The Prophets of the Quran

Introduction 

The Prophets of Islam according to the Quran

According to Islamic sources, twenty-five Prophets of Islam were mentioned by Muhammad in the Quran. 

   These twenty-five prophets have been listed in chronological order by Islamic scholars, who have attempted over the last fourteen hundred years, often in vain, to identify these prophets with the prophets of Judeo-Christian tradition as found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible:

Belief in these twenty-five prophets is an article of Islamic faith

Belief in these twenty-five prophets 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.  

Reading and understanding the Quran

To read and understand the Quran, it is essential to bear in mind the following points. 

  Firstly, the Quran is unique in containing only the oral revelations of a single man, the Prophet Muhammad, divided into 114 chapters known as suras.

   Secondly, Muslims have always learned to recite the suras by name, not by number, and still today, always refer to individual suras by name. 

   Thirdly, the suras are not in the same chronological order in which they were revealed to Muhammad, because they were only arranged in the current order after his death in 632CE.  

   Fourthly, when the definitive version of the Quran was being compiled under Caliph Uthman (644-655CE), the decision was made to place what were thought to be the most important and longest suras first. Thus the earliest revelations, which were often the shortest, have been placed last, towards the end of the Quran. 

   So if you want to read Muhammad’s first revelation, the revelation that was to be the origin of Islam, the revelation that was to alter the destiny of mankind, you will find it towards the end, among the other earliest revelations, as Sura 96. The Clot.

Muhammad’s sources 

Muhammad was illiterate, so he was unable to read any of the Hebrew or Christian scriptures for himself. Therefore, 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.

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. 

   These discarded books 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.’ Ibn Ishaq also describes the elderly Waraqa, Muhammad’s cousin by marriage, 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. [3]

Pre-Islamic Jewish tales in the Quran

Many of the stories of the prophets found in the Quran do not correspond with either those in the Old or New Testaments of the Bible, or 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 books 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 his highly-educated cousin, 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 with 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. [4]

The Islamic doctrine of infallibility

Even when a Quranic prophet story resembles the original Bible story, it is always censored to align with the doctrine that all Prophets of Islam are ‘righteous’ and ‘infallible.’ According to Muslim scholars, ‘their morality is beyond reproach,’ they cannot possibly have done anything that ‘deviates from the path of Allah,’ and their lives are a pattern for all devout Muslims to follow. Thus the Biblical story of King David, Bathseba and Uriah the Hittite has been omitted, and the Prophet Nathan’s criticism of David has been replaced in the Quran with a story called ‘The Two Litigants.’ 

Muhammad is hailed as the Messiah foretold in the Bible

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.’ [5]

Muhammad’s claims to be the foretold Messiah

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 Khazraj, however, Muhammad began to claim that he, Muhammad, and not Jesus, was the long-awaited Prophet and Messiah foretold in the Jewish scriptures. He downgraded Jesus 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 angels’, ‘the last trumpet’, and ‘the fiery furnace,’ all of which occur in the Quran. 

   The ‘fiery furnace’ also occurs in Muhammad’s own separate account of his Night Journey to Jerusalem on the fabulous winged beast Buraq, 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. [6]

Muhammad’s reception by the Jews of Medina

However, 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.’[7]

   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

The Beni al-Nadir who had fled to Khaybar then received a threatening letter from Muhammad, claiming to be the long-awaited Prophet or Messiah and ‘friend and brother of Moses’ foretold in Deuteronomy Chapter 18, verse 15 and summoning them to Islam.[8]

The Jews of Khaybar did not reply to the letter. Just three months later, in June 628CE/7AH, Muhammad, true to his threat, led his Muslim followers in a dawn raid on Khaybar and tortured their leader Kinana to death to make him reveal the whereabouts of the treasure of the Beni al-Nadir. (Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah)

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

As Muhammad was unable to read the Jewish and Christian scriptures for himself, he assumed that they were ‘direct revelations from Allah’ similar to his revelations in the Quran. He does not appear to have realised that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, consists of distinct books penned by different authors, who are said to have been ‘inspired by God’, but whose writings are not ‘the actual words of God’. 

