The Quran

فَلَمّا جاءَهُمُ الحَقُّ مِن عِندِنا قالوا لَولا أوتِيَ مِثلَ ما أوتِيَ موسىٰ ۚ أَوَلَم يَكفُروا بِما أوتِيَ موسىٰ مِن قَبلُ ۖ قالوا سِحرانِ تَظاهَرا وَقالوا إِنّا بِكُلٍّ كافِرونَ

Muhammad Asad

And yet, now that the truth has come unto them from Us, they say, "'Why has he not been vouchsafed the like of what Moses was vouchsafed?"¹ But did they not also, before this, deny the truth of what Moses was vouchsafed? [For] they do say, "Two examples of delusion, [seemingly] supporting each other!"² And they add, "Behold, we refuse to accept either of them as true!"

As the Qur'an frequently points out, the basic ethical truths enunciated in it are the same as those of earlier revelations. It is this very statement which induced the opponents of Muhammad - in his own time as well as in later times - to question the authenticity of the Qur'an: "If it had really been revealed by God," they argue, "would so many of its propositions, especially its social laws, differ so radically from the laws promulgated in that earlier divine writ, the Torah?" By advancing this argument (and quite apart from the question of whether the text of the Bible as we know it today has or has not been corrupted in the course of time), the opponents of Muhammad's message deliberately overlook the fact, repeatedly stressed in the Qur'an, that the earlier systems of law were conditioned by the spiritual level of a particular people and the exigencies of a particular chapter of human history, and therefore had to be superseded by new laws at a higher stage of human development (see in this connection the second paragraph of 5:48 and the corresponding note 66). However, as is evident from the immediate sequence - and especially from the last sentence of this verse - the above specious argument is not meant to uphold the authenticity of the Bible as against that of the Qur'an, but, rather, aims at discrediting both - and, through them, the basic religious principle against which the irreligious mind always revolts: namely, the idea of divine revelation and of man's absolute dependence on and responsibility to God, the Ultimate Cause of all that exists.
A contemptuous allusion, on the one hand, to Old-Testament predictions of the coming of the Prophet Muhammad (cf. surah 2, note 33), and, on the other, to the oft-repeated Qur'anic statement that this divine writ had been revealed to "confirm the truth of earlier revelations". As regards my rendering of the term sihr (lit., "magic" or "sorcery") as "delusion" - and occasionally as "spellbinding eloquence" - see note 12 on 74:24.