The Stories of the Prophets: What an Unlettered Arabia Could Not Have Known

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The ninth category asks how it is a miracle that the Prophet ﷺ narrated the stories of the earlier prophets. To see it, one must grasp how cut off and unlettered Arabia was, like a civilization sealed off in a jungle that somehow knows the detailed histories of every other people. Even the names of the Judeo-Christian prophets were largely unknown to the Arabs. Why would they know Yūsuf and Yaʿqūb, or care about Isḥāq? They preserved Ibrāhīm and Ismāʿīl, but the line of Isḥāq onward was nothing to them; of ʿĪsā they had only the vaguest notion. That is why, when the Quraysh sought test questions, one was, "Ask him about Yūsuf and his brothers", for who among them knew Joseph? There was not one library in all of Mecca, no Arabic Bible, and in the whole city barely five or ten who could read and write. Into that emptiness an unlettered man began recounting the Flood, Ādam and Ḥawwāʾ, Isḥāq and Yaʿqūb and Yūsuf, ʿĪsā and Mūsā, in detail: مَا كُنتَ تَعْلَمُهَا أَنتَ وَلَا قَوْمُكَ مِن قَبْلِ هَٰذَا, "Neither you nor your people knew these before this" (11:49).

❧The lost Gospel

Most striking: the Qurʾān preserves stories of ʿĪsā not found in the New Testament to this day, his speaking from the cradle, and his forming birds of clay and breathing life into them (mentioned three times). Neither is in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and for centuries Christians mocked these as bizarre Muslim inventions. Then, around the 1870s, a monastery was found in the Egyptian desert holding the body of a monk of a lost 4th-century Christian sect, with scrolls of non-canonical gospels, for at Nicaea and after, the many other gospels had been suppressed and destroyed, only four kept. Among these scrolls was a Gospel attributed to Thomas, and in it are found both of these very stories, the infant speaking and the clay birds given life. For some thirteen centuries no Christian community had known them; they were preserved only in the Qurʾān. It is, the shaykh says, a concrete and checkable sign of the truth of the revelation.