Qur'an

Divine Revelation

Islam considers the Qur'an the only uncorrupted record of divine revelation, but earlier books identified in the Qur'an are considered to have been divinely inspired, including the Scrolls of Abraham (considered lost), the Tawrat (the Torah, the five books of the Pentateuch credited to Moses), the Zabur (attributed to King David, and so probably referring to the book of Psalms), and the Injil, the gospel of Jesus, which Muslims believe survives only in piecemeal, in fragments repeated in both canonical (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and noncanonical (Peter, James, and others) gospels. The kitab—the holy books of Islam—includes all these books, but only the Qur'an is considered to survive in an uncorrupted form, and thus only the Qur'an represents the actual words of God rather than the work of man. The Qur'an itself assumes some familiarity with the earlier Jewish and Christian scriptures on the part of the reader and interpolates or summarizes some of their content. Major biblical figures found in the Qur'an include Adam and Eve and their children; Abraham and the other patriarchs; Moses and his brother Aaron; prophets such as Elisha and Jonah; kings of Israel like David, Saul, and Solomon; Jesus and his parents; and John the Baptist. Later Islamic scholars have interpreted some Jewish and Christian scriptural passages as referring to Muhammad, much as Christian theologians have reinterpreted many Jewish prophecies in a Christian context.

The Qur'an is explicit about the ways in which Islam differs from the other faiths of “People of the Book.” Jesus, for instance, is believed to be the product of a virgin birth and is viewed as a prophet, but is neither the Son of God (instead, God caused him to be born to Mary just as he caused Adam to be created from dirt) nor was he resurrected (he was instead miraculously saved before he could be crucified, and “Allah raised him up unto Himself,” in the words of the fourth sura). Without a divine Son, there is no Trinity, and indeed belief in Tawhid, God's indivisible Oneness and uniqueness, is the most fundamental tenet of the faith.

Abraham, the patriarch to which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all trace their origins, is considered to have possessed a true revelation about the nature of God and God's Oneness, but no written version survived, and the oral version of his revelation became corrupted over the generations. The eldest son of Abraham, Ishmael, is the biblical figure to which the Qur'an traces the origin of the Arab people. The Qur'an considers Allah to be the same god as the god of Judaism and Christianity and promises that those Jews and Christians who were righteous and lived before Muhammad's revelation received salvation in the afterlife. These many connections to and commentaries on Judaism and Christianity explain why some of the earliest criticisms of Islam by Christian writers approached Islam not as a heathen religion but as a heretical form of Christianity (one influenced by Arianism, which was similarly nontrinitarian).

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