Did a Christian Teach the Prophet of Islam?

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In some variants of the ninth-century Islamic accounts of the Christian priest Waraqa bin Naufal recognizing Muhammad as a prophet, Waraqa writes the Gospel in Hebrew; in other versions, however, he writes it in Arabic. The purpose of the variants might be to distance Waraqa from the Jews, who, according to these traditions, some charged was teaching Muhammad the Qur’an. Allah himself answers the charges in the Qur’an: “And we know well that they say, Only a man teaches him. The speech of him about whom they falsely hint is foreign, and this is clear Arabic.” (16:103)

That foreigner may also have been someone else; after all, from the record of these Islamic traditions, Waraqa wasn’t the only learned Jew, Christian, or pagan who had contact with Muhammad. Another was a mysterious and pivotal figure of early Islam, Salman the Persian. The Arabic word translated here as “foreign” in Qur’an 16:103 is ajami, which means Persian or Iranian. The Qur’an’s repeated insistence that it is in Arabic may betray an anxiety to head off suspicions of any foreign (or Persian) influence.

Then there is an unnamed figure who, according to a hadith, “was a Christian who embraced Islam and read Surat al-Baqarah [sura 2 of the Qur’an] and Ahl-Imran [sura 3], and he used to write (the revelations) for the Prophet.” In other words, he used to transcribe Muhammad’s Qur’anic recitations. Evidently this experience disabused him of the notion that they were divinely inspired, for “later on he returned to Christianity again and he used to say: ‘Muhammad knows nothing but what I have written for him.’” The tradition asserts that this man’s sin was so grave that, after he died, the earth itself would not accept his body, and after his people made several attempts to bury him only to find that the earth had spat him out again, they gave up.

That Muhammad’s prophetic mission was confirmed by a Christian convert from Judaism has been a source of embarrassment to Muslims, and some Muslim sources have denied that Waraqa was a Christian. Meanwhile, some modern scholars contend that Waraqa actually rejected Muhammad, and that the text of Ibn Hisham’s version of the Sira was later corrupted. They point out that there is no account in the voluminous hadith of Waraqa’s conversion to Islam or the details of his death—an argument from silence, to be sure, but a curious omission in a corpus that contains the minutest details of Muhammad’s activities and the events of the early Muslim community. After all, the conversion of a Christian priest, the cousin of Muhammad and his wife, would have been a momentous event. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that mainstream Islam accepts that Waraqa recognized Muhammad’s prophetic status, that Waraqa converted to Islam, and that the Bible—at least in its uncorrupted, original state—predicted the coming of Muhammad.

Even so, the suspicion that Waraqa taught Muhammad significant portions of what Muhammad represented as divine revelation in the Qur’an, has haunted Islam. Across these many centuries there is no way to determine the precise relationship between Muhammad and Waraqa, if either of them actually existed at all, and no way to tell if his wife’s cousin was his source for anything. What, however, is indisputable and interesting is that the Qur’an incorporates Jewish and Christian sources and that some of the “tales of the ancients” that found their way into the Qur’an are not from the canonical gospels but from decidedly heterodox sources—the sorts of sources Muhammad would likely encounter in Arabia, where heretical Christians predominated.

The clearest example of this is the Qur’an’s denial of the crucifixion of Christ, and assertion that the Jews who crucified him actually only thought they were doing so, but actually were not. It seemed to them as if they were, but they weren’t: “And because of their saying, We killed the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the messenger of Allah, they did not kill him nor crucify him, but it seemed so to them, and indeed, those who disagree about this are in doubt about it, they have no knowledge of it except pursuit of a supposition, they did not kill him for certain.” (4:157)

This is the most significant Qur’anic appropriation from Christian Gnosticism. In the Gnostic Second Treatise of the Great Seth, which dates from the third century, Jesus says: “For my death, which they think happened, (happened) to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death…It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I.”

For the Gnostics, this denial was rooted in an abhorrence of the material world and the flesh, which led to their denying altogether the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation; Muslims, on the other hand, deny the Crucifixion because, in their view, Allah’s prophet cannot suffer defeat.