Thirteenth Principle: The Qur’an’s method of argument and debate with the adherents of false religions.

Allah has commanded that debate be conducted in the best manner. Whoever reflects on the ways by which Allah set up the argument against those in error through His messengers will see them to be the clearest, strongest, and most upright proofs—establishing truth and vanquishing falsehood without confusion or annoyance.

Consider the exchanges between the messengers and their nations: they called them to worship Allah alone, without partner, because He alone possesses lordship and singly bestows favors. He is the One who granted them good health, hearing, sight, intellects, provisions, and every other kind of blessing; just as He alone averts calamities, while none of the creation has the power to remove or repel, to harm or to benefit. Once a servant merely knows and acknowledges this, he must inevitably submit to the true religion through which the blessing is perfected and which is the only path to express gratitude for it.

The Qur’an often argues against the polytheists’ associationism and the worship of their deities besides their Lord by obliging them to their own acknowledgment of His lordship—that He is the Creator and Provider of everything—so it follows that He alone must be worshipped.

Look, then, at this proof and how, at the very first instant, the mind passes from it to the necessity of worshiping One of such attributes; for the signs of His lordship cry out for exclusive devotion to Him.

It also debates the people of falsehood by pointing out the flaws of their gods, showing that they are deficient in every respect and unable to benefit themselves, let alone their worshippers.

Likewise, it establishes proofs against the People of the Book, demonstrating that their prior opposition to their own messengers makes it unsurprising that they should oppose His final Messenger, Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), who came confirming the revelations before him—all of which shared a single aim: to remove the shackles of blind imitation from the hearts of the children of Adam so that they might use their hearing, sight, and hearts to ponder their Lord’s signs. Through that reflection they would come to know that He is the true God, and that everything people have taken—under the whispers of human and jinn devils—as deities is nothing but an offshoot of those very signs; therefore none of it is in any way fit to share with its Lord and Creator in divinity, and it deserves only its rightful place as a created being in servitude.

The Creator, to whom nothing is comparable, is the One worthy of every form of worship, and He is not to be worshipped except in the manner He loves and has legislated.

The Qur’an topples the false claims of the leaders of polytheism and the champions of error, along with their fabricated self-commendations, by exposing the realities of their states and qualities that contradict those claims. It argues with them by clarifying the truth and laying out its proofs, so that its sheer veracity and reality, by themselves, drive away