An Example of Noble Character

MERCY TO THE WORLDS way to determine the status of a religious book was through the belief of its followers. Each group described its holy book as a divine revelation, and based on this, people began to assume that every religious scripture was equally divine. In reality, however, the Quran was the preserved divine scripture, while all the others were unpreserved. The Quran remained completely unaltered, whereas the other scriptures had undergone distortions. In the present age, with the advent of open intellectual freedom, everything came under unrestricted scrutiny— even sacred religious texts. This process has continued for nearly the past three hundred years among scholars and has become an independent academic field known by terms like higher criticism, historical criticism, and textual criticism. This open examination brought a great benefit: the difference between the Quran and other religious scriptures became clear on purely scholarly and historical grounds. These critics examined the Quran with the same severity as they did the other religious texts. But in the end, it was proven that the Quran is a preserved book, and all others are unpreserved. The Quran is unaltered, and the others are altered. The Quran is a historically reliable book, while the others lack historical reliability. For example, modern scholars collected different copies of the Quran from various countries. They gathered handwritten and printed versions of the Quran from different historical periods. When these thousands of manuscripts were compared with each other, not even the