Biblical narratives in the Quran  

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The Qur'an, the central religious text of Islam, contains references to over fifty people and events also found in the Bible. While the stories told in each book are generally comparable in most respects, important differences sometimes emerge.

In the Qur'an, it is mentioned that the original Gospel (and original Torah) tells about Muhammad, the final prophet to whom will be given the last revelation of God. Anything in the Bible that agrees with the Qur'an is accepted, and anything in the Bible that disagrees with the Qur'an is not accepted. Many stories in the Bible are not mentioned at all in the Qur'an; with regard to such passages, Muslims are instructed to neither believe nor disbelieve in them, but they are allowed to read them and pass them on if they wish to do so.

Often, stories related in the Qur'an tend to concentrate more on the moral or spiritual significance of the event rather than the details (though significant details are often offered). The tales often assume that people already know the basic details of the stories, and thus use the stories to make moral and religious points, rather than simply relating history for its own sake.

Western secular scholars have tended to analyze similarities between Biblical and Quranic accounts of the same person or event as being evidence for the influence of pre-existing traditions on the composition of the Qur'an. This has been denied by Muslims. From a traditionalist Muslim perspective, such a discussion would make no sense; Muslims believe that the Qur'an was sent from Allah (God) through the angel Jibrael (Gabriel) to the prophet Muhammad in a series of revelations, and this divinely inspired text was then progressively dictated (word for word, and over and over again to make certain that there were no mistakes) by Muhammad to the followers of Islam. Moreover, they believe that the Biblical tradition was corrupted over time, and hence it would be futile to use it as a basis for any sort of comparison with the allegedly infallible revelation of the Qur'an.

See also

• Origin and development of the Qur'an
• Legends and the Qur'an
• Alexander the Great in the Qur'an
• Source criticism
• Islam and Judaism
• Isra'iliyat
• Abrahamic religion
• Christianity and Islam
• Christianity and Judaism
• Comparative religion
• Cyrus (Bible)
• Cyrus the Great in the Qur'an