or the Hebrew, or the Indian. If, as they allege, each of those Scriptures can be found in seventy-two different tongues, then claiming that every copy in any one tongue is identical is no more credible than claiming that all the Arabic copies are identical; how preposterous, then, to insist that the copies in all those tongues agree with each other!

Grant—even for the sake of argument—that such uniformity might conceivably be asserted for a language whose writings have been handled only by its own small community of speakers. How could anyone make the same claim for a language whose speakers are many and scattered far and wide?

This is altogether unlike the Muslims’ claim concerning the agreement of their muṣḥafs of the Qur’an. The preservation of the Qur’an does not rest on written codices at all; rather, it is safeguarded in the hearts of countless multitudes of Muslims—whose exact number only Allah, exalted is He, knows. Were every written mushaf to vanish from the face of the earth, the wording of the Qur’an would remain intact. The earlier scriptures stand in stark contrast to this: it is rare indeed to find among the People of the Book anyone who has memorised even one of those writings, and among the Jews scarcely anyone knows the Torah by heart.

As for the Christians, there is no one among them who has committed to memory the Torah, the Gospel, the Psalms, and all the Prophetic Books, let alone memorised them in seventy-two languages. (And even if such a person existed, he would be but a handful, and neither error nor deliberate falsehood would be impossible for him.)

It follows, therefore, that their vaunted proliferation of translations actually makes it virtually impossible to ascertain whether the wording of those copies is identical, whereas the Qur’an—transmitted in a single language that vast numbers of Muslims have learnt by heart—demonstrates that no one is able to alter so much as a single word of it, even if