to practice kindness, pardon those who wrong them, endure harm with patience, and turn away from worldly attachment; and he illustrated these virtues with parables. Thus, what chiefly sets the Gospel apart from the Torah is its praise of noble character, its commendation of voluntary renunciation, and its lifting of certain prohibitions. All of this, however, is also found in the Qur’an—and in the Qur’an it is presented in an even more perfect form. There is nothing of sound knowledge or righteous action contained in the Torah, the Gospel, or the other prophetic books that is not found in the Qur’an, or else something superior to it. Indeed, the Qur’an contains additional beneficial knowledge, righteous deeds, guidance, and the religion of truth that the two earlier scriptures do not contain. Yet the Christians followed neither the Torah nor the Gospel. Instead, they invented a law for which no prophet had been sent. For Constantine they composed the “Creed” (al-Amāna) and compiled for him forty books of statutes. These volumes include some of what the prophets had brought, but much that flatly contradicts their law. They adopted many practices of the idolaters who worshipped other gods alongside Allah and rejected His messengers, so that their religion came to contain elements of polytheism and alterations of the prophets’ teachings, thereby distorting the Gospel’s own legislation. Consequently, the majority of them can no longer distinguish the Gospel’s law from what was later introduced: they cannot distinguish what the Messiah abrogated from the Torah’s law from what he upheld, nor what he himself enacted and what was innovated after him. The Messiah never commanded them to fashion images and venerate them, nor to invoke those whose likenesses the statues bore, and none of the prophets ever enjoined such a thing.