, the Sunni majority counts him as having left the faith.

The Qur’an-only Muslims who reject the hadith are in fact noticing something true: the portrait of the prophet drawn in the hadith is deeply troubling. But those who drew this portrait are not Islam’s enemies; they are Islam’s first and most respected scholars.