  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. [10] 

   However, Muhammad heard the term, the Torah, and claimed that it was a holy ‘book’ which had come down to the Prophet Moses from Allah. Muhammad also claimed that the Zabur (Psalms) was a holy ‘book’ that had come down from Allah to David.

   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. [11]  

    However, Muhammad heard the term Injeel (Evangelum or Gospel) and claimed that it was a ‘book’ that had come down 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 maintained that wicked Jews and Christians have somehow ‘concealed’ or ‘corrupted’ or ‘distorted’ or ‘rewritten’ these ‘books’ rather than admit the truth of Islam, the religion that began with Adam and so preceded both Judaism and Christianity.   

Muhammad’s tutors and advisors

We learn from the Quran itself that the more educated Meccans realised that Muhammad had advisors and tutors from the very beginning of his ministry. So they mocked him and nicknamed him ‘All Ears’, and accused him of copying ‘that man in al-Yamama’, of repeating ‘legends of the ancients’ and of ‘having men recite to him day and night’. 

   Indeed, a hadith confirms that there was a Christian convert to Islam who tutored Muhammad in Mecca before reverting to Christianity and either dying or being killed by Muhammad’s followers for apostasy. 

   Ibn Ishaq relates that after his arrival in Medina, Muhammad was shown and taught verses of the Torah by a Jewish tribal leader called Ibn Salam who abandoned his own tribe in order to scour the Bible and find any verses in it that could be construed as foretelling the coming of  Muhammad, and to help him to assert political, legal and religious authority over all the tribes of Medina.  

  Ibn Ishaq also recounts how one of Muhammad’s scribes, 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 Allah. This explains why Muhammad had Abdullah’s name on a death list when he conquered Mecca in 630CE.

   Muhammad’s most influential advisor, however, was a former slave named Salman the Persian who advised him on religious matters and Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine and who became part of Muhammad’s intimate household. It was probably Salman who scoured the New Testament and advised Muhammad that his coming had been foretold in the Gospel of St John in a passage that in fact foretells the coming of the Holy Ghost. After Muhammad’s death, Salman was one of the principal advisors on the compilation of the Quran under Caliph Uthman, along with Ali b Abu Talib, Muhammad’s warrior cousin and son-in-law. [12]

Quranic versions of the Prophet Stories supersede those of the Bible

For fourteen hundred years now, Muslim scholars, on finding discrepancies between the Biblical and Quranic versions of the lives of the Prophets of Islam, have claimed that if the Quranic version of a story is the same as the ancient original version in the Bible, its validity is confirmed. 

   However, if the Quranic version of the story, as recited by the illiterate Prophet Muhammad from 610CE onwards, differs from those ancient scriptures dating from hundreds, if not a thousand years before, then it is the Prophet Muhammad’s oral version that is correct, and it is the ancient Judeo-Christian scriptures that are wrong having somehow been corrupted or rewritten by wicked Jews and Christians.  

   Al-Tabari [1460] reports that ‘the apostle commanded Zayd b. Thabit to study the Book of the Jews, saying, “I fear that they ([the Jews) may change my Book.”’ [13]

Prophets of the Quran

Historical Notes to the Introduction

[1] The term hanif was constantly used by Muhammad to refer to an upright person and true believer in the ‘pure monotheism of Abraham.’

[2] The Quran says: ‘They (the Jews) declared: ‘We have killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the apostle of Allah.’ They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, though it was made to appear like that to them. Those who disagree about him are full of doubt, with no knowledge, only supposition. They certainly did not kill him. Allah in His wisdom raised him up to Himself (Sura 4.157-158).’ This was the belief of Hanifism, the pre-Islamic Judeo-Christian monotheistic sect to which Muhammad’s rival prophet Musaylima belonged. It is one of the reasons why the Quraysh accused Muhammad of being taught by that ‘fellow in al-Yamama.’ 

