A messenger to every nation? 6 answers on the Quran’s claim

The verse most often cited is 16:36: “We sent to every community a messenger, saying: worship God and avoid false gods.” Others repeat it. “For every community there is a messenger” (10:47). “There is no community but a warner has passed among it” (35:24). “You are only a warner, and for every people there is a guide” (13:7). And: “We did not send any messenger except in the language of his people, so that he might make the message clear to them” (14:4).^[1]

The Quran ties this to divine justice. “We never punish until We have sent a messenger” (17:15). On the Day of Judgment no people will be able to say that no warner came to them (5:19, 6:130–131).^[2] The commentators read these verses together. Al-Tabari, explaining 16:36, says that God sent His messengers to every nation before the community of Muhammad ﷺ, peace be upon him, as He sent Muhammad to his own, with the same call to worship God alone.^[3]

So the claim is in the text, and it carries a theological reason. A God who holds every people accountable has sent every people a warning. The objection that this is foreign to Christian doctrine is a comparison, and it is examined below.

The critic says that the Quran records messengers only to Hebrews, Arabs and peoples between them, and that there is no record of an apostle to any of the other nations.

The Quran answers this directly, in two places: “We sent messengers whose stories We have told you before, and messengers whose stories We have not told you” (4:164), and “of them are those whose stories We have told you, and of them are those whose stories We have not told you” (40:78).^[4] A book that says it has named only some of the messengers cannot be faulted for not naming the rest. The absence of a story about a messenger to the Germans is what 40:78 predicts.

The stories the Quran does tell were chosen for its first audience. The Arabs of Mecca and Medina knew of Abraham عليه السلام, Moses and Jesus through the Jews and Christians of Arabia, and they knew of Ad and Thamud from their own lore and from the ruins in the north of the peninsula. A message addressed to them in the first instance used the history they could check. The Quran’s purpose in these stories is the lesson, and it says as much: “In their stories there is a lesson for people of understanding” (12:111).^[5]

Even among the named prophets, the record does not support the critic’s limit.

Moses was sent to Pharaoh and his court as well as to the Israelites. The Quran’s account dwells on his mission to the Egyptians: “Go to Pharaoh; he has transgressed” (20:24), and the long debate with Pharaoh’s magicians ends with the magicians, Egyptians, declaring their faith (20:70).^[6] Joseph preached the oneness of God to his two fellow prisoners in Egypt (12:39–40), and a believer from Pharaoh’s household later reminded his people that “Joseph came to you before with clear proofs” (40:34).^[7]

Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. The Quran records that he was sent “to a hundred thousand or more, and they believed” (37:147–148), and that his people were the only town whose faith saved it after the punishment had been announced (10:98).^[8] The Assyrians were neither Hebrews nor Arabs. The Book of Jonah in the Bible tells the same story, with Jonah sent to Nineveh to preach to its people.

Abraham argued with his father and his people in Mesopotamia and with a king who claimed power over life and death (2:258, 6:74–83), and the Quran places that debate before any Israelite existed.^[9] Lot was sent to the cities of the plain, a people the Bible itself places outside Abraham’s household. So the critic’s own list of the Quran’s messengers, read carefully, already includes Egyptians, Assyrians, Mesopotamians and the people of Sodom.

Three of the Quran’s messengers are Arabian: Hud, sent to the people of Ad; Salih, sent to Thamud; and Shuayb, sent to Midian. Surah 7 tells their stories one after another (7:65–93). The critic grants that the three are useful to the Quran, as “genuinely Arab prophets”, and says that their careers are obviously legend.

The peoples to whom they were sent are not legend. Thamud is named in an inscription of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who in 715 BCE claims to have defeated the Tamudi among the distant Arabs of the desert. Classical writers also knew of them: Diodorus of Sicily, Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy place a people called Thamudeni in north-western Arabia. A bilingual Greek and Nabataean inscription from a temple at Ruwafa, in the Hisma desert, records that it was built in the second century CE by a confederation of Thamud for the emperor Marcus Aurelius.^[10] The Quran places Thamud among rock-cut dwellings in the valleys (7:74, 89:9), and the Prophet passed through al-Hijr, the site of their ruins, on the way to Tabuk, telling his Companions not to enter the dwellings of those who had wronged themselves except in tears.^[11]

Midian is the land where Moses fled in the book of Exodus, and it is mentioned by Ptolemy as Modiana on the Red Sea coast. Ad is the hardest to place, and the Quran itself treats it as the most ancient of the three (7:69, 53:50).^[12] No independent record names Hud or Salih. That is also true of most of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, whose names survive in no inscription outside it.

