A Case of Discovery

God in His mercy has chosen to reveal it. There is such a marvelous continuity and uniformity running throughout the whole Book, that no impartial critic or fair-minded reader can ever doubt either its sincerity or authenticity. You may call it tedious or monotonous, if you like, you may even point out some of its apparent discrepancies, but you cannot deny its being exactly the same book as that which was revealed to the Holy Prophet during his lifetime at different periods and on different occasions ever since that memorable night of the 27th Ramadan (Lailatul Qadr) when the angel Gabriel stood before him and said: Read, in the name of your Lord, who created, created man from clots of congealed blood. Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, Who taught man by the Pen, Who taught man what he knew not! Indeed, man transgresses in thinking himself self-sufficient. Verily to your Lord is the return. (96: 1-8) This historical groundwork of Islam has struck even such a sceptic as Ernst Renan who in his “Etudes d’Histoire Religieu” (pp. 220, 230) makes some very pertinent remarks about it. Professor Bosworth Smith holds similar views and expresses himself in the following terms in his famous lectures on “Muhammad and Islam.” “We know indeed, some fragments of a fragment of Christ’s life; but who can lift the veil of thirty years that prepared the way for the three? ... But in Islam everything is different; here, instead of the shadowy and the mysterious, we have history. We know as much of Muhammad as we do even of Luther and Milton. The mythical, the legendary, the supernatural is almost wanting in the original Arab authorities, or at all events, can easily be distinguished from what is historical.