This is Arabic speech transmitted from Allah; yet it is neither the Qur’an nor anything like the Qur’an, in wording or in meaning. How, then, can anyone claim that when the Torah or the Gospel is recited in Arabic it thereby becomes the Qur’an?

Likewise, if the Qur’an were rendered into Hebrew or Syriac, would any rational, religious person maintain that such a text [is] (1) the Torah and the Gospel revealed to Moses and Jesus—peace be upon them both? Would any sane individual say that the speech of Allah, sent down in different tongues, possesses a single, uniform meaning, like words that are merely translated into several languages? The falsity of this notion is one of the clearest self-evident truths. Anyone who voices it—were he to reflect on what he has said—would realize that even the mad would not utter such a claim.

Everyone knows that when discourse is translated—just as the Arabs translated the writings of the ancients among the Persians, Greeks, Indians, and others—the meanings remain exactly the same; they do not change simply because the words have become Arabic, Persian, Greek, or Hindi. [And] (2) the same applies when they translated (3) whatever they rendered of the words of the prophets before us and of their nations: the meanings are identical, whether expressed in Arabic or in Persian.

Moreover, Allah has told us in His Book about what earlier nations—their prophets and their peoples—said. They spoke in their own tongues, yet Allah conveyed it to us in Arabic. Those meanings are themselves unchanged; their being truth or falsehood, faith or disbelief, guidance or error, does not stem from the difference of languages. Rather, the meanings themselves are distinct, varied realities—far more diverse than the differences among tongues and languages.

So how incomparable is the difference of meanings to the difference of words! Indeed, the latter is but like the difference of