Torah and Injil. By preserving such doctrines the Qur'an acts as a guardian to those books.

C. Such is your explanation. But if the Qur'an, as we have seen, attested the Scriptures which in Muhammad's day were extant in the hands of Jews and Christians, and was constituted their guardian, surely you cannot hold that those Scriptures were at that very time corrupted or had previously been so. And, if the Qur'an then appealed to certain passages in the Bible as it then existed in proof of Muhammad's claim to be a prophet, does not that show that in Muhammad's time the Bible was not corrupt?

10. M. Well then, if the Scriptures were not corrupted before Muhammad's time, or in his days, they must have been corrupted since that time, for they are corrupt, as everybody knows, because they used to agree with the Qur'an and no longer do so. The Qur'an appeals to its agreement with the Bible as one of the proofs of its inspiration; that is one meaning of several of the verses which you have quoted. This it would not have done if the Bible had then been what it now is, since it now contradicts the Qur'an in many important points, and this is the reason why we cannot accept your Bible ¹. Muhammad would not have been commanded

to call a witness to give evidence against him.

C. Let us inquire in the first place whether it is possible, on the supposition that the Qur'an is a Divine Revelation, to believe that the Bible has been corrupted since Muhammad's time, remembering that, according to the Qur'an, one reason for the "descent" of that book and for Muhammad's mission was to confirm the Law and the Gospel, as we have already proved. The Qur'an itself asserts that God preserves the "Warning" (ذكر ) which He has sent down (Surah XV., Al Hajr, 9), and moreover repeatedly affirms that the Word of God cannot be altered by any one (Surahs LXIX, Al Kahf, 26; VI., An‘am, 35, 115; X., Yunus, 65) ¹.

11. M. But "the Warning" is one of the titles of the Qur'an itself, and these verses all refer to the Qur'an and not to the Bible. We are quite ready to admit that the Qur'an cannot be changed.

C. No doubt "the Warning" is sometimes a title of the Qur'an, but the same title is also, in the Qur'an itself, given to the Bible, as for instance in Surah XXI., Al Anbiya', 7 and 49; and it therefore no more belongs exclusively to the Qur'an than the title "Al Furqan" does, which in the latter verse is bestowed upon the Taurat, which we are there told was given to Moses and Aaron. If we take the promise in Surah XV., Al Hajr, 9 as applying to