and by twisting their tongues while reciting the Scripture so that the listener imagines the words are from it when they are not.

These, then, are five practices:

1. Blending truth with falsehood—mixing the two until truth can no longer be distinguished from error.

2. Withholding the truth.

3. Hiding it, which is very close in meaning to withholding it.

4. Altering the words from their proper places, and this is of two kinds: tampering with the wording and tampering with the meaning.

5. Twisting the tongue when reciting, so that the revealed wording is confused with something entirely different.

They adopted these methods only to serve ulterior motives that impelled them to such actions. Thus, when they turned against the Messenger, denied his prophethood, branded him a liar (1), and fought him, it became even easier for them to deny his description and identifying traits, to suppress and remove them (2) from their proper contexts, and to reinterpret them contrary to their true meaning.

That is exactly what they did. Yet, because the glad tidings concerning him were so numerous and varied, they failed (3) to conceal and hide all of them. Consequently, they resorted to “distorting the interpretation,” stripping the passages of their intended sense so that they would no longer point to the one for whom they were meant, and assigning them instead to a non-existent figure whom Allah never created—someone who simply does not exist at all.

Tenth: He further substantiated the truth of his prophethood by calling upon the scholars of the People of the Scripture as witnesses, and