1THE MOSES OF MECCA
Did you not know that we have found Muhammad, a prophet like Moses described in the oldest books.
Abu Talib, speaking to fellow Meccans, circa 616 CE1Before this, the Book of Moses was revealed as a guide and mercy. And this Book is a confirmation, in the Arabic tongue.
The Qur’an, 46:12Until the late age of forty, Muhammad ibn Abdullah, a merchant from the Arabian city of Mecca, was a righteous, virtuous, yet still seemingly unexceptional man. He did not expect to receive divine revelations, challenge his own tribe, suffer persecution, flee his hometown, command armies, conquer cities, and ultimately change the world forever.
In other words, Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, was not like Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of Christianity, who had a supernatural birth, a wise childhood, a preconceived mission, and a foreknown finale. Rather, he was like Moses who, until his encounter with a burning bush on Mount Horeb, also didn’t know what God expected of him.
Notably, Muhammad’s first encounter with the divine also took place on a mountain: Jabal al-Nour, or “Mountain of Light,” a small hill that rises a few miles outside Mecca. On this peak, there is a cave, known as Hira, where Muhammad used to withdraw periodically to contemplate. Yet in AD 610, in the month of Ramadan, his reflections were disrupted when he suddenly realized that he wasn’t alone in the cave. He heard a voice telling him, “Iqra,” or “Recite.” “Recite,” the voice said repeatedly, “in the name of your Lord who created the human from a clot.”2 These were the very first words of the scripture that would be known to the world as the “Recitation,” or the Qur’an.
Muhammad’s first response to this initial revelation was what the Qur’an also ascribes to Moses: fear.3 He ran back home, “with his heart beating severely,” only to ask his wife, Khadija, “Cover me! Cover me!” When the latter learned what happened, she took Muhammad to her cousin Waraqa, “a Christian who used to write with Hebrew letters.”4 When this mysterious Judeo-Christian sage heard the story, he comforted Muhammad. The voice that terrified him was no demon, Waraqa said, but:
Holy! Holy! By Him in whose hand is the soul of Waraqah, there hath come unto Muhammad the greatest namus, even he that would come unto Moses. Verily Muhammad is the Prophet of this people.5
The Arabic word namus, probably from the Greek word nomos, meant either “the Angel of Revelation” or “Divine Law or Scripture.”6 In both senses, it referred to a Mosaic precedent.
So, at the very first assurance of his prophecy, Muhammad was also informed about his role model: he was the new Moses whom God sent to the Arabs, the Children of Ishmael.7 Unlike their cousins, the Children of Israel, these were “a people whose forefathers were not warned.”8 In other words, they had not yet received revelations from God. But now, a “warner” had finally come to them, with two revolutionary calls: Arabs had to give up worshipping the idols of their fathers and instead worship only the one true god, the God of Abraham. They also had to give up their immoral ways, like the exploitation of orphans, the poor, and slaves.
It was no easy task to challenge the Quraysh, Muhammad’s own tribe that controlled Mecca, which was all too proud of its gods, hundreds of which were venerated at the cube-shaped sanctuary that stood in the heart of the city—the Kaaba. Hence Waraqa not only assured Muhammad but also cautioned him: “Thou wilt be called a liar, and they will use thee despitefully, and cast thee out, and fight against thee.”9
Which is exactly what happened in the next thirteen years, when Muhammad preached an uncompromising monotheism in the face of a growingly hostile polytheism. He was ridiculed, abused, pelted, and almost assassinated. His fellow mu’minun, or believers, also faced persecution. The slaves among them were tortured by their owners. Two of them, Sumayyah bint Khabbat and her husband, Yasir ibn Amir, were executed, to be hailed in history as Islam’s first martyrs. To save their lives, some believers fled to the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia, where they hoped for, and indeed found, a safe haven. Ultimately, most believers in Mecca, including the Prophet himself, fled the city in 622, in a historic hijra, or migration. Their new home was the northern city of Yathrib, which later would be known simply as “the city,” or Medina.
Muslim sources write that the believers who migrated to Medina were a little over two hundred people. The other party, refugees in Abyssinia, reportedly numbered a little over a hundred people.10 These small numbers, in a city whose population must have been many thousands, show how tiny the early Muslim community was.11 It also gives an idea about how insecure they must have felt.
We see this insecurity also in the Qur’an, in the very words that Muhammad was commanded to convey to his followers in one of his darkest hours: “I do not know what will be done with me or you; I only follow what is revealed to me.”12
Yet the same Qur’an, which did not tell much to Muhammad and his believers about their own future, did tell them, repeatedly, about something else: the stories of former prophets and believers who, just like the first Muslims, were abused and oppressed, only to prevail in the end.
