The judgment passed on a holy writing depends to a great extent on the religious concepts and the emotional values held by the one judging it. The European's ideas, even if he is an agnostic, are shaped by Christianity. To the Christian, the Gospel is the essence of the Word of God. He has known and loved this work since his childhood. He understands it, or thinks he does. He considers it to be 'a priori' different from every other writing. He adopts it as a standard by which he judges unfamiliar revealed writings like the 'Qur'an', with which he only becomes familiar through the veil of inadequate translations since he has no command of Arabic, and is without any knowledge of the ideas, situation and conditions of that period of history, which are occasionally referred to in the 'Qur'an' itself. And after a superficial reading of it he lays this book aside, disappointed and convinced of the unsurpassable and matchless quality of the Gospel. In doing so he fails to realize that the language of the Word of God is very varied. The divine truth has been expressed at different periods, in different places, in very different forms of human thought and language. To say nothing of the holy writings more removed from us like the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada, even the writings of the Old Testament are very different in content and stylistic form. The gospels, too, show differences in their stylistic characteristics: the Gospel of St. John differs from the synoptic gospels to a great degree by its adoption of Hellenistic ways of thinking and speaking. The 'Qur'an' which, for the first time, preserves for mankind the pure, directly spoken and undistorted word of the Almighty, cannot be compared on its literary quality to any of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Apart from the philological aspect of the work, namely the extraordinarily expressive Arabic language which is capable of the finest nuances, and which has been, since Muhammad's advent, the language of revelation, this uniqueness lies in the singular way the book is presented and in the overpowering spirit of its prophetic parts. Thus the 'Qur'an' is described by non-Muslim experts of the Arabic language as a great masterpiece of literature. Of course, to the superficial reader who remains aloof, its original character, its poetic expression and the hidden, symbolic meaning of its verses disclose themselves just as little as the "Art of Fugue' would to the man who does not understand Bach's polyphony. (140:1)

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