Professor Halim Sayoud of the Department of Electronics and Informatics, USTHB University, Algiers, Algeria, writes in his paper Author discrimination between the Holy Quran and Prophet’s statements:
‘Author discrimination consists of checking whether two texts are written by the same author or not. Individuals have distinctive ways of speaking and writing, as explained by Corney (2003), and there exists a long history of linguistic and stylistic investigation into authorship attribution (Holmes, 1998). In recent years, practical applications of authorship attribution have grown in areas such as intelligence (linking intercepted messages to each other and to known terrorists), criminal law (identifying writers of ransom notes and harassing letters), civil law (copyright and estate disputes), and computer security (tracking authors of computer virus source code). As reported by Madigan (2005), this activity is part of a broader growth within computer science of identification technologies, including biometrics (retinal scanning, speaker recognition, etc), cryptographic signatures, intrusion detection systems, and others.’
‘In this research work, we deal with a religious enigma, which has not been solved for 14 centuries, as mentioned by Sayoud in 2010…., it is crucial to use rigorous scientific tools and it is important to interpret the results very carefully. Hence, knowing that authors possess specific stylistic features that make them differentiable (Jiexun, 2006), we tried to make some experiments of author discrimination between the Quran and some Prophet’s statements in order to show that the Quran was not written by the Prophet Muhammad, if the results of these techniques confirm that supposition (Al-Shreef, 2009).’
The conclusions
Results of all experiments have led to two main conclusions:
(1) First, the two investigated books should have different authors;
(2) Second, all the segments that are extracted from a unique book appear to have a certain stylistic similarity.
Consequently, we can conclude, according to this investigation, that the Quran was not written by the Prophet Muhammad and that it belongs to a unique author too. Muslims believe that it is written by Allah (God) and sent to his messenger (the prophet Muhammad). We will not extend our research work into an etymological point of view: this is not the main topic of this work, but we think that it may be interesting to mention this point. The result of this investigation rejects, then, the doubts assuming that the Quran was written by the Prophet and it confirms what has been stated by Muhammad: that the Quran has been transmitted to him (by Allah)
I’d need to see a written affidavit from the angel Gabriel first.
Professor Halim Sayoud’s conclusion stands or falls on his robust scientific methodology.
Scientific methodology is not something Iggy will understand. He’s still looking for Brutus the Brontosaurus and rabbits that chew the cud.
“I’d need to see a written affidavit from the angel Gabriel first”
Don’t you need the same from the holy spirit concerning the Bible?