Thus, it was the Aaronite imams who knew the Torah and had memorised most of it; but Nebuchadnezzar slew them all in a single massacre and, on the day he seized Jerusalem, burned their Temple. The Torah was no longer preserved upon their tongues—each of the Aaronites retained only one section (1) of it.

When Ezra saw that their Temple had been burned, their dominion overturned, their community scattered, and their Scripture removed, he gathered what he himself remembered and what the priests remembered of its various sections, and from that he pieced together the Torah that is now in their hands. For that reason they extolled Ezra (2) to the utmost, saying about him what Allah reports of them in His Book, and they even claim that to this very day a light appears on his grave in the marshlands of Iraq, because he produced for them a book that safeguarded their religion.

In truth, therefore, the Torah they possess is Ezra’s book, even though some—or even most—of it does go back to the Torah that Allah revealed to Moses.

He went on to say: This shows that the man who compiled the passages they now possess was ignorant of the attributes of the Exalted Lord—of what befits Him and what can never be ascribed to Him—and so he attributed to the Lord things from which He is utterly transcendent and sanctified (3).

This man is known among the Jews and Christians as ‘Azar the copyist, and some people think that he is the one of whom it is said: “He passed by a town that lay in ruins upon its roofs and said, ‘How will Allah bring this back to life after its death?’”