Anyone familiar with Hebrew Scriptures might be rather astonished to read Islamic versions of the Cain, Abel and Joseph stories, to name just a few.
For example, Cain kills Abel supposedly in a jealous fit because their father Adam bestowed on Abel a more beautiful virgin than he gave Cain. In an Islamic variation on the Joseph story, Potiphar’s wife, who is madly in love with Joseph, invites some women friends to meet the man she failed to seduce. The women, engaged in cutting fruit, are so distracted by Joseph’s beauty they wind up cutting themselves!
These stories and many more are included in “Lives of the Prophets,” a volume translated from Arabic and annotated by William “Ze’ev” Brinner.
“Islamic versions of what we consider familiar Jewish stories always reflect curious and sometimes humorous differences,” says Brinner, a retired U.C. Berkeley professor of Near Eastern Studies, specializing in both the language and history of Hebrew and Arabic cultures.
Early Muslims, Brinner explains, adapted Jewish scriptures, midrashic literature, Christian traditions, early Arab tales and other sources. Some Jewish converts to the new religion of Islam apparently brought information about Jewish sources.
Brinner’s book is an 850-page volume that spans from the beginning of humanity up to Muhammed’s birth around 570 CE. After an exhaustive multiyear study, Brinner has created a groundbreaking magnum opus, the first full translation in English of the original Arabic text by Thalabi, an Islamic scholar who died in 1036.
“Lives of the Prophets” describes the lives and records of all the Jewish and Christian figures that Islam considers as prophets as well as less-familiar figures viewed as “true” Islamic prophets.
Originally published in late 2002, it’s being used in Islamic study departments at Oxford, Cambridge, New York University and Northwestern, among others.
For Western readers, “Lives of the Prophets” portrays an ancient civilization, providing an excellent source both for studying comparative religion and for showing the relationship of early Islamic religion to other monotheistic religions of the Middle East.
To Muslims, Muhammad is seen as the last in a long line of divinely inspired humans to whom Allah alone would speak directly.
Some present-day Muslims believe, however, that Jewish and Christian texts have been altered or deleted and thus can’t be considered true versions in their present form. Later religious informers even charged Jews with fabricating material to undermine Islam by introducing Jewish lore. As a result, Muslims believe their versions are the only correct ones and that whatever in the Old and New Testaments agrees with the Koran is true and what denies it is false.
Nevertheless, to this day the “Tales of the Prophets” are still popular with most Muslims.