Every doubt they advance in opposition to the Messenger, the moment it is subjected to sound scrutiny, melts away and dies, for “Indeed, falsehood is ever bound to perish” (al-Israʾ 81).

• In their brazenness they declared, “This Quran that Muhammad has brought is nothing but the legends of the ancients which he has had written down” (al-Furqan 5)—taken, they claimed, from the recorded annals of former peoples—“and they are dictated to him morning and evening” (5). Alas for them! Who, in the very heart of Mecca, is supposedly dictating such material to him? Were there, at that time, in Mecca or its surroundings, any books being read aloud at all? And even if—purely hypothetically—such a person existed, why would Muhammad alone be singled out to receive what he recites?

• Because that outrageous calumny was so transparently false, they grasped at another: “Muhammad sits with a blacksmith in Mecca, a Persian, and learns from him.” Concerning this Allah said: “We certainly know that they say, ‘It is only a human being who teaches him.’ The tongue of the one to whom they allude is foreign, whereas this Quran is in clear, manifest Arabic” (an-Nahl 103)—a speech that reaches the very summit of clarity and eloquence. Two opposites cannot be combined:
– that he should learn it from this inarticulate, non-Arab whose language is foreign, a man without any acknowledged learning or distinctive knowledge; and
– that the selfsame Quran, resplendent in its perfect eloquence, should encompass the knowledge of the earliest and the latest generations.

• When this assertion and the stubbornness that produced it—whose mendacity was evident to friend and foe alike—proved untenable, all enemies of the Messenger nonetheless continued to bequeath their enmity to those who came after them. These heirs persist in their hostility toward the Messenger and the religion, giving it full rein even when it drags them into outright lies, fabrication, and obstinate denial. Yet the later enemies have come to recognize the perversity of their own predecessors who directly belied the Messenger; they have witnessed their allegation crumble and disappear, and its falsehood stand exposed before everyone;