is then one of the most ignorant and unjust of mankind, utterly incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, honesty from lying, and good from evil. Such a person is like someone who cannot tell a genuine prophet from a false claimant—an extreme degree of ignorance. If he is confused about another’s state, how much worse is it when he is confused about his own and does not even know whether what he utters is truth or lies?

Now, whoever remains ignorant while making so tremendous a claim—one that no human being has ever put forward—and who, at the same time, relates a multitude of unseen matters of past and future, issues wide-ranging commands and prohibitions, and lays down comprehensive norms, universal practices, laws, and ordinances, must inevitably contain within all of this some misguidance and error that would soon become evident to most people. Yet if his reports of past and future events corroborate one another, the path he enjoins is the straightest course, and the scripture he brings is a self-consistent, oft-repeated Book whose parts resemble and reinforce one another in truthfulness, then—

He, exalted, has said:

“Will they not then reflect upon the Quran? Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would surely have found in it much inconsistency.” (al-Nisāʾ 4:82)