Fight in the Way of God 99rabbinical authorities of their time by planting their words in Muham-
mad’s mouth. If Muhammad’s biographies reveal anything at all, it is the
anti-Jewish sentiments of the Prophet’s biographers, not of the Prophet
himself. To understand Muhammad’s actual beliefs regarding the Jews
and Christians of his time, one must look not to the words that chroni-
clers put into his mouth hundreds of years after his death, but rather to
the words that God put into his mouth while he was alive.
The Quran, as a holy and revealed scripture, repeatedly reminds Mus-
lims that what they are hearing is not a new message but the “confir-
mation of previous scriptures” (12:111). In fact, the Quran proposes
the unprecedented notion that all revealed scriptures are derived from
a single concealed book in heaven called the Umm al-Kitab, or
“Mother of Books” (13:9). That means that as far as Muhammad
understood, the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran must be read as a
single, cohesive narrative about humanity’s relationship to God, in
which the prophetic consciousness of one prophet is passed spiritually
to the next: from Adam to Muhammad. For this reason, the Quran
advises Muslims to say to the Jews and Christians:
We believe in God, and in that which has been revealed to us, which is that
which was revealed to Abraham and Ismail and
Jacob and the tribes [of Israel], as well as that which the Lord
revealed to Moses and to Jesus and to all the other Prophets.
We make no distinction between any of them;
we submit ourselves to God. (3:84)Of course, Muslims believe that the Quran is the final revelation
in this sequence of scriptures, just as they believe Muhammad to be
“the Seal of the Prophets.” But the Quran never claims to annul the
previous scriptures, only to complete them. And while the notion of
one scripture giving authenticity to others is, to say the least, a
remarkable event in the history of religions, the concept of the Umm
al-Kitab may indicate an even more profound principle.
As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitu-
tion of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood
the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews,