The Prophets of the Quran

Belief in these twenty-five Prophets an article of Islamic faith

Belief in these prophets of Allah is a fundamental article of the Islamic faith. Indeed, it is said that any Muslim who ‘denies belief in any of the Prophets leaves the fold of Islam.’  

   Muslim children are brought up to imitate the ‘perfect lives’ of the twenty-five so-called prophets of Islam. Cute cartoon videos can be found on You Tube in which the drawings of the prophets themselves are misted out, so as not to infringe the Islamic prohibition on depiction of Muhammad or other revered personages of the faith.  

   There are often significant differences between Muhammad’s accounts of the Prophets in the Quran and the accounts of the Prophets in the Bible. This is due to several important factors which are explained below. 

The Old Testament of the Bible – Hebrew myths, laws, legends and history

The Old Testament, the Jewish part of the Bible that we know today, consisting of 39 books, begins with Genesis, the ancient Hebrew creation myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and continues with the history of the Jews and the myths and legends of their kings and prophets compiled over hundreds of years. [1] 

   These archetypal myths, legends and stories have profound religious meaning, recounting as they do the everlasting struggle of humankind to transcend Evil and attain the Good. The most ancient books of the Old Testament are thought to be those which recount the lives of the Prophets. Many of these stories originate from between 500-800 years before the birth of Christ, and well over a thousand years before the birth of Muhammad in 570CE. 

The New Testament of the Bible – the Four Gospels

The New Testament, the Christian part of the Bible that we know today, begins with four different accounts of the life of Jesus Christ, his teachings and his death upon the cross. These four accounts, known as the four Gospels, have been ascribed to the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are thought to have been written some decades after the death of Jesus Christ, who was crucified in Jerusalem on the order of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate in about 30CE. 

    These four Christian Gospels are not at all comparable to the Quran. They do not at all purport to be the unalterable word of God. Indeed, they are more comparable to the earliest biographies of the Prophet Muhammad as recounted by Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, Al-Tabari and Al-Waqidi, for example, although even the first of these oral histories, Ibn Ishaq’s Life of Muhammad, was not in fact dictated and written down in its final form until well over a century after Muhammad’s death.

The Quran –the influence of Christianity

The Prophet Muhammad, born c570CE, was an intelligent and thoughtful person, a seeker after truth. He early on realised that the 360 idols of the Kabah were unresponsive manmade objects unworthy of the worship of any intelligent human being. Hence like other hanif [2] before him, Muhammad continually questioned, and debated with, believers and holy men of the two main religions of his time, Judaism and Christianity, and listened carefully to their arguments about which religion was the true one. 

   There was at the time in 7th-century Arabia, enormous controversy between the numerous different Christian Churches and Judeo-Christian sects about the relationship of Jesus with God Almighty, and the vexed question of how Jesus could be both human and divine. [3]

    At the age of forty, Muhammad finally had his first revelation. He became convinced that the Arab moon god, Allah, was the same god as in the Bible, the God of Creation, One Being, with no partners or associates, and that Jesus, though miraculously born of the Virgin Mary, was purely human, merely a prophet of Allah. Anyone who believed otherwise, Christians included, were utterly mistaken and nothing more than idolators, to be consigned to the Fires of Hell. 

   Under the influence of certain other Judeo-Christian sects around him at the time, Muhammad also came to believe that Jesus had not actually been crucified by the Romans or the Jews, and that Jesus’s reported death on the cross had been some sort of mirage. Jesus had merely ascended to heaven, from whence he would come forth to fight the Anti-Christ on the Day of Judgement. [4] 

   Many revelations were to follow over the next two decades of Muhammad’s life, until his death in 632CE and it is these revelations from Allah, at first religious, then legal and often practical, that make up the 114 suras [chapters] of his Quran [the Recital].

Muhammad’s tutors and advisors in Mecca and Medina

Muhammad was illiterate, so he never knew whether the religious teachings and stories he heard from others were in the canonical Bible or whether they were taken from the many ancient legends, Jewish tales and commentaries, or Christian apocryphal stories and pseudo-gospels circulating at the time in the Middle East. 

   He therefore learned orally, from the lips of often ignorant or superstitious contemporaries, all manner of contradictory, heretical and dubious teachings, as well as legends and stories of ancient heroes, kings and prophets. In particular, he would have heard the fantastical tales about the life of the infant Jesus and his mother Mary which have found their way into the Quran we know today. 