[3] A concise account of ‘the perplexed maze of controversial doctrines from which Muhammad had to acquire his notions of the Christian faith, all of which have been pronounced heretical or schismatic’ is given in the note to Chapter VIII of Washington Irving’s Life of Muhammad, 1849. The Islamic belief that Jesus was a mortal man, and that Mary was his mortal mother, was that of the ancient Judeo-Christian Ebionite sect to which Khadija’s cousin, Waraqa, belonged.

[4] The Syriac Infancy Gospel (also known as the Arabic Infancy Gospel) of stories about the childhood of Jesus, is apparently based on two other spurious mid-second century documents called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Infancy Gospel of James (also known as the Protoevangelium of James). N.B. Any stories of bad behaviour by the boy Jesus have been omitted from the Quran, due to the Muslim doctrine of infallibility of Prophets. 

[5] Guillaume, A: The Life of Muhammad. A translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford University Press, 1955, p 198.

[6] Ibid. pp 181-187.  

[7] The Jews had always believed themselves to be God’s Chosen People, and were expecting a Prophet or Messiah from amongst their own people. At that time, they had every reason to reject Muhammad as a Prophet, and his claim that the ancient Arab moon god of the Kabah, Allah, was the same god as in the Old Testament. 

[8] Ibid. p256. Muhammad had learned from his Jewish ally in Medina that the Messianic Prophet foretold in the Torah was ‘like unto Moses and of his brethren’ (Deuteronomy 18:15), so here in this threatening letter to the Jews of Khaybar, he claims to be a ‘friend and brother of Moses.’ Muhammad often compared the Hijra (Emigration to Medina) to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and referred to his enemy, Abu Jahl, as ‘the Pharaoh of this umma (community).’ 

[9] Here Muhammad is quoting from the Quran: ‘There is no compulsion in religion. True guidance is now distinct from error (Sura 2. 256).’ Muslims often quote this verse as proof that Islam is a tolerant religion, and that no unbelievers have ever been forced to become Muslims. In fact, it means the opposite: Islam is so plainly and clearly true that those who deny its truth are surely guilty of deliberate error and therefore deserve ‘severe’ punishment in this world and the next. 

[10] There are 39 books in the Old Testament. The first five (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) form the Torah, and are known as The Law. The other books are divided into The Prophets and The Writings. The Prophets consists of two groups of books, The Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings) and The Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the book of the Twelve Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habbakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.) These books came to be regarded as Scriptures in about 200 BCE, therefore 800 years before Islam. The Writings are the remaining books of the Old Testament (Ruth, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Daniel), which were not finally accepted as being part of Scripture until after the time of Christ. (See Hinson, David F: The Books of the Old Testament Introduction 2, SPCK, 1974.)

[11] For 1400 years now, based on Muhammad’s teachings, Muslims have mocked Christians as ‘deluded idolators’ who follow ‘corrupt and anonymous’ gospels. In fact, there is a succession of testimonies and an unbroken chain of evidence to support the original attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For example, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (c130-c202CE), an immediate disciple of St Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (69-155CE), who in turn was an immediate disciple of St John the Apostle himself, writes, ‘So Matthew brought out a written gospel among the Jews in their own style (language) when Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel in Rome. Mark, the disciple of Peter, handed on to us his written account of what had been proclaimed by Peter. And Luke, the disciple of Paul, wrote the gospel as proclaimed by Paul. Later, John, the disciple of the Lord (Jesus) and the one who leaned against his chest, put out a gospel whilst residing in Ephesus of Asia.’

[12] Salman the Persian was a slave in Medina whom Muhammad ransomed and bought from his master. He had been brought up as a Zoroastrian, had converted to Christianity, and had studied under various Syrian bishops, so he became an invaluable source of religious knowledge for Muhammad. He also advised Muhammad on the building of the trench, and ‘took part in the Battle of the Trench as a free man and thereafter was present at every other battle.’  Guillaume, A: The Life of Muhammad. A translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford University Press, 1955, pp 95-98.

[13] Here, Muhammad is saying that his revelations from Allah are the true ones taken from God’s original ancient tablets in heaven, and that he suspects that the ‘deceitful’ Jews have been ‘tampering’ with the message of Allah sent down to them in the Torah (Sura 5.13).