Do we believe in the previous scriptures?
I've heard multiple times from Muslims that according to their religion, if they don't believe in what God has revealed previously, especially scriptures that are named explicitly in the Quran, such as the Torah, Psalms and the Gospel, they are not Muslim. The Quran itself commands Muslims to believe in the previous scriptures—Quran 29:46, and Allah even commands Muhammad that if he doubts, he should go to the previous scriptures so that his doubts can be erased—Quran 10:94. However, when I ask Muslims whether they believe in the Judeo-Christian scriptures today, the majority of them will say no because they've been corrupted. This of course raises the next question.
How can we believe in something that doesn't exist anymore?
If Muslims are right and the Judeo-Christian scriptures, especially those that are named by Allah in the Quran, such as the Torah, Psalms and the Gospel are corrupted and the original ones don't exist anymore, and that Muslims are commanded to believe in the original ones, how is that even going to be possible? In other words, how can someone claim to believe in something that doesn't exist anymore? How could Muhammad himself who was the founder of Islam obey Allah's command in Quran 10:94, if the Judeo-Christian scriptures didn't exist anymore? Now, even if such commands didn't exist in the Quran, another valid question can be raised.
Does God preserve His words?
If God doesn't preserve His words, then no religion that appeals to words written centuries ago can be true including Islam. If however God does preserve His words, then we should start with what has come first and work our way up. If Muslims can indeed come up with an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian scriptures that would agree with standard Islamic theology, I would be all ears and I'm sure I won't be alone. But I honestly won't be holding my breath; there are good reasons why the cheap "it's been corrupted" accusation is thrown at us. It's simply because there can't possibly exist an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian scriptures that would agree with standard Islamic theology or even any interpretation of the Quran.
Now let me address three common objections:
1. God never promised to preserve His words before the Quran.
This is an even cheaper assertion than the cheap "it's been corrupted" accusation. First of all, how can a Muslim possibly know whether God has promised to preserve His words before the Quran or not? If what God has said previously is corrupted, then it follows that a Muslim can't possibly know such a thing without a blind leap of faith. Secondly, what if I quote passages from the Judeo-Christian scriptures such as Isaiah 40:8 and Matthew 24:35 to show that God did indeed promise to preserve His words long before the Quran came to exist? Will Muslims believe these verses in the Judeo-Christian scriptures?! If this isn't a viciously circular argument, I don't know what is!
2. The Quran is special and it hasn't changed unlike the Bible.
This is simply an assertion with no real evidence to back it up and it doesn't really prove anything even if it was true. Once asked how the Muslim knows that the Quran hasn't changed, the answer is that all the manuscripts are identical all the way down to the letter and dots unlike the Bible. Even though this claim is totally false and can be easily falsified by pointing the Muslim to the textual variants between the different manuscripts such as the Warsh manuscripts vs. the Hafs manuscripts, it doesn't prove anything. Even if all the existing manuscripts of the Quran today were exactly identical, the conclusion that the Quran hasn't changed is nothing more than an assertion. What if someone burned all the copies of the original Quran and replaced them with a new Quran? There is in fact evidence in the hadith that at the time of Uthman which was only two generations after Muhammad, there existed different versions of the Quran and Uthman issued a decree to burn all the different manuscripts and force everyone to only copy from his own manuscripts. This is according to the Islamic sources by the way; it's not something made up by anti-Islamists or anti-Muslims. You can read this story on https://sunnah.com/bukhari/66/9.
3. Quran was memorized first and then written down.
So what? That can be said and in fact is said about Christianity as well. The Gospel was first preached and then written down. In fact the simplicity of the Gospel makes memorizing it super-simple, unlike the complexity of the Quran. Oral tradition exists in all religions, however historians and skeptics prefer written evidence because they don't trust human memories, perhaps rightly so. As a result, the sooner there is written evidence about a particular faith after it's preached, the better. And the Christian message recorded in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is believed by historians to have been written within a decade or even less than a decade after the crucifixion. 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 clearly lays out the Gospel and shows that what Christians preach today is the same message that the earliest Christians were preaching. Not only that, there are also more copies of the New Testament than any other ancient texts including the Quran. One way to know whether an ancient text has changed or not or what and how much of it has changed is to cross reference all the different manuscripts and so the more manuscripts, the better. We don't have that many manuscripts when it comes to the Quran, thanks to Uthman for burning most of them!
To top it all off, I see a lot of Muslims take a few verses from the Bible out of context and misuse them in order to preach Islam in the West and those who are ignorant and don't know the Judeo-Christian scriptures well enough, can end up buying into the message of Islam. The truth is that anyone can do that with any book to preach any message. In fact, I can do that with the Quran in a much better and consistent way. Because I know for a fact that there are easy and rational answers and explanations for the verses that Muslims take out of the Bible. Some of them are so embarrassing that should make an intelligent Muslim question the sanity and honesty of these preachers. But I've never seen a rational response to any of the questions that are raised in the following video. If indeed cherry picking from a book or set of books and insisting on our own interpretation is the way to pin down the truth, then all non-Muslims have every right to reject the Quran based on the following video alone, without any shadow of doubt, regardless of how Muslims would respond to it. Because remember, we don't care about how Muslims read and interpret the Quran. As long as we can convince ourselves that Quran is self-contradictory and therefore not the Word of God, we're good!
