—except for a small remnant—until the last of them told him, “No one at all remains upon it. Yet a Prophet will soon be raised, bringing the religion of Abraham, from the direction of the Hijaz.” Those words moved Salman to set out for that land and eventually to believe in him.

The religion upon which the Muslims gathered around their Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—in an open and well-known way is that which reached them from him through uninterrupted, mass transmission. They transmitted the Qur’an, and they transmitted his Sunnah, and his Sunnah elucidates and clarifies the Qur’an, just as the Exalted said to him:

“We have sent down to you the Reminder so that you may make clear to the people what was sent down to them” (an-Nahl 16:44).

He therefore clarified what Allah revealed, both in its wording and in its meaning. Consequently, the meanings of the Qur’an upon which the Muslims have manifestly agreed are part of what the community has inherited from its Prophet, just as it has inherited from him the very words of the Qur’an. Thus—praise be to Allah—nothing upon which the ummah has agreed contains any distorted or altered meaning; how much less, then, its actual wording.

Indeed, the transmission of those meanings and the consensus concerning them are even more evident than that regarding the words themselves. The manifest religion possessed by the Muslims—the point upon which they are united—is precisely what they have conveyed from their Prophet in both wording and meaning, free of any distortion or alteration whatsoever, whether of expression or of sense. This stands in stark contrast to the Torah and the Gospel, the meanings and rulings of some of whose passages the Jews and the Christians, or both together, have openly and famously altered among the masses, just as