The Authenticity of the Old and New Testaments

Al-Kairanawi's treatment of Biblical authenticity in Izhar al-Haqq is distinguished by its method as much as its conclusions. Rather than relying solely on traditional Islamic arguments about tahrif (textual corruption of earlier scriptures), he systematically cites Christian Biblical scholars themselves to demonstrate that the texts of the Old and New Testaments are composite documents of uncertain origin, containing variants, interpolations, and passages of disputed authenticity. This approach was novel in Islamic polemical literature: al-Kairanawi had clearly read widely in European Biblical scholarship, whether in translation or through intermediaries, and he understood that the discipline of textual criticism had raised serious questions about the reliability of the Biblical text from within the Christian scholarly tradition. By quoting these scholars by name and citing their findings, he made an argument that Christian missionaries could not simply dismiss as Muslim prejudice.

On the Old Testament, al-Kairanawi examines the question of Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. By the mid-nineteenth century, European scholars had developed extensive arguments that these books were composite documents assembled from several distinct sources, identified by scholars as the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomistic, and Priestly traditions. The presence of doublets (two versions of the same story with different names for Allah and different details), anachronisms (references to events that postdate Moses), and stylistic differences across the Pentateuch had led many critical scholars to reject the traditional view that Moses wrote these books directly. Al-Kairanawi presents these findings as evidence that the claim of unbroken Mosaic transmission for the Torah cannot be sustained on historical grounds.

On the New Testament, his focus is primarily on the Gospels and on the textual variants that scribal transmission had introduced over the centuries. He refers to cases where different manuscript traditions give significantly different readings of the same passage, where scholarly consensus has concluded that certain passages were later additions to the original text, and where the internal evidence of the Gospels suggests different authors with different and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The most famous example he discusses is the ending of the Gospel of Mark, where the most ancient manuscripts end at chapter 16 verse 8, with the discovery of the empty tomb and the flight of the women in fear, rather than continuing with the resurrection appearances and the Great Commission that appear in later manuscripts. This scholarly finding was already established in al-Kairanawi's time, and he uses it as a clear example of textual addition to the Gospel.

Al-Kairanawi is careful to present this argument as establishing a point about textual reliability rather than a total dismissal of the Biblical texts. His argument is that the Christian appeal to Biblical authority in debates with Muslims depends on the assumption that the Biblical text is reliably preserved, and that this assumption cannot be maintained in the light of the evidence that Christian scholars themselves have assembled. This does not mean that every passage in the Bible is inauthentic or that no truth can be found there. It means that the Bible cannot function as the simple, clear, and unambiguous criterion of religious truth that missionaries like Pfander presented it as being. The field of Biblical criticism had exposed the human dimension of the Bible's composition and transmission in ways that complicated any straightforward appeal to its authority, and al-Kairanawi's achievement was to bring these complications into the Islamic-Christian debate at a moment when they had maximum rhetorical force.