The Muslim reception of biblical materials : Ibn Qutayba and his Aʿlām al-nubuwwa

Abstract

The two earliest extant Muslim works containing comprehensive lists of biblical predictions of the Prophet Muhammad from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are the Kitāb al-dīn wa-al-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 ibn Muslim ibn Qutayba (b. 213/828, d. 276/889). Ibn Qutayba's Aʿlām al-nubuwwa clearly eclipsed Ibn Rabban's Kitāb al-dīn wa-al-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. This article contains a critical edition of the first eight sections of the text, which contain biblical materials.