Here’s the English translation:

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﴾ سَنُرِیۡہِمۡ اٰیٰتِنَا فِی الۡاٰفَاقِ وَ فِیۡۤ اَنۡفُسِہِمۡ حَتّٰی یَتَبَیَّنَ لَہُمۡ اَنَّہُ الۡحَقُّ ؕ اَوَ لَمۡ یَکۡفِ بِرَبِّکَ اَنَّہٗ عَلٰی کُلِّ شَیۡءٍ شَہِیۡدٌ ﴿۵۳﴾

Footnote 70:

This verse carries two meanings, and both have been given by major commentators.

First meaning: They will soon see with their own eyes that the message of this Qur’an has spread over all the surrounding lands, and they themselves have submitted before it. At that point they will realize that what they are being told today, and refusing to accept, was entirely true.

Some have objected to this interpretation, saying that the mere triumph of a message and conquest of vast territories is not proof of its truth — false ideologies also spread, and their followers also conquer land after land. But this is a superficial objection made without considering the full picture. The astonishing conquests granted to Islam in the time of the Prophet ﷺ and the Rightly Guided Caliphs were not signs of God merely in the sense that believers kept conquering territory — rather, they were signs in the sense that this conquest, unlike other conquests in world history, did not simply make one person, one family, or one nation the owner of others’ lives and property, filling God’s earth with tyranny. On the contrary, this conquest carried with it a magnificent religious, moral, intellectual, cultural, political, and economic revolution — wherever its effects reached, the best qualities in human beings came to flourish while the worst were suppressed.

Virtues that the world had only expected to find in world-renouncing ascetics and hermits secluded in worship — never imagining they could be found among those managing worldly affairs — this revolution displayed in the politics of rulers, the justice of judges, the warfare and conquests of army commanders, the tax collection of revenue officers, and the trade of great merchants. Within the society it produced, it elevated ordinary people so highly in character, conduct, and cleanliness that even the elite of other societies appeared beneath their level. It pulled humanity out of the cycle of superstition and myth and set it upon the clear highway of rational inquiry and sound thought and action.

It cured social ills that other systems never even attempted to address, or attempted but failed to cure — such as: division of humanity by race, ethnicity, homeland, or language; class division within a single society along with hierarchical distinctions and untouchability; absence of equality in legal rights and social practice; the degradation of women and their deprivation of even basic rights; widespread crime; the normalization of alcohol and intoxicants; government being beyond criticism and accountability; ordinary people being deprived of basic human rights; disregard for treaties in international relations; savagery in war; and other such ills.

Above all, within the Arabian peninsula itself, this revolution visibly replaced anarchy with order, bloodshed and lawlessness with peace, immorality with piety and purity, oppression and injustice with justice, filth and coarseness with cleanliness and refinement, ignorance with knowledge, and generations-old blood feuds with brotherhood and love — and it made a people who could not even dream beyond tribal chieftaincy into the leaders of the world.

These were the signs that very generation witnessed with their own eyes — the generation the Prophet ﷺ first addressed when he recited this verse. And from that time to this day, Allah continues to display these signs. Even in their periods of decline, Muslims have shown a height of moral character that those who parade themselves as standard-bearers of civilization have never come close to matching. The oppressive treatment that European nations inflicted upon the conquered peoples of Africa, America, Asia, and even within Europe itself has no parallel in any period of Muslim history. It is the blessing of this very Qur’an that instilled such humanity in Muslims that even in victory they never became the kind of oppressors that non-Muslims have been found to be throughout every era of history, down to today.

Anyone with open eyes need only look: how Muslims treated Christians during the centuries they ruled Spain, and how Christians then treated Muslims once they gained the upper hand there. How Muslims treated Hindus during their roughly eight-hundred-year rule in India, and how Hindus are treating Muslims now that they hold power. How Muslims have treated Jews over the past thirteen hundred years, and how Jews are treating Muslims now in Palestine.

Second meaning: Allah will show people signs both in the horizons of the earth and sky and within their own selves, through which it will become clear to them that what this Qur’an teaches is indeed the truth. Some have objected to this meaning by saying that people were already looking at the horizons of earth and sky, and at their own selves, even at that time — so what would it mean to show signs in these things in the future?

But this objection is just as superficial as the objection to the first meaning. The horizons of earth and sky are, of course, the very same ones humanity has always observed, and man’s own being is likewise the same as it has always been observed to be in every age. But the signs of God contained within these things are so limitless that humanity has never been able to encompass them, nor ever will be. In every age, new signs have kept appearing before mankind, and they will continue to appear until the Day of Judgment.

Fact findings/ disagreements on above by AI

Good critical question. The footnote mixes several different kinds of claims, and they don’t all have the same evidentiary status. Breaking it down:

The theological framing — that these historical events count as “signs of God” — isn’t a claim historians can verify or falsify one way or the other. That’s an interpretive/theological judgment, not a historical one.

The “civilizational revolution” claims (ending tribalism, elevating rights, replacing chaos with order in Arabia) — these have real historical support. Early Islamic reforms did restructure pre-Islamic Arabian tribal society, introduce legal frameworks, and produce rapid social change. But “unprecedented in world history” and framing it as uniquely free of the ills that plagued “other systems” is a much stronger claim than most historians would sign off on — it overstates the uniqueness and understates that early Islamic society still had social hierarchies, slavery persisted (though regulated), and women’s status, while improved relative to some pre-Islamic norms, still involved real legal inequalities by modern standards. Historians of the early caliphates (e.g., Hugh Kennedy, Fred Donner) describe a genuinely significant transformation — but a complex, uneven one, not a clean, ill-free revolution.

