5 facts about the Hanif poets, Musaylima and the Quran

The strongest form of the claim runs like this: Arabia before Muhammad already had men who rejected idols and spoke of one God, so the Quran’s message did not arrive from nowhere. That much is true, and the Islamic sources say so themselves. They call such men hanifs, a word the Quran applies first to Abraham (2:135; 3:67).^[1] Ibn Ishaq names Zayd and Waraqa among those who left idol worship before Islam.^[2]

Ismail al Faruqi, in his essay on Islam in the Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World, makes the same point from the Muslim side. Islam, he notes, names the hanifiyya, the tradition of the hanifs, as its predecessor and identifies itself with it (10:105; 2:135). The hanifs, in his account, were Arabs in good standing with their tribes, neither Jewish nor Christian, who rejected the cults of Arabia and professed the faith of Abraham. For that reason he holds that the parallels between Islam and the older religions prove neither borrowing from them nor development out of them.^[3]

A shared theme is not a shared text, however. The claim needs three further steps: that the poems contain Quranic wording, that they came first, and that the Quran copied them. The next entries test each step. The Quran never presents itself as a message without precedent. It says that it confirms what came before (3:3) and that earlier prophets taught the same call to worship God alone (21:25).

Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl refused meat offered to idols and, according to the reports, saved baby girls from being buried alive. Al-Bukhari records that he met the Prophet before any revelation came, and that he did not live to see Islam.^[4] Ibn Ishaq places his death in the years before the prophethood, near the time the Kaaba was rebuilt.^[2] A man who died before the first revelation cannot have written the surahs revealed afterwards, and no source credits him with doing so.

Waraqa ibn Nawfal was a cousin of Khadija and a Christian who knew the scriptures. When Muhammad came to her after the first revelation, Khadija took him to Waraqa, who said that the angel who came to him was the same one who came to Moses. Al-Bukhari adds that Waraqa died soon afterwards and the revelation paused.^[5] The report is itself the evidence a critic would use, and it shows Waraqa as a witness who confirmed Muhammad, not as an author of anything he recited. No verses of Waraqa that match the Quran are recorded in the early sources.

The few lines attributed to Zayd are preserved by Ibn Ishaq and later literary collections. Their theme is submission of the speaker to a Lord whom the earth and the clouds obey, and a rejection of the gods of his people.^[2] The theme matches the Quran’s, and a reader may fairly say so. The wording does not. No passage of the Quran is a quotation of these lines, and the claim that they appear “verbatim” has no basis that a reader can check against the sources.

Two further points apply. Zayd’s lines are poetry in metre, while the Quran denies that it is poetry (36:69; 69:41) and is not composed in the metres of Arabic verse. And these poems reach us through works written well over a century after Zayd, which is why historians of early Arabic poetry treat the exact wording of many pre-Islamic verses with caution. If anything, that caution weighs against the critique: a later transmitter could have shaped a monotheist’s lines to sound Islamic, which would reverse the direction of influence the claim assumes.

Musaylima, of the tribe of Banu Hanifa in Yamama, claimed to be a prophet in the last years of Muhammad’s life, after the Prophet had already been preaching for two decades. He was killed in the battle of Yamama, fought against the forces of Abu Bakr in the year 11 or 12 after the Hijra (about 632 to 633).^[6] The Quran’s early surahs were revealed in Mecca long before he appeared, so he cannot have supplied their style. If any borrowing took place, the evidence points the other way: a rival who imitated what was already being recited.

The sayings attributed to him survive in historians such as al-Tabari, who were hostile to him. They are short rhyming lines, some of them about frogs, elephants and sowing, and they are presented in the sources as mockery of his claim.^[6] Their authenticity is itself uncertain, as with any report of a defeated opponent preserved by his enemies. A critic may say that a hostile record proves nothing either way, and that is correct. It leaves the chronology standing, and the chronology is what decides the question. The name Hanifa belongs to a tribe and has no connection with the Hanifs of the first entry.

The Meccans who rejected Muhammad searched for a human source and said so openly. The Quran records one accusation: “only a human being teaches him.” It answers that the man they hint at speaks a foreign tongue, while this recitation is in clear Arabic (16:103).^[7] It also records the charge that these were “tales of the ancients” that others wrote down for him (25:4-5).^[7] The commentators discuss who the foreign man was, and they differ.

What is absent is as telling as what is present. Zayd’s poems were known in Mecca, since he had lived there and clashed with his own family. Had his lines been the source of the early surahs, the opponents had every reason to say so, and the sources record no such accusation. Neither is there a report of anyone, then or later, pointing to a Quranic passage and matching it to a line of Zayd. The Quran also issues a challenge to produce a comparable text (2:23; 17:88), and no one has been recorded as answering it with Zayd’s verses.^[8]