That is why almost one-fourth of the Qur’an consists of qasas, or stories, of former prophets, with emphases that unmistakably resonate with the ordeal of the first Muslims. That is also why, as observed by the contemporary Jewish scholar Rabbi Reuven Firestone, “the Qur’an is less a literary work than it is a self-conscious scripture,” and “is more straightforwardly didactic than the Hebrew Bible.”13 In other words, the Qur’an narrates history, not to be taken as a book of history but to tell stories to its believers in order to give them religious lessons, inspiration, and encouragement.
Most of these Qur’anic stories have heroes and villains. Most heroes are former prophets, some twenty-four of whom are mentioned by name. Except for two—the Arab prophets Hud and Salih—they are all Biblical figures.14 Some are noted quite briefly, while a few are given a great deal of attention. Among the latter are Noah, Abraham, Lot, Joseph, and Jesus. Yet none of them even come close to the attention given to the most prominent figure of the whole Qur’an, who is, of course, Moses.
A SCHEME AGAINST THE PHARAOH
When you take a copy of the Qur’an and seek the story of Moses, you will find not one but many passages in different chapters.15 Their dispersion may make them seem disconnected, but in fact there is an important connection between these passages: almost all of them are Meccan, as opposed to Medinan.16 In other words, they were revealed in the Meccan phase of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission, which was characterized by the oppression of the Muslim community, and not the Medinan period, when Muslims achieved political and military power.
Now, with this Meccan context in mind, let’s read the opening of the most comprehensive Moses story in the Qur’an, which is in the Meccan chapter al-Qasas (28):
We recount to you [Prophet] part of the story of Moses and Pharaoh, setting out the truth for people who believe.
Pharaoh made himself high and mighty in the land and divided the people into different groups: one group he oppressed, slaughtering their sons and sparing their women—he was one of those who spread corruption. But We wished to favor those who were oppressed in that land, to make them leaders, the ones to survive, to establish them in the land, and through them show Pharaoh, Haman, and their armies the very thing they feared.17
Note that in the very beginning, we are told that this is a story of not one but two men: it is the “story of Moses and Pharaoh.” The latter was the title given to the rulers of ancient Egypt, while the Qur’an seems to use it to refer to a specific Pharaoh—an arrogant and cruel one. The Qur’an also shows remarkable attention to this Pharaoh—the term appears seventy-four times in the Qur’an, second only to Moses himself. It shows how central the struggle between the two men is to the foundational story of Islam.18
The Qur’anic passage above also tells that Pharaoh oppressed a certain group of people in his land, and even slaughtered their sons. Those who are familiar with the Bible can easily recall here a theme from the Book of Exodus: the commandment by Egypt’s Pharaoh that “all male Hebrew children born be killed by drowning in the river Nile.”19 The Qur’an seems to allude to this tragic story by giving little details, as typical, while emphasizing the theological lesson: yes, the Pharaoh was brutally powerful, but God “wished to favor those who were oppressed.”
Meanwhile, the Qur’an does give an interesting detail: the Pharaoh seems to have an associate named Haman. Those who are familiar with the Bible, however, can recall a different Haman, narrated in the Book of Esther. This was a cruel vizier who indeed persecuted Jews—yet not in Egypt during the time of Moses (around the fourteenth century BC) but in the Persian Empire at the time of Xerxes the Great (fifth century BC)—in other words, almost “a thousand miles and years away.”20 This dissonance between the Biblical and Qur’anic figures of Haman has long been picked up by critics of Islam. They argue that Muhammad, whom they consider the author of the Qur’an, “mixed up sacred stories.”21
In return, some Muslim scholars offer a very different explanation: the Qur’anic Haman has nothing to do with his Biblical namesake. Instead, it is a reference to the high priests in ancient Egypt called Ha-Amen.22 Therefore, this is not a flaw of the Qur’an but rather a “miracle” of it, as the Prophet Muhammad could not possibly have known the ancient Egyptian terms that we know today thanks to the modern study of hieroglyphs.
Yet there is a third explanation, arguably a stronger one, that falls short of interreligious polemics, but which reflects a more complex interfaith connection: that Haman was not really a historical figure but an archetype. As recent scholarship has shown, “Haman was viewed in the pre- and post-Islamic Near East as an ahistorical character, who could dip in and out of literary contexts when a villain was required.”23 In rabbinic Jewish literature, too, “Haman could turn up wherever there was trouble.”24 In fact, his very presence in the Book of Esther could also be due to such preexisting archetypes in “Babylonian antecedents.”25
Therefore, when the Qur’an was condemning Pharaoh and Haman, it was probably addressing a cultural milieu familiar with these typologies. Meanwhile, it was certainly giving its primary addressees, the first Muslims, an encouraging message: tyrants, their associates, and their armies could inflict all sorts of torment on innocent believers such as you. Yet those oppressors would ultimately lose, because God “wished to favor those who were oppressed.”
