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The questioner said (1): “It is well-known among you—in the Qur’an and the Sunnah—that your Prophet was recorded in their scriptures (2), namely the Torah and the Gospel. Yet they erased every trace of him for the sake of authority and worldly gain. Reason finds this hard to accept: did all of them, in every direction—east, west, south, and north—really agree to blot out his name from the books revealed by their Lord? (3) Such a notion is even more objectionable to the intellect than their verbal denial, for words can be retracted, whereas restoring what has been erased is far less likely.

The reply: this objection is built on a faulty understanding. It assumes that Muslims hold (4) that the Prophet’s explicit name—Muḥammad in Arabic—is written in the Torah and the Gospel, the two scriptures embodying earlier laws; and that Muslims further believe the Jews and Christians, everywhere on earth, conspired to delete that name completely from both books, coordinating with one another whether near or far, east or west.

No scholar of Islam has ever claimed such a thing. Allah—exalted be He—has not informed us of it in His Book, nor has His Messenger; he never censured them for it (5) at any time. None of the Companions, the imams after them, the Qur’an commentators, or those devoted to the histories of nations and their chronicles has ever made such a claim.