The message of these three is the same as that of Noah, Abraham and Moses. Each of them says to his people, in the same words: “O my people, worship God; you have no god other than Him” (7:59, 7:65, 7:73, 7:85).^[13] The Quran states the principle elsewhere: “We sent no messenger before you without revealing to him that there is no god but Me, so worship Me” (21:25). The Prophet described the prophets as brothers of different mothers whose religion is one.^[14] On the Quran’s account, then, each people received the same call in its own language, and the stories of Hud, Salih and Shuayb show the pattern at work among the Arabs before Muhammad.

The critic says the idea of a particular revelation for each people is entirely foreign to Christian doctrine. The Bible contains more of it than the objection allows.

Melchizedek, king of Salem, is “priest of God Most High” and blesses Abraham, with no link to Abraham’s family (Genesis 14:18–20). Jethro, the priest of Midian, advises Moses and offers sacrifice to God (Exodus 18). Balaam, a seer from the region of the Euphrates, receives words from God and pronounces them (Numbers 22–24). The book of Job is set in the land of Uz and its hero is not an Israelite.^[15] Each of these figures knows the true God without being part of Israel.

The New Testament states a principle close to the Quran’s. In Lystra, Paul and Barnabas tell a crowd of non-Jews that God “in past generations allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways, yet he did not leave himself without witness” (Acts 14:16–17). Paul writes that Gentiles who do not have the law “show that the work of the law is written on their hearts” (Romans 2:14–15).^[16] Christian theology has long discussed how God dealt with peoples who never heard of Israel, and it has not answered that God left them with no witness at all.

The difference between the two positions is real. Christianity holds that the decisive revelation came through one people and then went out to all nations through the church. The Quran holds that the same basic message went out repeatedly, through many messengers, before it was sealed by a final one sent to all. That is a disagreement about how revelation reaches the world. It is not a case of one religion holding a sensible view and the other an absurd one.

The critic’s sharpest point is that a separate messenger for every people would be an untidy arrangement, needing a prophet for the Swabians and another for the French. The Quran’s answer turns on the difference between the earlier messengers and the last.

A hadith in the Sahih of al-Bukhari, narrated by Jabir ibn Abd Allah, lists five things given to Muhammad that no prophet before him received. One of them is that “every prophet used to be sent to his own people specifically, and I have been sent to all mankind.”^[17] The Quran says the same: “We have sent you only as a mercy to the worlds” (21:107), and “We have not sent you except to all people, as a bringer of good news and a warner” (34:28).^[18]

On this account the many messengers belong to the age before the world was connected. Peoples who lived apart, spoke unrelated languages and could not reach one another each received a warner “in the language of his people” (14:4). The final messenger came when one message could travel, and his book was preserved so that it would not need repeating. The Swabians and the French of the modern world fall under the second dispensation, not the first. They do not need a prophet of their own, since the last one was sent to them.

The New Testament makes a comparable move. Jesus says in Matthew 15:24 that he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, and he tells the Twelve not to go among the Gentiles (10:5–6). After the resurrection the commission widens to “all nations” (28:19). Christians read this as a change from a mission to one people to a mission to all, which is the same shape as the Quran’s account of the earlier messengers and the last.^[19]

The question of what happened to peoples who never heard a clear message, before or after Muhammad, is one Muslim scholars discussed at length. Many held, on the strength of 17:15, that such people are not punished as those who heard and refused, and that they will be tested on the Day of Judgment. Ibn Kathir records the reports on this test in his commentary on that verse.^[20] Christian theologians have their own debate on the same question, under the name of the unevangelised.

The verse that the critic finds implausible, then, is part of a consistent scheme: a warning to every people in its own language, a final message for all people in one book, and judgment according to what each had received.