58وَقالوا أَآلِهَتُنا خَيرٌ أَم هُوَ ۚ ما ضَرَبوهُ لَكَ إِلّا جَدَلًا ۚ بَل هُم قَومٌ خَصِمونَMuhammad Asadand say, "Which is better - our deities or he?"1 [But] it is only in the spirit of dispute that they put this comparison before thee: yea, they are contentious folk!2Objecting to the Qur'anic condemnation of their idolatrous worship of angels - whom they describe here as "our deities" - the pagan Quraysh pointed to the parallel Christian worship of Jesus as "the son of God", and even as "God incarnate", and argued more or less thus: "The Qur'an states that Jesus was purely human - and yet the Christians, whom the same Qur'an describes as 'followers of earlier revelation' (ahl al-kitab), consider him divine. Hence; are we not rather justified in our worshipping angels, who are certainly superior to a mere human being?" The fallacy inherent in this "argument" is disposed of in the sequence.Since the Qur'an condemns explicitly, and in many places, the deification of Jesus by the Christians, this unwarranted deification cannot be used as an argument in favour of the pagan worship of angels and, thus, against the Qur'an: in the words of Zamakhshari, such an argument amounts to "applying a false analogy to a false proposition" (qiyas batil bi-batil).