those who possess a revealed Book and those who do not, such as the philosophers and the Hindus.

Knowledge is obtained through sense perception and reason, through what these two faculties yield, and through Allah’s revelation to His prophets—a source that lies beyond the common stock of human sensation and intellect.

Hence it has been said: “The epistemic avenues are perception, rational reflection, and authoritative report: sense perception, reason, and revelation—that is, direct sensory data, analogy, and prophethood.”

The People of the Scripture are therefore set apart from others by the share of prophethood granted to them, while they still participate with the rest of humanity in the empirical and rational sciences open to all.

As for the Muslims, they inherited from previous nations every prophetic and rational science those nations possessed, then surpassed them with knowledge unknown to anyone else. Whatever rational disciplines reached them from earlier peoples they refined, both in wording and in meaning, so that the product became better than it had been in its original setting. They removed the falsehood that had crept into it and added the truth by which they outstripped all others.

Likewise, in the prophetic sciences Allah granted them gifts He had never bestowed on any nation before them. This becomes obvious to anyone who studies the Qur’an alongside the Torah and the Gospel, for the superiority of Qur’anic knowledge is plain to all but the blind.

How, then, could one imagine that Muslims would overlook the unsoundness of the claim these ignoramuses have attributed to them?