The Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Prophets

The Quran is Islam’s central sacred text. Muslims believe it is the word of God revealed in Arabic to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel over approximately twenty-three years. It consists of 114 chapters, called surahs, of varying lengths and addresses subjects including God, prophets, worship, ethics, justice, family and community life, and humanity’s relationship with God.

Muslims understand the Quran somewhat differently from the way Christians generally understand the Bible. The Bible is a collection of books written by numerous authors over many centuries, whereas Muslims believe the Quran consists of God’s direct revelation to Muhammad. In this respect, the Quran’s place in Islam is sometimes compared more closely to the place of Jesus in Christianity as the divine Word.

Muslims also believe that God revealed earlier scriptures, including the Scrolls to Abraham, the Torah to Moses, the Psalms to David, and the Gospel to Jesus, and the Quran contains many people and narratives familiar from the Bible.

The Muslim case rests on an unusual combination of oral and written transmission. From the beginning, the Quran was memorized in full by many of Muhammad’s companions and written down piecemeal by scribes. Within roughly two decades of his death, an official recension was compiled by a commission that cross-checked written records against the memories of those who had learned it directly from the Prophet, and standardized copies were distributed across the young empire. From then to now, transmission has run on parallel tracks, manuscript and memory, each checking the other; today millions of people (huffaz) know the entire text by heart, a living testament no other ancient book has.

The physical evidence supports an early, stable text: the oldest surviving manuscripts (including the Birmingham folios, radiocarbon-dated to Islam’s first decades, and the Sanaa manuscripts) correspond closely to the text recited today. Academic scholars of the Quran, working outside faith commitments, continue to debate details of the compilation’s history, as scholars should, and Muslims can engage that scholarship with confidence: its broad trajectory in recent decades has been toward earlier dating and greater textual stability than skeptical theories of a century ago proposed. 

Minor variant readings (qira’at) of the Quran do exist and are not a secret: they are a canonized part of the tradition, taught openly, affecting recitation and occasionally inflection, but not the substance of the text. Moreover, “authenticity” in this question means textual preservation, whether today’s Quran is what Muhammad delivered, which historical evidence can address; whether that text is divine revelation is a question of faith, for the Quran as for every scripture.

Since only about one in five Muslims is an Arab, the Quran has been translated into and is read in many other languages, with multiple English translations. However, because Muslims consider the original Arabic text to be the literal Word of God, during ritual prayers, the Quran is recited in its original Arabic language (just as some Catholic churches still perform mass in Latin or synagogues perform part of their prayer in Hebrew). To fully understand the Quran for study and spiritual enrichment, non-Arab Muslims also read translations in their native languages.

On the basis of scripture: the Quran calls Muhammad “the Messenger of God and the Seal of the Prophets” (33:40), and prophetic sayings elaborate the point. In one, Muhammad compares the succession of prophets to a building complete but for one final brick. But it helps to grasp what the claim means, because “final” is often misheard as dismissive of what came before. It is the opposite: Muslims believe God sent prophets to every people throughout history, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and thousands unnamed, all teaching the same essential message, and that Muhammad’s mission confirms and completes that single chain rather than founding something against it. Finality means Muslims expect no further prophet or revelation; the message, they hold, is complete and preserved, and religious authority after Muhammad passes to no prophet but to the community’s scholars and to each believer’s conscience. In this respect, Islam’s self-understanding parallels the way each Abrahamic tradition views the sequence of revelation; Judaism closing the prophetic canon, Christianity seeing fulfillment in Christ, with each drawing the line at a different point, which is precisely what makes them different religions and, at the same time, recognizable siblings.

