Ibn Qutayba

"The Muslim Reception of Biblical Materials: Ibn Qutayba and his A'lam al-nubuwwa"

by Sabine Schmidtke زابينه اشميتكه סבינה שמיטקה

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 22 iii (2011), pp. 249-74

The two earliest extant Muslim works containing comprehensive lists of biblical predictions of the prophet Muḥammad... more The two earliest extant Muslim works containing comprehensive lists of biblical predictions of the prophet Muḥammad from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are the Kitāb al-Dīn wa-l-dawla by the Nestorian convert to Islam ʿAlī Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī (b. ca. 194/810, d. 251/865) and the Aʿlām al-nubuwwa by Ibn Rabban’s contemporary Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. Muslim b. Qutayba (b. 213/828, d. 276/889). Ibn Qutayba’s Aʿlām al-nubuwwa clearly eclipsed Ibn Rabban’s al-Dīn wa-l-dawla in popularity – the text was used over the following centuries by various authors as a reference text for the biblical material it contained. An incomplete and (as it seems) unique manuscript of Ibn Qutayba’s work, which is preserved in the Dār al-kutub al-Ẓāhiriyya in Damascus, has mostly escaped scholars’ attention until now. The article contains a critical edition of the first eight sections of the text that contain biblical materials.