In his debate with brother David Wood, Shabir Ally made two attempts to prove that the Quran has several numerological miracles concerning the number seven, which according to Shabir proves that the Quran is from God since no man can insert such mathematical wonders. In this video, however, we will show you, in a matter of minutes, that Shabir Ally has overlooked a number of things, four things to be exact. First, it is definitely possible for humans to insert this kind of multiple into a text. Second, the example given by Shabir is one of those possibilities. Third, the perfect number of 28, which Shabir mentions has been known for literally ages before Muhammad was born. Fourth, a very brief search into the Bible gives us a bunch of multiples of 7 in even more miraculous fashion than the example given by Ali.
Shabir Ally states the following. A passage of the Quran that mentions the number 7, that’s Surah 2:196. Verse 196 turns out to be 7 x 7 x 4 = 196. It’s 7 twice so the chances of that is 1 out of 49. First of all, we can see that number 7 is actually a subtotal in this verse. Allah wants to get to the grand total of 10 days of fasting and splits these up in 3 and 7. So yes, the number 7 is mentioned but it is not at all the crux of the verse. Later on in our biblical examples we will see instances where the grand total is the miracle number. Now let’s assume that 7 x 7 x 4 is something special. Moreover, 7 x 4 = 28. Mathematicians have the concept of what is called a perfect number. Only 48 such numbers are known to mathematicians so far and 28 is one of them. So Ally says that 28 is a perfect number according to mathematicians but this has been known since ancient history because 28 is one of the most simple and easy to follow examples of a perfect number. you see 28 is a perfect number because of 1 + 2 + 4 + 14 = 28. We know this perfect number was discovered by mankind at least five centuries before Mohammed was born. Scholars and apologists have proven many times before that the Quran is filled with plagiarism from the ancient Greeks and although there is still no reason for me to assume that this numerological example given by Shabir is anything more than a coincidence, it may not be coincidental that we are led once again to the ancient Greeks when examining the history of perfect numbers.
A man from ancient Roman Syria called Nicomachus was a famous mathematician who lived between 60 and 120 AD. He was heavily influenced by Aristotle and wrote the text you see on screen, which was translated from his Greek work. As you can clearly see, he already mentions the numbers 6 and 28 as perfect numbers. Is Shabir Ally suggesting that the people at the time of Muhammad’s so-called prophethood had not yet come across the perfectness of number 28 even though it was known to mankind for literally hundreds of years? Surely he will not want to present a case where the first Muslims were completely ignorant of relatively simple mathematical conclusions drawn by the rest of the world centuries prior. Obviously, the Muslims could easily have placed this numerological example in the Quran especially since the order of the chapters were determined years after Muhammad’s death but in all fairness I doubt that this was done deliberately. This mathematical example is most likely to be merely a coincidence and I say this because when I open my Bible up, I came across these multiples of seven just about every seven minutes of my search. I will give you just two of the several examples I have found.
In 1 Chronicles 5:24, we read the following verse.
As you can see, this verse gives us exactly 7 names but why is this significant? Chapter 5 of 1 Chronicles is the 343rd chapter of the Bible and 7 x 7 x 7 = 343. Perfect score. This completely shatters Shabir Ally’s measly 7 x 7 x 4.
The second and final example is even more amazing. Nehemiah 7:21 keeps a record of the number of children of a certain individual. We have a lot of numbers in this particular place. Let’s see how many of them are multiples of seven.
The chapter of Nehemiah is 7. We have verse 21 and 7 x 3 = 21. The verse itself speaks of 7 x 14 = 98 children. This gives us a new number 14 and 7 x 2 = 14. There are four 7s and 7 x 4 = 28, a perfect number.
We have shown everyone that Shabir Ally’s example of a so-called mathematical miracle was actually a perfect number long before the days of Muhammad and was bettered by my personal example which I did not get from any book or website. I assure you I found in just a few minutes of targeted searching.
We did not make this video to mock Shabir Ally or other Muslims but we do want to warn people against the kind of cheap and self-deluding tricks given by some Muslim apologists. To point at mathematical coincidences in large books that have numbered verses is just a silly trick to make people who rely on the intelligence of others think that there is a miracle from God. We see this many times and a lot of people fall victim to this kind of falsehood. And this is why brother David Wood went to Google, not to be unscholarly as the demagogic Shabir Ally pointed out to his audience, but merely to show everyone how silly the argument is. And for the record, there were definitely correct examples from the things he took from Google. Why doesn’t Shabir attempt to attack the substance of the source instead of the source itself? The fact is that we can find mathematical so-called miracles in any book. We could find them in every single newspaper ever published if they had numbered lines.