    We know from the Quran that the Meccans nicknamed him ‘All Ears’, and accused him of learning from ‘that man in al-Yamama’, of repeating ‘legends of the ancients’ and of ‘having men recite to him day and night’. 

   We know from the hadith that there was a Christian who tutored him in Mecca before reverting to Christianity. We know from Ibn Ishaq that after his arrival in Medina, Muhammad was taught verses of the Torah by a Jew called Ibn Salam, and that he was advised on religious matters and Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine by a former slave called Salman the Persian, who became part of his intimate household. 

   We also know from Ibn Ishaq that a scribe called Abdullah b Sa’d left Islam and fled to Mecca saying that he had contributed sentences to the Quran which Muhammad was claiming had come to him direct from God. This explains why Muhammad had Abdullah’s name on a death list when he conquered Mecca in 630CE.         

Stories from the Books of the Christian Apocrypha in the Quran

The Apocrypha is a collection of intertestamental books of the Bible originally widely accepted in the canon of the early Christian Church but since discarded or removed by some Churches because of doubts about their authenticity or because the teachings in them did not conform to later canonical [officially accepted] doctrine. 

   They are however significant to Islam because there are many instances of Apocryphal material which Muhammad heard and recited into his Quran. As we know from Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad personally had some debate and contact with early Christians, such as the Syrian Gnostic Christian monk, Bahira, who recognized that Muhammad bore the ‘seal of prophecy,’ and Muhammad’s cousin by marriage, Waraka, who is thought to have belonged to a heretical Judeo-Christian sect known as the Ebionites, similar to the Nazarenes, who relied on an early form of the Gospel of St Matthew.  

Pre-Islamic Jewish tales in the Quran

It is a fact that many of the stories of the Prophets found in the Quran do not correspond with those in the Old or New Testaments of the Bible, nor with those in the Books of the Apocrypha. Instead, they derive from a wide variety of ancient texts containing forgotten stories and commentaries by various unknown Jewish authors, but which were believed by ignorant Jewish tribes at the time of Muhammad to form part of the scriptures of the Old Testament. 

   For example, Muhammad put into the Quran the strange magical tale of Sulaiman, his army of birds, animals and spirits, and his encounter with the Queen of Sheba that can be found, not in the Old Testament, but in an ancient Jewish annotated and embellished version of the apocryphal Book of Esther, written by an unknown hand many centuries before. 

   For this reason, Muhammad was mocked by the Meccans, especially by al-Nadr b. al-Harith for re-telling ‘tales of the ancients’ in the Quran, and it was in revenge for this mockery that Muhammad had al-Nadr beheaded after the Battle of Badr in 624CE.  

Pre-Islamic Christian stories in the Quran

The people of sixth and seventh century Arabia would also have been well acquainted with these and other now lost religious books, as well as certain apocryphal Christian stories that have found their way into the Quranic versions of the Lives of the Prophets. 

   For example, the Quranic story of the Infant Jesus speaking in the cradle can be found in a naïve and peculiar collection of stories known as the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Saviour, in which the new-born baby Jesus is said to have piped up: ‘I am Jesus, the Son of God, the Logos, whom thou hast brought forth, as the Angel Gabriel announced to thee, and my Father has sent me for the salvation of the world. ’ 

   The Quranic story of the young Jesus making little clay birds and blowing life into them is found in the long-forgotten so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a collection of fanciful tales by an unknown author or authors about the early life of Jesus, which also originated sometime in the second century. These stories were still being widely recited at the time of Muhammad, and remained in popular folklore in Europe right up into medieval times. [5]

Muhammad hears about the Jewish prophecy of a Messiah 

It was a decade after his first Christian-based revelations that Muhammad came into contact with the Aus and Khazraj tribes of Medina. As Ibn Ishaq relates:

 ‘Whenever he could, Muhammad preached the word of Allah to the Arab tribes at the fairs, and in 620CE, at al-Aqaba, he met some men of Medina who told him they were of the Khazraj tribe. They and the tribe of Aus lived alongside tribes of Jews, who were people with knowledge of the Scriptures, whilst they themselves were idolators. When the tribesmen heard the apostle recite the Quran, they said to one another, ‘This is the very Prophet the Jews warned us about. Let us accept him before they do!’ And they returned to Medina as believers and Ansar (Helpers), promising to meet up with Muhammad the following year.’ [6]

Muhammad’s belief in the ‘Four Holy Books’ from Allah 

From then on, Muhammad began to claim that the god Allah was the same god as in the Hebrew Old Testament as well as in the Christian New Testament. He had heard the term, the Torah, and believed it to be a ‘book’ which had come down to Moses from Allah. 

