or by translating it for them. Had the message not first been made clear to his own people, the very purpose of the mission would have been thwarted—neither they nor anyone else would have gained its benefit. But once it is clarified to his people, the explanation reaches both them and others through their mediation. It was to his own people that he was sent at the outset; they were the first he invited and the first he warned. This in no way means that he was not also sent to others. Rather, once it is clear to his own people—because it is in their language—it thereafter becomes possible for those outside his community to know it, either by learning that language or by receiving it in a tongue they understand. Consider a man who pens a scholarly treatise on medicine, grammar, or arithmetic in his native language. Later that work is translated and transmitted into other tongues, and people of different nations benefit from it—just as medical and mathematical works originally composed in non-Arabic languages were translated, from which the Arabs profited and understood the authors’ intent, even though the writers had first authored them only in their own language. If this transfer is feasible in subjects that do not determine blessedness in the Hereafter or deliverance from Allah’s punishment, how could it be judged impossible for the sciences on which eternal happiness and salvation from torment hinge—that they be conveyed from one language to another until the speakers of the second tongue grasp what the first speaker originally intended? When the Muslim Persians took an interest in this matter, they produced numerous Quranic codices: they would write the Arabic text and place a Persian translation alongside it. Before Islam, they had been farther from the Muslims than the Byzantines and the Christians. If even the Magian Persians received the meanings of the Quran in Arabic together with its translation, how could those meanings fail to reach the People of the Book, who are nearer to the Muslims than they are? And most of the fundamental principles that