Readers who search for the Islamic Dilemma often add the word Reddit to their search, looking for a plain, direct answer. This page is for them. It answers, briefly and with sources, the questions people actually type into search engines about the argument; the full treatment is in The Islamic Dilemma: the argument and the answer.
What is the Islamic Dilemma?
An argument popularised by the Christian apologist David Wood. The Qur’an affirms the Torah and the Gospel; if the Gospel is God’s word, Islam is false for contradicting it, and if it is not, Islam is false for affirming it.1 See What is the Islamic Dilemma? for the verses it cites.
Is the Islamic Dilemma true?
Only if the Qur’an vouches for every text in the hands of Jews and Christians. It does not. The same passage the argument quotes calls the Qur’an a guardian and criterion over earlier scripture, and the Qur’an elsewhere speaks of people who wrote scripture with their own hands and distorted words from their places.2 Confirming a revelation and judging the texts that carry it are two parts of one claim, so the dilemma’s two horns do not close.
What does Surah 5:46 say?
That God sent Jesus confirming the Torah before him, and gave him the Gospel, ’in which was guidance and light’.3 The verse speaks of the Gospel God gave to Jesus. The four Gospels of the New Testament were written about him by others, one of whose authors says he compiled it from earlier accounts.4
Why does the Qur’an tell Christians to judge by the Gospel?
Surah 5:47 tells the people of the Gospel to judge by ’what God has revealed therein’: by the truths of revelation that remain in their scripture, among them the oneness of God and the prophet the Qur’an says they find described in it.5 The next verse makes the Qur’an the criterion of what those truths are.
Did Muhammad doubt the Qur’an? (Surah 10:94)
The verse is conditional: if you are in doubt, ask those who read the scripture before you. Many classical exegetes took it to concern the Prophet’s description in the earlier books; others held that he neither doubted nor asked, and that the verse addresses his hearers through him.6
Has the Qur’an been changed?
The manuscript evidence places the Qur’an’s written text very close to the Prophet’s lifetime. Two leaves held by the University of Birmingham, containing parts of chapters 18 to 20, were radiocarbon dated in 2015 to between 568 and 645 CE with 95.4 per cent probability.7 Muslim scholarship has always recorded the recognised variant readings of the text, the qirāʾāt (قِرَاءَات, readings), openly. See The preservation and transmission of scripture.
Has the Bible been changed?
Christian scholars themselves identify later additions. The last twelve verses of Mark are missing from the oldest complete Greek Bibles, and most New Testament scholars regard them as a second-century addition.8 Many modern Bibles note that the earliest manuscripts lack the story of the woman taken in adultery.9
Where can I read a full rebuttal?
Start with The Islamic Dilemma: the argument and the answer, and see also The Islamic Dilemma, refuted at The Muslim Apologist.
Further reading: The Islamic Dilemma: the argument and the answer, What is the Islamic Dilemma?.
Notes
- “What is the ‘Islamic Dilemma’?,” The Islamic Dilemma (islamicdilemma.com). ↩
- Qur’an 5:48; 2:79; 5:13. ↩
- Qur’an 5:46, trans. Saheeh International. ↩
- Luke 1:1-4. ↩
- Qur’an 5:47; 7:157; cf. Mark 12:29. ↩
- Waleed Blyth, note to Qur’an 10:94, Quranenc.com, citing al-Ṭabarī, Ibn ʿAṭiyyah, Ibn Kathīr, al-Wāḥidī, al-Baghawī and Ibn ʿĀshūr. ↩
- “Birmingham Qur’an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world,” University of Birmingham, 22 July 2015. ↩
- “‘The Earliest Manuscripts Do Not Have …’: How to Preach Mark 16 and John 8,” Logos. ↩
- New International Version, note at John 7:53-8:11. ↩