The mainstream scholarly position discourages visual depictions of Muhammad, and of prophets generally, for two connected reasons: reverence and a deep aversion to anything that could lean toward image-veneration, in a tradition whose foundational commitment is that nothing created should be worshipped. The concern echoes the biblical commandment against graven images and the iconoclast controversies within Christianity; Islam largely resolved the question in favor of aniconism in religious contexts, which is why mosques are adorned with calligraphy, geometry, and arabesques rather than figures. History complicates the simple version, as history usually does: Persian, Ottoman, and Mughal manuscript paintings sometimes include depictions of Muhammad, often with his face veiled or as a flame of light, and some of these works hang today in museums, including museums in Muslim-majority countries, without controversy. Shi‘i communities also have a more permissive visual tradition, and images of ‘Ali and devotional posters are common in some countries.

Two clarifications matter for non-Muslim audiences. First, the norm is internal: it binds Muslims as a matter of their own conscience and devotion; classical law imposes no rule on non-Muslims, and academic or museum displays of historical miniatures is a different act from deliberate mockery. Most Muslims distinguish sharply between the two, objecting to insult rather than to depiction as such. Second, whatever the offense, the religiously grounded responses are persuasion and turning away; violence over images finds no justification in Islamic teachings, as Muslim authorities worldwide said plainly after the Danish cartoon and Charlie Hebdo episodes, which we address in the next question.

A handful of events shape most Americans’ impressions of this issue: the protests, some violent, over the Danish cartoons of 2005–2006; the 1989 edict by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the death of novelist Salman Rushdie, and the 2022 stabbing that nearly killed him; the 2012 attack on American government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, initially presented as a response to the film The Innocence of Muslims, which contained derogatory depictions of the Prophet; the 2015 attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed twelve people; and the 2020 murder of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty. 

These tragic events were carried out by individuals or small extremist groups, out of a global population of nearly two billion Muslims. The overwhelming majority of Muslims have responded to insults against the Prophet through peaceful means, including protests, petitions, boycotts, op-eds, and campaigns to educate people about who the Prophet actually was.

It is also important to stress that these violent reactions have generally been fueled by political agendas that compounded any anger at the offensive material. Investigations into the Benghazi attack found that it had in fact been long planned by militants, while the Charlie Hebdo attack was the work of militants who may have been seeking to recruit French Muslims to al-Qaeda by creating an incident that would isolate them from other French people. In such cases, the offensive representations served as a pretext.

Understanding why these insults cause deep anger is not the same as justifying violence. Muslims love and revere the Prophet Muhammad deeply; many would sooner tolerate an insult to themselves or their own family than to him. And for Muslim minorities in Europe who already face hostility, public mockery of the Prophet often feels less like free expression than like deliberate humiliation of their whole community. That explains the intensity of the reaction, but it does not excuse bloodshed, and mainstream Muslim scholars say so plainly. Even the classical legal tradition that treated insulting the Prophet as a crime reserved punishment to courts; vigilante killing has never had any sanction in Islamic law. The Quran teaches that no one bears responsibility for another’s wrongdoing (35:18) and that taking a single innocent life is like killing all of humanity (5:32).

For these reasons, the attacks above were condemned across the Muslim mainstream, including by Al-Azhar (the Sunni world’s most prominent religious institution), by international Muslim bodies, and by major Muslim American organizations. Khomeini’s edict against Rushdie was rejected by many Muslim scholars at the time as baseless and politically motivated. Extremists on both sides feed off these controversies: violent groups use them to recruit, and anti-Muslim activists use them to portray all Muslims as dangerous, each promoting the same false “clash of civilizations” story. Most Muslims respond to insults against the Prophet the way he himself did: with patience, dignified protest, and efforts to make his real character better known.

At the same time, many Muslims find the lack of respect in many secular societies for sacred symbols, regardless of the religion involved, to be offensive. The Prophet Muhammad respected other religions and their sacred symbols, and the Quran prohibits reviling the followers of other religions and that which they hold sacred.

In the first part of his mission, in Mecca, Muhammad’s approach closely resembled that of Jesus: he, too, sought change as a nonviolent reformer. Their paths diverged when Muhammad and his followers were expelled from Mecca and migrated to Medina. While Jesus and his community of believers remained politically powerless throughout his mission, Muhammad in Medina, as the head of a new political community, was required to serve as a political and even military leader as he finally fought back in self-defense against the Meccans after years of persecution. As the head of the new community in Medina, he also had to deal with internal conspiracies and rebellions in addition to external threats.

