During my conversations and presentations on this series with our neighbors, colleagues, clerics, rabbis, and ordinary Jews and Christians, it is apparent that many of them are unaware that there is a strong linkage among the three monotheistic religions of today—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This linkage goes back all the way to Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael, the stories of whom are in the Genesis, which is part of the Torah and the Bible. Given the timeframe of these books of revelation, the Torah makes no mention of Jesus, other than the common knowledge that Jews were waiting for the arrival of the Messiah as one of the great prophets of Judaism. Similarly, the Bible is silent about Mohammad except some verses that foretell the arrival of Mohammad. The Qur’an claims that arrival of Mohammad had been mentioned in the Bible in biblical traditions where future prophets are mentioned to announce their expected arrival in future.
The Qur’an has the last revelations from God, in line with revelations that came to prophets of God throughout human history including Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus, and finally Mohammad. The Qur’an contains mostly brief and sometime detailed narratives of biblical prophets in its various parts. It was assumed that the readers of the Qur’an would be somewhat familiar with the stories of the biblical prophets, and hence no attempts were made to retell the entire stories but to bring into focus relevant parts of their lives and lessons to be revisited as the occasion demanded. It should also be mentioned here that the Qur’an was revealed over a period of twenty-three years—from the beginning of the prophethood of Mohammad at the age of forty until his death at the age of sixty-three. Many parts of the Qur’an are in the form of Q&A narratives where God asks a question directly or paraphrases a question in the minds of human beings about life, the meaning of our existence, the natural world, and about God or specific questions being raised by people contemporary to Prophet Mohammad and other prophets during their times.
More recently I had the privilege to join and officiate a Muslim–Jewish wedding and had a conversation with the rabbi as part of the ceremony afterward. Again, it became clear to me that many Jews and Christians, whom the Qur’an calls collectively the “People of the Book,” are not aware to what extent the Qur’an retells the stories of biblical prophets and shows reverence to these great prophets of God for humanity, irrespective of our current and historic religious divides. The same week I was also invited to give a talk to students in a middle school run by a private charter school with secular orientations that included students from the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths as well as atheists and humanists, and one student who mentioned that her parents were followers of a satanic cult. The parents of these students did not feel confident about the public-school system and were homeschooling their children most of the time. I was impressed by the interest these children had in faith and religions, their openness and lack of any pretension about their own faith, and a willingness to know more.
The confluence of all these recent interactions as well as my conversations over the years convinced me that it would be worthwhile to capture all the narratives in the Qur’an related to Abraham, Moses, and Jesus for our world today and especially in America, where we have religious plurality enshrined in our Constitution, but there is mounting evidence that religious intolerance is on the rise, especially against Muslims and Jews, especially by a group of Evangelical Christians.
The following three appendices capture the narratives on Abraham, Moses, and Jesus/Mary as they appear in the Qur’an with limited commentary from my side to give the readers an unhinged view of how the Qur’an personified these individuals of immense stature in human history and as God’s servants, who serve as role models for billions of human beings, including Muslims, all over the world.