CHAPTER ONE The Quran: The Book of God

Contradictions within a work arise basically from the deficiencies of its author. If such imperfections are to be avoided, two things are essential: absolute knowledge and total objectivity. There is no human being who is not sadly deficient in both of these areas. It is only God who is omniscient, and flawless as a Being, and while works wrought by the human hand are invariably marred by inconsistencies, His book, and His book alone never contradicts itself. Because of man’s inherent limitations, there are many things which, intellectually, he cannot grasp. He is forced, therefore, to speculate, and this frequently leads him into making erratic judgements and unfounded contentions. Every human being graduates from youth to old age, and when a man grows old, he often contradicts things he asserted as facts when he was young and immature. With age, his knowledge and experience increase, hence his final verdict stands at variance with his initial judgements. But even when death finally comes to take him away, he still has much to learn, and often the assertions of his mature age are proved wrong after his death. The truth is not arrived at purely through experience and reasoning. Human beings, in addition to making inadvertent and unwitting errors are all too prone to make deliberate misrepresentations of facts when they are motivated by the base emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, revenge and fear. Human moods and passions are often to blame for people turning a blind eye to the truth and falling a prey to faulty reasoning. Love and hate, friendship and hostility all have their influence on human thinking. A man’s inability to be dispassionate, his elation or depression, his triumph or despair, his successes and frustrations all colour the quality of his thought. Such fluctuations of mood, caprice and willfulness, can deflect the very best minds from the truth. The only one who is free of all such caprice and all such limitations is the Almighty. That is why His word is of an impeccable consistency. Biblical Inconsistency To illustrate this point, let us take the example of the Bible, which, as a book of revelation was the forerunner of the Quran. Initially, the Bible was the word of God, but in later years it suffered from human interpolations, with the result that many internal contradictions began to sully its pages. A case in point is the genealogy of the Messiah, which has been given in several places in that part of the Bible known as the Injil, or New