   Similarly, Muhammad believed that the Zabur [Psalms] was a ‘book’ that had come down to David, and the Injeel [Evangelium] was a ‘book’ that had come to Jesus from Allah, in the same way that the Quran [Recital] was a ‘book’ that had come down to him. 

   For fourteen hundred years now, Muslim scholars have defended this extraordinary belief and unable to locate these supposed ‘books’, have continued to claim that wicked Jews and Christians have somehow ‘concealed’ or ‘corrupted’ or ‘distorted’ or ‘rewritten’ these ‘books’ rather than submit to the truth of Islam, the religion of Allah’s prophets that began with Adam and so preceded Judaism and Christianity.      

Muhammad’s claims to be the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament 

Muhammad had always gone along with the Ebionite belief that Jesus, though miraculously born of the Virgin Mary, was merely a mortal man and Prophet. From the time he met the Aus and Khazraz, however, Muhammad began to claim that he, Muhammad, and not Jesus, was the long-awaited Prophet and Messiah foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. 

   According to Muhammad, Jesus was downgraded from being the Son of God to being just the second to last in a long line of Prophets of Judaism and Christianity that was to culminate in Muhammad himself, the greatest and the last, the very ‘Seal of the Prophets.’ 

   So in his subsequent revelations of Heaven and Hell, and particularly in his own personal revelations of the Day of Judgement, Muhammad drew on both Christian and Jewish beliefs, and particularly on the Ebionite version of the Gospel of St Matthew in its description of ‘the last trumpet’ and the ‘fiery furnace,’ both of which occur in the Quran. (Sura 39.68)

   The ‘fiery furnace’ also occurs in Muhammad’s own separate account of his Night Journey to Jerusalem and his Ascent to the [Jewish] Seven Heavens, where he claimed to have seen Jesus [Isa] and John the Baptist [Yahyah] of the Christian Gospels residing as Prophets, along with several of the great Prophets of the Hebrew scriptures [the Old Testament].[7]    

Muhammad’s reception by the Jews of Medina

Unfortunately, when the Prophet Muhammad finally emigrated to Medina in 622CE, expecting to be hailed as the long-awaited Messiah/Prophet of the Scriptures, the leaders and rabbis of the three largest tribes of Jews, the Beni Qaynuka, the Beni al-Nadir, and the Beni Qurayza refused to believe in his claims of prophethood, saying that ‘he brought them nothing that they recognised.’ [8]

   Muhammad became particularly angry when, like the leaders of the Quraysh before them, the Jews of Medina mocked him for being illiterate. The Jews also refused to allow Muhammad’s followers even to have a look at their Scriptures. Muhammad was eventually to get his revenge on the Jews for their unbelief. Within five years, these three tribes no longer existed in Medina, having been exiled or massacred by the Muslims.     

Muhammad’s threatening letter to the Jews of Khaybar, 628CE

According to Ibn Ishaq, after the disappointment of his troops over the signing of the Treaty of Hudaybiya in March 628CE/6AH, Muhammad wrote a threatening letter to the Jews of Khaybar in which he deliberately likened himself to the Prophet Moses and claimed to be the long-awaited Prophet or Messiah foretold in their Scriptures (Deuteronomy Chapter 18, verse 15.) [9]

   Muhammad begins his letter by telling the Jews that he is the Prophet to be found in their Scriptures. He identifies closely with Moses, and promises them forgiveness and Paradise if they submit to Islam and agree that he is the Prophet foretold in their Holy Books.

   Towards the end of the letter, he says that if they do not find him in their Scriptures, there is ‘no compulsion upon them [to believe].’ Then, knowing that the Old Testament prophecy describes the Messiah as being like Moses, Muhammad reasserts his claim. He quotes from Sura 2 of the Quran, and ends by summoning them ‘to Allah and His Prophet.’ Ibn Ishaq quotes the wording of the letter in full: