The Message

Through logic we have arrived at an irrefutable conclusion: there must be an eternal, self-existing, almighty and necessary Creator, who is the first cause behind the universe and all existence.

The universe cannot have created itself; it can neither be eternal nor have arisen from nothing. There must be someone who set the first domino in motion.

We needed no religion to arrive at this conclusion, only logical thinking. If you have come this far, then you should now have absolute certainty about it. Unless you could imagine that a monkey might produce something as complex as a book about the fastest car. Which is not assumed here.

But how does it continue? What should we now ask ourselves, having arrived at this conclusion? It is the following question:

If we look at all religions, is there one among them whose religious text describes God in this way? What do you think?

Well, there is indeed a religious text that stands apart from all other religions and reflects exactly the same properties that we have determined through logical reasoning. In what follows, this will be illustrated by means of a few selected verses.

English rendering of the Quranic verses: Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran.

These are just a few example verses that reflect this correspondence. But from which religious scripture do they come?

This is a translation of the meaning of the words of God in the Quran, which were revealed in the Arabic language. Yet it is not only the correspondence that is remarkable; there is a distinctive feature that sets it apart from all other religious scriptures.

If that is impossible, then ask yourself the following question: How is it possible that this is exactly what the story of the Quran reflects, which took place over 1,400 years ago on the Arabian Peninsula?

The story of the Prophet ﷺ

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was born around the year 570 in Mecca as an orphan. He grew up in a society shaped by idolatry, in which alcohol, injustice, prostitution and tribal wars were part of everyday life. Even as a young man he distinguished himself through his honesty, helpfulness, purity and justice. It was not without reason that people called him “al-Amīn,” the trustworthy, for it was known that he did not lie, did not cheat and treated people justly. In that time, linguistic art was regarded as the highest virtue. The Arabs competed in the markets in poetry and eloquence and were regarded as true masters of language. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, however, had no talent for poetry and had never composed any poems. Like most people of that time, he could neither read nor write.

Yet after forty years, he suddenly began, overnight, to speak verses that surpassed everything ever composed in the Arabic language. Although Arabic literature before the revelation of the Quran was divided into only two main forms (prose and poetry), the Quran overnight burst these boundaries and created a completely new literary genre that remains, to this day, unmatched in form, beauty, eloquence, expressive power and profound meaning. In the Quran, God directly challenged the masters of poetry: if they doubted its origin, then they should produce just a single chapter of the same kind. Yet even the most gifted poets failed.

Before Islam, the Kaaba was the religious heart of idolatry. Tribes from all over Arabia made pilgrimage to Mecca each year to worship their idols. The Quraysh, guardians of the Kaaba and the most powerful tribe of Mecca, thereby enjoyed power, religious prestige and economic gain. Their wealth and authority thus rested on a religious system that worshipped idols and drew pilgrims from all over Arabia. At the same time, injustice, the exploitation of orphans and the poor, the degradation of women and slaves, as well as usurious practices, shaped the society.

Islam confronted the system directly. It rejected the idols as lifeless objects, called for the worship of the one God, and declared that faith, piety and morality counted before God. Not, however, whether someone was rich or poor, free or a slave, Arab or non-Arab. More and more people turned away from the idolatry of their forefathers. Whoever accepted Islam left behind not only false gods but also the social order that brought the powerful Quraysh wealth, power and social superiority.

Since they could refute the Quran neither linguistically nor in content, they responded not with arguments but with violence. They tried to silence its proclaimers through hunger, torture and murder. They called the Prophet ﷺ a magician and tried to bribe him with wealth, power and the most beautiful women of Mecca. Everything a swindler could wish for. He was only to abandon the message. Yet he refused without hesitation. They even imposed a total boycott on the entire clan of the Prophet ﷺ, which was part of the Quraysh tribe. The boycott lasted about three years, and they were banished outside the city of Mecca into a ravine. During this time neither food nor trade goods were permitted to be sold to them. After other tribes from Medina accepted Islam and the Muslim community fled to Medina, the Quraysh tried to wipe out Islam through war.

Yet neither violence nor persecution could halt the message. Within a few centuries, Islam spread to many regions, above all through traders and scholars who traveled along the trade routes of the Arabian Peninsula, through Persia and Central Asia as far as China, and across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia and deep into the lands of Africa. In territories under Islamic rule that were opened up through conquest, such as North Africa and Spain, Christians and Jews were allowed to continue to practice their religion. This stands in stark contrast to the Crusades and the Christian reconquest of Spain in the 15th century, in which Jews and Muslims were killed, expelled or forced to convert to Christianity.

To this day the challenge has remained unbroken. No poet and no linguist has ever been able to replicate the linguistic and literary uniqueness of the Quran.

Bearing in mind that the Quran did not come into being in a quiet writing room, but was transmitted orally while the Prophet ﷺ endured war, hunger, persecution and boycott by his own people, the linguistic miracle appears all the more inexplicable by human standards. These circumstances of life and the inimitable nature of the message permit only one conclusion: it is a divine revelation to mankind.

Knowledge that no one could have known

Alongside the inimitable linguistic style, there are further remarkable aspects in the Quran, such as its historical accuracy, the fulfilled prophecies and the presence of scientific facts that no one in the 7th century could have known.