FROM THE RIVER TO THE MOUNTAIN
After letting us know that the Pharaoh’s regime would face “the very thing they feared,” chapter al-Qasas gets to the story of Moses:
We inspired Moses’ mother, saying, “Suckle him, and then, when you fear for his safety, put him in the river: do not be afraid, and do not grieve, for We shall return him to you and make him a messenger.”
Pharaoh’s household picked him up, later to become an enemy and a source of grief for them: Pharaoh, Haman, and their armies were wrongdoers. And Pharaoh’s wife said, “Here is a joy to behold for me and for you! Do not kill him: he may be of use to us, or we may adopt him as a son.” They did not realize what they were doing.26
Meanwhile, the sister of Moses, who watches all this from afar, comes onto the scene and offers the real mother as a wet nurse. “We restored him to his mother in this way,” God tells us, “so that she might be comforted, not grieve, and know that God’s promise is true, though most of them do not know.”27
That is how Moses grows up in the Pharaoh’s palace. When he kills an Egyptian to defend an Israelite, however, he gets into trouble and flees. When he reaches the place called Midian, on the other side of the Red Sea, he finds an old shepherd with two young daughters, whom he kindly helps. Soon, the shepherd makes an offer: to marry his daughter, and to work for him for eight years, at least, if not ten.
Moses accepts the offer and settles in Midian, but at the end of that period, he begins to move again. On the way he sees a “fire” on a mountain, and goes to just check it, only to experience the turning point of his life. He hears the Almighty God:
Moses, I am your Lord. Take off your shoes: you are in the sacred valley of Tuwa. I am God; there is no god but Me. So, worship Me and keep up the prayer so that you remember Me.28
God then tells Moses to throw his staff, which miraculously turns into a snake. He also tells him to put his hand inside his shirt, which comes out “white but unharmed.” Finally, he tells him to go to the Pharaoh, accompanied by his brother, Aaron, because the latter is “more eloquent.”29
So far, the Qur’anic story of Moses closely parallels that of the Bible, only with some subtle nuances: in the Bible, we do not see any “revelation” to the mother of Moses; she rather seems to put the baby on the Nile on her own. Also, in the Bible, the baby is found by Pharaoh’s daughter, not his wife as in the Qur’an. The story about the Egyptian killed by Moses is also slightly different in both scriptures: the killing seems less premeditated and less intentional in the Qur’an, presenting Moses as less blameworthy. The Qur’an doesn’t name the shepherd in Midian, while the Bible names him as Jethro.30 Also, in the Qur’an the shepherd seems to have two daughters, whereas in the Torah he has seven.31
Such differences between the Bible and the Qur’an are interesting, and are open to various interpretations. Yet still, it is hard to find in them any big theological significance. However, as we go further in the story, we come to a fascinating difference whose theological significance cannot be missed.
WHAT TO DO WITH THE PHARAOH?
This remarkable difference between the Bible and the Qur’an is in the call that Moses extends to the Pharaoh. In the Bible, we read that Moses goes to the Pharaoh and tells him:
This is what the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, says: “Let my people go, so that they may worship me.”32
This memorable phrase, repeated several times in the Book of Exodus as the divine call to the Pharaoh, has subtle messages: Moses represents “the God of the Hebrews”—not necessarily the God of the Egyptians and the Pharaoh himself as well. No wonder Moses asks for “my people” to go, so that they—the Hebrews—may worship God. The Pharaoh is guilty of oppressing the Hebrews, and not allowing their worship. He doesn’t seem guilty of his own lack of worship, which is neither asked nor expected.
In the Qur’an, however, we have a remarkably different version of the same story. Moses, again, goes to the Pharaoh, and again asks for his people—the Hebrews—to be set free. But there is more than that. Now God is not just the “God of the Hebrews” but also the Lord of everyone, including the Pharaoh himself, who is invited to “right guidance”:
Go and tell him: “We are your Lord’s messengers, so send the Children of Israel with us and do not oppress them. We have brought you a sign from your Lord. Peace be upon whoever follows the right guidance; it has been revealed to us that punishment falls on whoever rejects the truth and turns his back on it.”33
In another Qur’anic chapter, al-Shu’ara (26), which gives another snapshot from the same story, we hear a similar message from Moses to the Pharaoh: “We bring a message from the Lord of the Worlds: let the Children of Israel leave with us.” Then the two men engage in a theological discussion:
Pharaoh asked, “What is this ‘Lord of the Worlds’?”
Moses replied, “He is the Lord of the heavens and earth and everything between them. If you would only have faith! He is your Lord, and the Lord of your forefathers … Lord of the East and West and everything between them. If you would only use your reason!”
But Pharaoh said [to him], “If you take any god other than me, I will throw you into prison.”34
So, in the Qur’an, God is not just the Lord of the Hebrews. Instead, he is the Lord of everything and everybody, the East and West, the living Egyptians and their forefathers. Pharaoh is condemned for denying this one true God—and, instead, deifying himself.
Copyright © 2024 by Mustafa Akyol