Last Monday night, about 100 viewers joined our webinar with Professor Shari Lowin (Stonehill College), a specialist in comparative early Islamic and Jewish intellectual history and literature.

Shari introduced us to some of the ways the greatest prophet of Jewish tradition appears in the Qu’ran and Hadith. We learned that Moses, Nebi Musa in Arabic, is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Qur’an, before Abraham and Jesus. Muhammad himself, to whom the Suras that make up the Qur’an were revealed, is not the subject of the Qur’an. Much of the holy book of Islam consists of angelic speeches that remind the prophet and his audience of the antecedent sacred history, which is seen as a continuous  history of divine revelations and admonitions that  culminate in the messages conveyed by this final messenger. The aim is to establish God’s rule over humanity, starting with those who submit to his command.

Shari compared stories about the birth of Moses and the role of his divinely inspired mother and stories about the birth of Prophet Muhammad and his divinely inspired parents, showing that the Hadith (stories about the prophet and his companions) casts Muhammad as a new Moses. Moses and Muhammad even meet during the famous “Night Journey” to the “distant sanctuary” (see Sura 17), the only truly miraculous event in the life of the prophet, as recounted by the traditional biographers.

To understand why Moses matters so much to the early Muslims one needs to know that 7th-century Arabia was a world of trade and exchange, not just of goods but of stories and ideas, a world that connected the three ancient continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, and that was alive with debates between Jews, orthodox and heterodox Christians, Gnostics, Zoroastrians, and others. The choices made by the early Muslims and the messages of Prophet Muhammad himself reflect the outsized role of Moses in the political and religious imagination of late antiquity.  The idea of divine rule on earth had been proclaimed by Byzantine Roman Emperors long before the institution of the Caliphate arose. Since the writings of Philo, whose Life of Moses decisively shaped the Christian understanding of the biblical prophet, Moses was perceived not just as the lawgiver of the Jews but also as king, prophet, and high priest. Moses served as the model by which Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea cast his Life of Constantine. And Moses served as the model of striving for the highest human perfection for Gregory of Nyssa, whose allegorical interpretation of the Moses story harks back to Philo. Gregory, who took on the responsibility of a prince of the Church only grudgingly, emphasized Moses’ search for spiritual perfection, deliberately tamping down the political dimension emphasized by others.

It is into, and out of, that world that the Moses of the early Islamic isra’iliyyat is spoken: affirming, correcting, and carrying forward the legacies of Judaism and Christianity as they existed and interacted then and there.

Shari Lowin’s lecture reminded us of what scholars have long since come to see, namely, that Islam did not arise from nowhere but in many respects represents the coming together and culmination of late antique culture. Or, more simply put: without Moses, no Muhammad.