To picture this, imagine that in the 7th century a book appeared, at a time when people thought that the Earth was flat and that the stars revolved around it. No one at that time knew that the universe is immeasurably larger than the sun, moon and stars in the sky. Amid the searing heat of the Arabian desert, among nomads who revered poetry and were constantly embroiled in tribal wars, an illiterate man proclaimed this book, without ever having learned to read or write, and without access to modern science. And yet the Quran describes things that were discovered only over 1,000 years later.

The Quran speaks of a universe that is expanding (51:47), a discovery that even Einstein ruled out until modern astronomy proved it in 1929. Stephen Hawking even described this as “one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.”

The Quran speaks of the heaven and the earth once being a single mass that was separated (21:30), as described by the Big Bang theory, which was first published in 1927.

Another mighty revelation of the Quran was that the sun purposefully travels through the universe (36:38). At that time the sun was, for the people of that era, nothing more than a heavenly body that orbited the Earth. Isaac Newton and René Descartes were, in the 17th century, the first to describe theoretically that the sun moves through space.

The Quran also mentioned the protective function of the sky (21:32), whereas the protective function of our atmosphere was discovered only in the 20th century.

It compares mountains to pegs that reach deep into the earth (78:7), a geological fact that was discovered only during the “Great Trigonometrical Survey of India” in the 19th century.

It even describes internal ocean waves that travel beneath the surface (24:40), a phenomenon that was demonstrated only in the 20th century.

Over 1,000 years before the existence of modern brain research, the Quran pointed specifically to the forehead being the place of lying (96:15-16), a region that science today calls the prefrontal cortex.

It also pointed out that pain depends on the skin (4:56), long before physicians discovered pain receptors, 90% of which are located in the skin.

It gave the example of the female mosquito and “what is upon it” (2:26), over 1,300 years before the tiny ectoparasite Culicoides (Trithicoides) anophelis was discovered on the backs of mosquitoes with modern microscopes.

And over 1,400 years ago the Quran describes that the honeybee is female and carries honey in its stomach, details that were completely unknown. Aristotle was mistaken about the sex of bees, and it was not until 1670 that Jan Swammerdam proved that the worker bees are indeed female (16:68-69).

But that is not all. The Quran speaks of several stomachs of the bee. Centuries later, biology confirms that bees possess two, one for digestion and one as a honey store.

The next point is no less incredible. In the 7th century the Quran describes that the human being arises from a “mixed drop” of male and female fluid (76:2) and then names the following stages of development with a precision (23:12-14) that only modern embryology could confirm. At the time — and for centuries afterward — the conceptions of this were fundamentally wrong. Aristotle taught that the male seed shaped the woman's menstrual blood into the embryo. In the 17th century sperm were discovered and thought to be parasites, or people believed in tiny, fully formed humans within the sperm or egg. It was not until 1876 that Oskar Hertwig discovered that life actually begins through the fusion of sperm and egg cell.

In addition to these detailed scientific facts, the Quran made highly improbable prophecies — for example, it foretold that the Romans, after their crushing defeat by the Persians, would defeat the Persians within three to nine years (30:2-4), a prophecy that seemed impossible at the time but later came true.

Besides prophecies, the Quran also revealed lost knowledge — for example, that Pharaoh commanded one of his ministers by the name of “Haman” to build him a tower so that he might reach God (28:38). Now, no written document from the 7th century could contain a hitherto unknown hieroglyphic name, since the meaning of the hieroglyphs had at that time fallen completely into oblivion. It was not until the 19th century that hieroglyphic writing was deciphered. The surgeon and historian Dr. Maurice Bucaille researched this and discovered the name on an Egyptian stone tablet in Vienna, as well as the fact that Haman held the title of “overseer of the stone-quarry workers.” Whether it is the same Haman remains open, but the name existed, and the man was responsible for construction. How could an illiterate man in the 7th century know such a detail, if not through divine revelation?

Likewise, the Quran distinguishes precisely between “Pharaohs” and “kings.” For centuries it was assumed that all Egyptian rulers were Pharaohs. Only the deciphering of the hieroglyphs showed that the title “Pharaoh” was used only in a later era. How, then, could a human being in the 7th century know the difference? Even in the Bible it is erroneously mentioned that Abraham, Joseph and Moses (peace and blessings be upon them) had dealings with Pharaohs.

All this knowledge in a single, orally transmitted masterpiece, without even a single error or contradiction. Statements that were confirmed more than 1,000 years later through microscopes, telescopes and modern research.

Even today, with supercomputers and the most advanced technology, it would be impossible to write a book that simultaneously creates a unique literary form, contains lost historical secrets, flawlessly predicts improbable future events, and describes scientific facts that would only be discovered centuries later.

Who other than God could have revealed to a human being in the 7th century — in a society without scientific medicine, without books, without a laboratory, without microscopes or telescopes and without scientific research — an oral message containing medical, cosmological and historical details that were only confirmed centuries later through modern science, and whose linguistic beauty no poet has been able to imitate to this day? Details that were discovered over 1,000 years later through modern research. And all this amid persecution, boycott and war.

Even if you think about it your whole life or consult the most advanced AI systems of the future, you will find no logical scenario that explains how a human being could have produced the Quran. The contents of the Quran go far beyond what a human being in the 7th century could have known or guessed. It can therefore only be a divine message.