The Genre of Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa

Jadid al-Islam's magnum opus, the Sayf al-muʾminin fi qital al-mushrikin, is written following established conventions of polemical writing. The major characteristic of this work is that it treats biblical passages as signs that foretell the coming of Islam. This argumentative theme dates back to the Abbasid period (750–1258) and is intrinsically linked to the history of Muslim engagement with the Bible more broadly. According to scholarly consensus, no biblical translations predated the advent of Islam. Moreover, the first ones to be made were conceived by, and for the use of, Christians. Embellished stories of the biblical prophets appeared indeed very early in the Islamic tradition in the form of the popular tales of the prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ), which set out to provide a narrative background to the rather schematic portrayal of the prophets in the Qurʾan. However, as Hava Lazarus-Yafeh noted, literal biblical quotes are rare in this kind of literature as well as in early Muslim historiography. It is thus likely that the popular storytellers (quṣṣāṣ) and early Muslim historians only knew of biblical excerpts through the oral tradition or at most through abridged Arabic translations. This seems to have also been the case for early Muslim scholars who ventured into biblical exegesis and refutations, and hence why they cited the same set of biblical verses throughout generations.

In contrast, converts were usually well acquainted with the Bible, either through the original Hebrew and Greek sources or through Syriac, Coptic and Arabic translations. Some of them became quṣṣāṣ, as they could draw from their biblical expertise in a way that a Muslim-born storyteller usually could not. Others, as we will see throughout this chapter, would go on to produce the most representative works of polemical literature. As Lazarus- Yafeh observed, it was oftentimes they who contributed the most to ‘biblical misinformation’ in Islam through intentional misquotations: from Saʿid b. Hasan of Alexandria (date of conversion, 1298) extrapolating the name of Ismael into various passages of the Old Testament, to the Maghrebi Jewish renegade ʿAbd al-Haqq al-Islami (d. fourteenth century) playing with phonetics and altering the vowels of Hebrew words to make them sound like references to the trilateral root ‘ḥ-m-d’, and hence to Muhammad.