Abraham

At the heart of the Christian faith is the Bible, God’s revelation, which in the Old Testament prophesies the coming of the Messiah and then in the New relates how those prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. At the heart of Islam is the book known as the Qur’an. The Arabic word Qur’an means “reading” or “reciting,” a reference to the command said to have been given to Muhammad to read or recite.

Unlike the Bible, which consists of 66 books written by several dozen inspired writers over 1500 centuries—from 1400 B. C. to A.D. 100—the Qur’an is the product of one man, Muhammad, between the years 610 and 632. Moreover, while the Bible is arranged chronologically and by subject matter, the Qur’an follows no such arrangement. Rather, it is simply a collection of chapters, called suras, which are divided into verses, called ayat.

The Doctrine of Corruption

Muslims struggle with the many discrepancies between the Qur’an and the Bible. Since God gave the former Scriptures as well as the Qur’an, the problem could not be attributed to God. So it is said that Jews and Christians corrupted their Scriptures. The Islamic doctrine of corruption is known by the Arabic term tahrif.

There are two approaches to tahrif. One maintains that the text itself of the Bible has been tampered with. The other is that while the text is intact, Jews and Christians have twisted its meaning, making it say things that are not really there.