—claiming that the verse is speaking about the Christians—this is nothing but removing the words from their proper places and tampering with the speech of Allah, exactly as they have done with His statement, “Whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted from him” ⦗3:85⦘; with their gloss on the phrase “by My permission,” which they take to mean “by the divine nature”; and with His words, “Guide us to the straight path” ⦗1:6⦘, along with other passages they have cited and construed in a sense Allah never intended. All of this shows that they have treated the Torah and the Gospel in the same way. For if they can take the Quran—whose explanation and intended meaning, both general and specific, are well known, having been transmitted from the Messenger in multiple, mutually-corroborating reports until its sense became certitude and self-evident—and still alter its meaning and twist its words from their places, then what will they do with the Torah and the Gospel, whose wording and import have never been preserved as the Quran has been, and among whose adherents there is no one to defend their text and meaning the way Muslims defend the text and meaning of the Quran?

They have been deluded by the phrase “That Book” ⦗2:2⦘, imagining that because the demonstrative pronoun usually points to something remote, it must be referring to the Gospel. The reply is that this usage is just like His words, “That is what We recite to you of the signs and the Wise Reminder” ⦗3:58⦘, where “that” points to what He had just recited before the verse, and like His words, “Ask for what you have spent and let them ask for what they have spent; that is Allah’s ruling—He judges between you” ⦗60:10⦘.