this Quran, and that a mere mortal is the one instructing him. Concerning this, Allah the Exalted said:

“lisān alladhī yulḥidūna (The tongue of the one to whom they allude is foreign…)” (an-Nahl 103).

In other words, they ascribe this instruction to that man and credit it to him. Allah described their claim with the word ilḥād (deviation) because of the crookedness it contains.

He therefore declared that the tongue of the person they allege to be the Prophet’s teacher is non-Arab. They could not plausibly attribute such instruction to an Arab, so they fastened it to this foreigner, who would occasionally sit with the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him. Yet that foreigner was incapable of articulating this eloquent Arabic discourse; he was foreign, and Muhammad was in no way known to speak a foreign tongue. All that such a man—like the client of the Banu al-Hadrami—could grasp was a smattering of everyday Arabic words required for ordinary dealings: terms such as “bread,” “water,” “sky,” and “earth.” He could not even recite a single surah of the Quran.

Thus the Almighty exposed the manifest falsehood of their fabrication. None of them ever advanced a charge that might even resemble a plausible doubt—namely, that he had learned reports of the unseen from some scholar among the People of the Scripture or the like. Rather, they put forward an accusation whose falsity was obvious to everyone, and nothing has been transmitted from