... Islam in the name of another faith, namely the Manichaean faith which several of the friends of Ibn al-Mukaffa' had adopted and of which the writer himself was suspected.[1] The reference 2 gives a brief review of his work: The prominent Arabic prose writer of Iranian descent who was cruelly put to death in 139/756, is said to have tried to imitate the Qur'ân at the behest of the group of heretics, but he had to abandon this endeavour because it proved too difficult. This is of course a legend. But Ibn al-Mukaffa' did compose a polemic in which he took issue with Islam, and especially with the Qur'ân from a Manichaean standpoint. Fragments of this polemic have come down to us in a refuation written by Zaydi Imam, al-Qasim b. Ibrahim (d. 246/860). The first four words of this polemic - and they alone - are obviously modelled on the first ...

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