“He composed the Qur'an himself”

The objection

“He composed the Qur’an himself.”

In its strongest terms: a man of genius, attentive to the Jewish and Christian stories that passed from mouth to mouth, composed this book over more than twenty years, as events unfolded. Since Abraham Geiger (1833), historians have catalogued the parallels between the Qur’an and Jewish and Christian literature; Gabriel Said Reynolds (2018) and Le Coran des historiens (2019) read it as a text in dialogue with the biblical culture of late antiquity (research file v1, part 3). His Meccan adversaries were already saying it: “this is nothing but a lie he has invented” (25:4).

The answer

A challenge set in his lifetime ﷺ, and never taken up

“And you never will” (2:24): a human author who writes this before his adversaries, and for all time, stakes his whole book on a single sentence. In the eighth century of the Hijra, Ibn Kathir observed that no one had produced such a sura, and saw in the verse a prophecy in its own right: so categorical a claim about the future can come only from one who is sure of what he announces (Ibn Kathir, Mu’jizat, I, 235-236; see also 17:88).

“I have lived among you a whole lifetime before it”

He ﷺ is forty when the revelation begins (Ibn Hisham, I, 233). His people know him, call him al-Amin (Ibn Hisham, I, 183), and know of no book or writing of his:

A book that reproves its prophet ﷺ

The Qur’an does not spare the Prophet ﷺ: it reproves him, and these reproaches are part of the text that he himself recited (research file v1, part 4):

On the captives of Badr: “it is not for a prophet to have captives until he has prevailed in the land” (8:67).

The revelation, finally, does not come when he would want it: in the affair of the slander against Aisha, he ﷺ remains a month with nothing revealed to him about her. And he distinguishes what is revealed to him from his own opinion: “you know better the affairs of your world”, he says about the pollination of the palm trees (Muslim 2363; research file v1, part 4).

Stories that no book offered him ﷺ

The Qur’an tells of two prophets of Arabia, Hud and Salih, of whom no known earlier text speaks. And when it tells stories also found in the Bible, it corrects them (research file v1, part 3):

• Solomon “did not disbelieve” (2:102), whereas the book of Kings says that “his wives turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:4);
• the hand of Moses comes out “white, without any harm” (20:22), where Exodus calls it “leprous as snow” (Exodus 4:6);
• the golden calf is the work of the Samiri, and Aaron warns the people (20:85-94), whereas Exodus says of Aaron that he “made it a molten calf” (Exodus 32:4).

An oral circulation would explain themes; it does not explain this sifting, nor these corrections (research file v1, part 3).

Prophecies fixed before the event

The Qur’an announces, in Mecca, that the defeated Romans will be victorious “within a few years” (30:2-4), which comes about between 622 and 628. It announces that Abu Lahab and his wife will burn in the Fire (sura 111); Abu Lahab dies an unbeliever some ten years later. A feigned conversion would have been enough to refute the book (research file v1, part 4). An author who composes to convince does not place the truth of his work in the hands of an adversary.

What the objection gets right

The parallels exist. The Qur’an shares stories with Jewish and Christian texts outside the Bible: the people of the Cave (18:9-26) and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, in a homily of Jacob of Serugh, who died in 521; Mary entrusted to Zechariah (3:35-44) and the Protoevangelium of James, of the second century (research file v1, part 3). The Qur’an does not deny it: it presents itself as confirming the Scriptures and prevailing over them (5:48).

But a shared subject does not make an author. Several Jewish parallels are later than the Qur’an: the raven that shows Cain how to bury his brother (5:27-31) has as its known parallel the Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, composed in the eighth century, after the Qur’an. And the two prophets of Arabia remain without antecedent (research file v1, part 3). The Qur’an confirms, corrects and adds: the very opposite of a compilation.

Further reading

• What the Qur’an tells with no known precedent, and what it sets right: What the Qur’an reveals with no biblical counterpart.
• The prophecies of the Qur’an, one by one: The Qur’an’s predictions.
• The reproaches, the waiting, the opinion kept apart from revelation: The testimony of his person.
• The teacher ascribed to him ﷺ: “He learned it all from Bahira, or from Waraqa”.
• All the objections: Objections answered.

Sources for this page

• Qur’an: Tanzil text (Uthmani); translation of the meaning by this site.
• Bible: King James Version.
• The pollination of the palm trees: Muslim 2363.
• Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-nabawiyya, ed. al-Saqqa, al-Abyari and Shalabi, al-Babi al-Halabi, Cairo, 2nd ed., 1955, I, 183, 233.
• Ibn Kathir, Mu’jizat al-Nabi ﷺ (extract from al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya), ed. al-Sayyid Ibrahim Amin Muhammad, al-Maktaba al-Tawfiqiyya, Cairo, I, 235-236.
• Research file “Annonces du Prophète ﷺ”, v1.0, 14 October 2026, parts 3 and 4.