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Baidawi says: 'Because of God's command to them to keep His Book from being lost or
perverted.' And Zamakhshari: '(They were) guardians, lest it (the Book) should be
changed.' And Jalalu'd-Din: 'Lest they should change it (the Book).' And Tabari: 'They
condemned them on the authority of the Book of God which was sent down on His Prophet
Moses.' And Razi, the strongest of them all, says that these divine guardians (Rabbis,
Priests, Prophets, and Muhammad himself), were ' witnesses that everything in the Taurat
was truth and of God' meaning, of course, the actual Book current among the Jews of
that day. 'As though,' continues Razi, 'God were addressing the people saying,
"Beware that ye pervert not my book through fear."'
5. This passage fixes the meaning tahrif and tabdil (perversion and substitution)
wherever they occur. They clearly mean, not falsification of text, as we have seen, but
concealment of it, or lying about its contents, or twisting it with false
interpretations. On this point the commentators are unanimous. So Razi:
'The keeping of God's book is of two kinds; keeping it from being forgotten and
keeping it from being lost. Now God put upon the 'Ulama the keeping of the Book in both
kinds, namely, (1) that they should keep it in their hearts and learn it with their
tongues, and (2) that they should not lose its judgements, nor neglect its laws.'
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More remarkable still is the tradition which Razi quotes from ibn 'Abbas, an uncle of
Muhammad: 'The Taurat and Injil were books which had reached a degree of celebrity and
universal traditional consent (tawatur) which rendered impossible such a thing (as
corruption) in their case.'
Impossible! We thank ibn 'Abbas for that word, and we thank God; for, if the corruption
of the Bible was impossible before or during Muhammad's day, it has become more and more
impossible since that time, owing to the ever-increasing area of the circulation of the
Book, and the bitterness between the sects, all of which profess the Taurat and each of
which would watch like lynxes for any sign of tampering on the part of another; to say
nothing of the total silence of history about so marvellous a conspiracy, of all the
Jewish and Christian leaders in the world, to change 'be it remembered' not one text only,
but a whole Book! Impossible! we echo again with ibn 'Abbas!
So, then, like a rock stands the truth that the Taurat sold to-day is the very Book
pointed to by Muhammad that day in Madina, and expounded to him by ibn Suriya. And let us
thank God for the evidence and the witness, and in it is this Verse of Stoning as we shall
see in the next chapter.
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