This question, as posed, also assumes that there is only one way of looking at these figures, which is misleading. For instance, while Jesus is commonly viewed today as a “nonviolent reformer,” this has not always been the case. In his book Jesus through the Centuries, church historian Jaroslav Pelikan depicts and analyzes the varied views of Jesus at different times and in different cultures and devotes a whole chapter to Jesus as both “Prince of Peace” and instigator of divine warfare; sometimes at one and the same time. The representations of Muhammad are likewise varied. In The Lives of Muhammad, Kecia Ali makes the same point: portrayals of him by Muslims and non-Muslims alike have been anything but fixed, varying widely and shifting sharply from one century to the next. However, Muslims uniformly love and respect both men not only as prophets and messengers, descended from noble families, but also as exemplars of the most perfect character. Jesus is described in the Quran as one who is “held in honor in this world and the Hereafter and of those nearest to God.” (3:45) The Prophet Muhammad was known even before his prophethood as “al-Ameen,” “the Trustworthy,” and his praiseworthy characteristics and actions are the topic of books (known as Shama’il), poems, and songs through the centuries.

Muhammad married Khadija, a successful merchant fifteen years his senior, who employed him and proposed to him, at about twenty-five, and remained monogamously married to her for a quarter century until her death, through the hardest years of his mission. Only afterward, in his fifties and now the political leader of a besieged community, did he contract multiple marriages. According to Muslim historians, nearly all of these wives were widows, several widowed by the wars that killed their husbands, or divorcees, and the marriages served the purposes typical of a seventh-century leader: providing for women without protectors and binding rival tribes and factions to the new community through kinship, including marriages that sealed reconciliation with former enemies. Plural marriage was the norm for leaders across that world, as the Hebrew Bible’s patriarchs and kings attest on a far larger scale.

Muslims add a religious observation: the Quran limited other Muslims to four wives while addressing the Prophet’s household as a special case bound by heavier obligations, and his wives, referred to as “Mothers of the Believers,” became crucial transmitters of the faith, ‘Aisha foremost among them as one of early Islam’s most important scholars and Hadith narrators. One can accept or debate any particular historical interpretation, but the caricature of self-indulgence fits the record poorly: the man it describes spent the years of his prime monogamous with an older widow and his later marriages helped to create allies and provided for a community defending itself against attacks by pagan Meccans and tribesmen.

That depends on which prophet we are talking about. In many cases, the stories of the prophets in the Quran are similar to the stories in the Bible. Some examples include:

• The story of Noah and his ark
• The story of Abraham and Sarah and the birth of their son Isaac, who is also considered a prophet in the Quran
• The story of Jacob and his twelve sons, including Joseph, who is also considered a prophet in the Quran
• The most oft-mentioned prophet in the Quran, Moses, and the story of his mission in Egypt to rescue his people

Some of the major differences between the biblical and Quranic accounts of these prophets stem from the Quran’s teaching that all prophets were immune from major sins. The Quranic stories of Jesus are close to those in the Bible in their descriptions of his virginal birth and miracles but differ sharply in their account of the divinity of Jesus and his crucifixion; the Quran states that Jesus was only a man, not divine, and that he was not crucified but was raised to God. The Quran says only that it was made to appear so to those present (4:157).

While most Muslim theologians historically have considered all the prophets to have been men, some hold that there were female prophets, especially given that only 25 of the 124,000* prophets are identified in the Quran. Four of the women regarded by these scholars as prophets are Eve, the first female created by God; the mother of Moses, who is not named in the Quran; Asiyah, the wife of Pharaoh who in the Quran is the one who adopts Moses as her son, as opposed to the daughter of Pharaoh who does so in the Bible; and Mary, the mother of Jesus, because they all received direct divine revelation. In either case, Muslims revere them as among the many righteous and saintly women mentioned in the Quran.

