that writhed, and that Allah parted the sea.

Whereupon the denierssaid:

“The thing that stands firm is called a ṭūr, for it is fixed like a mountain. Hearts are called ‘valleys,’ the disclosure of sciences by causing springs of knowledge to gush forth is called ‘splitting open,’ and a decisive proof that swallows up the discourse of the people of falsehood is a ‘metaphorical staff.’ Thus, what the scriptures intend by the ṭūr is the Active Intellect from which knowledge overflowed onto Moses’ heart, peace be upon him; the valley is Moses’ heart; the speech he heard he heard from the heaven of his own intellect; those sounds existed only within him, not outside; the angels he saw were luminous forms that arose in his psyche, not in the external world; the sea that was parted is the sea of knowledge; the staff was his argument—he prevailed over the magicians with his rational proof, and his proof swallowed their sophistries, which they had fashioned into ‘ropes’ by which to reach their objectives and into ‘sticks’ by which to overpower those who debated them.”

Is it not self-evident that anyone who says such things is, by necessity, known to be lying about the divine scriptures that relate the story of Moses—namely the Torah and the Qur’an—and that this was never what the messengers intended by their report of Moses’ story? Rather, they stated explicitly that Moses heard Allah’s call to him, that He spoke to him from the mountain—Mount Sinai, an actual mountain; that He turned his staff, with which he used to beat down leaves for his flock, into a mighty serpent; that He parted the sea for him and drowned Pharaoh’s people in it so they perished; and the like of these distortions concocted by the deniers are many indeed.

In the same manner the Christians distorted the books of Allah and called Allah’s eternal, pre-existent attribute