Second, it has been said that they made this statement when the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, first arrived in Medina. Yet the opening of Surah Āl ʿImrān was revealed only later, when the delegation from Najrān arrived, as established by widespread, mass-transmitted reports. It was in this surah that Hajj was prescribed, and it was prescribed only in the ninth or tenth year after the Hijrah—not at the outset of the Hijrah, as all Muslims agree.

Third, the letters of the alphabet and a letter’s indication of how long this community will endure are not part of that interpretation of the Quran whose knowledge Allah has reserved for Himself. Either one says that this is not something Allah intended by His speech—in which case one cannot say that He alone knows it; rather, the claim that the letters indicate it is false—or one says that they do indicate it, in which case some people have understood what they indicate. Thus, people have come to know it. What is false is to claim both that the Quran indicates this and that no one knows it.

Furthermore, if the Messenger did not understand the matters of knowledge that Allah conveyed in the Quran, this would provide the heretics with one of their strongest grounds for attacking him. It would support their claim that he either did not understand these matters or understood them but did not explain them. Indeed, this position entails that he did not know them, since whatever Allah alone knows is known neither to the Prophet nor to anyone else.

In short, the abundant evidence establishes with certainty the falsity of the claim that the Quran contains verses whose meaning neither the Messenger nor anyone else knows.