*According to one hadith, there were 124,000 prophets; in another hadith, there were 224,000 prophets. Muslims believe every group of people was sent a prophet to convey the message of God.

Muslims revere Jesus, whose name Muslims traditionally follow with “peace be upon him,” as one of God’s greatest prophets, and the depth of that reverence often astonishes Christians. The Quran teaches that he was born of the Virgin Mary through an act of God, describes his miracles of healing and raising the dead by God’s permission, calls him the Messiah, and devotes more attention to him than to almost any other figure. Belief in Jesus is not optional for Muslims.

The differences are equally real, and Muslims state them respectfully rather than pretending they don’t exist. Islam holds that Jesus was fully human, a prophet, not divine, because God, in Muslim understanding, is utterly unlike His creation and has no children, even metaphorically; the Quran compares Jesus’s fatherless creation to Adam’s. Muslims also believe Jesus was not crucified but was raised to God and will return before the end of time, so Muslims, too, await a second coming of Jesus, though without the theology of atonement that the crucifixion carries in Christianity. These are precisely the questions, who Jesus is, what happened at the cross, which Christians and Muslims have discussed with each other for fourteen centuries, and interfaith friendship neither erases the differences nor lets them erase the shared reverence and values.

Because of what Muslims understand the Quran to be: not a book about Muhammad but God’s speech addressed to him and through him to humanity. It therefore speaks constantly to Muhammad, instructing, consoling, and correcting, while narrating the stories of the prophets who came before him, Jesus prominent among them. Muhammad’s own life and example reach Muslims through a different channel, the Hadith literature and biographies, which record his words and actions in great detail. The proportion says nothing about relative rank; it reflects the difference between a scripture and a biography. Christians encounter something analogous: the Hebrew prophets fill the Bible Jesus himself read, while Jesus’s own life comes through the Gospels written about him.

Muslims revere Mary (Maryam) as the virgin mother of Jesus and as the greatest of all women; the Quran says God “chose and preferred her above all the women of the worlds” (3:42). She is the only woman mentioned by name in the Quran, where she is named more often than in the entire New Testament, and the Quran’s nineteenth chapter bears her name and recounts the Annunciation and Jesus’s birth. Importantly, the Quran presents her not only as a mother but as a spiritual exemplar in her own right for all believers, men and women alike, devout, truthful, and courageous in bearing a miracle her society doubted. Her stature was such that some classical scholars, most famously Ibn Hazm of Muslim Spain, argued that Mary was herself a prophet, since God communicated with her directly through an angel. The majority of scholars held that prophethood was limited to men, citing verses stating that God sent “only men” as messengers before Muhammad (e.g., 16:43), though even they ranked Mary among the most spiritually exalted of all human beings. Muslim veneration of Mary has long been a natural meeting point with Christians: in some Muslim countries, Christians and Muslims visit the same Marian shrines.

Not from any lack of reverence for Jesus, whom Muslims honor as among the greatest prophets. The reason is theological and historical: Christmas celebrates, for Christians, the incarnation of God, precisely the doctrine on which Islam and Christianity differ, and it entered the calendar as a specifically Christian feast. Islam’s own religious calendar contains two holidays, the two Eids, while many Muslims commemorate the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday or Mawlid, itself a subject of friendly internal debate about whether to celebrate birthdays religiously at all.

Most Muslims do not observe Christmas religiously but happily share the season with Christian family, friends, and neighbors, attending gatherings, exchanging greetings, and admiring the lights. Scholars differ on details as scholars do, but the majority view permits wishing Christians a merry Christmas as simple good neighborliness, and Muslims in Christian-heritage families (including converts) navigate the season with the same mix of participation and boundary-drawing familiar to Jewish Americans. What Muslims ask in return is the understanding that declining to celebrate is not hostility, just as a Christian’s not observing Ramadan implies none.