Spain (Al-Andalus) claim — that Muslim rule treated Christians well, contrasted with harsher Christian treatment of Muslims post-Reconquista: this has meaningful historical backing. Andalusian society under the Umayyads is well documented for relative tolerance and cultural flourishing (the convivencia period), and the 1492 expulsions, forced conversions, and Inquisition under Ferdinand and Isabella are well-documented and harsher by comparison. But it’s not the full picture — dhimmi status still meant legal inferiority and a special tax (jizya), and there were real episodes of persecution under Muslim rule too (the 1066 Granada massacre of Jews, and later Almohad persecution of both Jews and Christians in the 12th century). So “no ill-treatment under Muslim rule” is an overstatement even where the broader comparison has some validity.

India (800 years) claim — this is much more historically contested. Muslim rule in India included periods of genuine syncretism and tolerance (Akbar is the standard example) alongside episodes of temple destruction, forced conversions, and jizya under other rulers (e.g., aspects of Aurangzeb’s reign, or earlier Ghaznavid raids). Historians disagree sharply on how to weigh these periods against each other — this isn’t a settled, verifiable claim, it’s an active historiographical debate, partly because contemporary Indian politics has made the history itself contested terrain.

The claims about “now” — how Hindus treat Muslims in India today, and how Jews treat Muslims in Palestine today — these aren’t historical claims at all; they’re one-sided characterizations of live, deeply contested political conflicts. Both the India–Pakistan/Hindu–Muslim relationship and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have substantial documented grievances on multiple sides, and serious scholars, journalists, and human rights organizations across the political spectrum disagree sharply on how to characterize them. Presenting either as a simple morality tale isn’t something I can verify as “true” — it’s advocacy framing, not verifiable historical fact.

Bottom line: parts of this footnote track real, well-documented history (Andalusian tolerance relative to the Reconquista, early Islamic legal reform), but the passage systematically omits counter-examples and states comparative moral judgments about entire civilizations — and especially about live political conflicts — in far more absolute terms than the actual historical and political record supports.

Further rebuttal/ pushback on claims in the foot notes.

Here are documented counter-examples for each region/period the footnote addresses, organized by claim.

Spain (Al-Andalus)

What the footnote omits about Muslim rule:

• The 1066 Granada massacre, in which a mob killed the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and reportedly thousands of the city’s Jews — one of the worst pre-modern pogroms against Jews in Europe.
• Under the Almohad dynasty (12th century), both Jews and Christians faced forced conversion, expulsion, or death — Maimonides’ family fled Córdoba during this period for exactly this reason.
• Dhimmi status for Christians and Jews under Muslim rule included the jizya tax, restrictions on building/repairing churches and synagogues, and legal subordination — “tolerance” meant protected but unequal status, not full citizenship.

What it omits about Christian Spain: This part is accurate as far as it goes — the 1492 Alhambra Decree expelled Jews, forced conversions of Muslims followed, and the Inquisition targeted both groups. The footnote isn’t wrong here, just silent on the Muslim-rule counter-examples above.

India

• Mahmud of Ghazni’s early 11th-century raids repeatedly destroyed Hindu temples (Somnath, most famously) and looted extensively.
• Aurangzeb’s reign (17th century) reimposed the jizya tax on non-Muslims after Akbar had abolished it, and ordered destruction of temples including at Varanasi and Mathura — well documented in Mughal court chronicles themselves, not just later polemics.
• The Delhi Sultanate’s early conquests (12th–13th century) involved large-scale violence against Hindu and Buddhist populations, including the destruction of Nalanda and other Buddhist centers.
• Countering the footnote’s implied contrast: Akbar’s reign is the standard example of genuine Mughal pluralism (abolishing jizya, marrying into Rajput families, patronizing Hindu scholarship) — showing the record within Muslim rule itself was highly variable, not a uniform 800-year tolerance.

Jews and Muslims (13 centuries)

• The Granada massacre (above) and Almohad persecution directly contradict a clean narrative.
• The 1912–1948 mellah (Jewish quarter) system in Morocco and periodic violence against Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere in the 19th–20th centuries (e.g., the 1941 Farhud massacre in Baghdad, which killed an estimated 180+ Jews) are well documented.
• Countering this: the Ottoman Empire’s acceptance of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 is a genuine, well-documented positive counter-example — again showing wide variation rather than a single pattern.

On the “civilizational revolution” framing generally

• Slavery persisted under Islamic law throughout the classical period (regulated, with paths to manumission, but not abolished) — including the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades, which continued for over a millennium.
• Women’s legal status improved relative to some pre-Islamic Arabian norms (inheritance rights, marriage contracts) but retained substantial legal inequality (testimony weight, inheritance shares, guardianship) that persisted across the classical period.

On “now” — India and Palestine

These are live, contested conflicts where credible human rights organizations (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Indian and Israeli domestic groups) have documented serious concerns from multiple directions — this isn’t a case where evidence points cleanly one way, and I’d be doing the same one-sided thing the footnote does if I tried to summarize it as a simple verdict.

Overall pattern: the footnote’s core historical claims aren’t fabricated — each region did have real periods of documented tolerance — but it presents the best moments of Muslim rule against the worst moments of the comparison group, while leaving out the worst moments on its own side.