Nabi or rasul? 6 answers on the Quran’s two words for prophet

The two words have different roots. Rasul comes from r-s-l, to send, and means one who is sent with a message. Nabi is usually derived from n-b-ʾ, news or tidings, and means one who receives news from God and announces it. Some Arabic lexicographers derived it instead from n-b-w, to be raised up, so that a nabi is one raised above others. The Arabic dictionaries record both explanations.^[1]

In the Quran the word rasul and its plural rusul are far more common. In a count of the standard Arabic text, the singular rasul occurs 236 times and the plural rusul 86 times, while the singular nabi occurs 54 times, its plurals nabiyyun and anbiya 21 times, and the abstract noun nubuwwa, prophethood, five times.^[2] The verb arsala, to send, and the participle mursal, one who is sent, add many more references to the first root.

The decisive verse for the question is 22:52: “We did not send before you any rasul or nabi except that when he recited, Satan cast something into his recitation.” The verse names the two as separate categories and joins them with “or”. Had the words been simple synonyms, the second would add nothing. Most commentators read the verse as proof that the Quran itself treats the terms as overlapping without being identical.^[3]

Two further verses describe one man with both words. Moses عليه السلام “was chosen, and he was a messenger and a prophet” (rasulan nabiyya, 19:51), and Ishmael عليه السلام “was true to his promise, and he was a messenger and a prophet” (19:54).^[4] A writer who meant the two words to be identical would have no reason to pair them. The pairing marks a man who holds both ranks.

The critic borrows an etymology from Wilhelm Gesenius, the nineteenth-century Hebrew lexicographer, who explained the Hebrew navi as “one who bubbles forth”, from a root meaning to gush or pour out. On that derivation a prophet is a man who pours out words in a state of excitement, and the critic uses it to suggest that the Quran borrowed a Hebrew word for ecstatic speech.

The derivation is no longer the standard one. Most modern Hebrew lexicons and commentaries connect navi with the Akkadian verb nabû, “to call” or “to name”. The form can be read in two ways: actively, as one who calls out or proclaims, or passively, as one who is called by God. The second reading fits the call narratives of the Hebrew Bible, in which Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah are summoned before they speak. The older “bubbling” etymology was set aside because the root it relied on is not attested with that meaning in Hebrew.^[5]

The Arabic word has its own history, and the Arabic lexicographers did not take it from Hebrew. They derived nabi from naba’, news of weight, so that a nabi is one who is informed and who informs. The two Semitic words are related, as are many shared words for religious ideas across the family of languages. The Arabic meaning, a bearer of news from God, is close to the Akkadian “one who is called”, and neither has anything to do with babbling. The Quran’s own usage settles the matter: it never describes a prophet’s speech as ecstatic, and it rejects the charge that the Prophet was a soothsayer (kahin) or a man possessed (52:29, 69:42).^[6]

The objection says the distinction is a post-Quranic invention that only multiplied confusion. The classical position is simpler than that, and it is drawn from the verses above. The majority of Sunni scholars held that the two words are related as general and particular. Every rasul is a nabi, since every messenger receives revelation, and some anbiya were never given the commission to deliver a mission of their own. That relationship explains 22:52, which lists both, and 19:51, which joins them in one man.

The scholars then disagreed about what the extra commission consisted of. Three answers are found in the literature. The first is the one the critic cites: a rasul is a prophet who brings a scripture or a new law, and a nabi is one who receives revelation without a new law, teaching by the law of the messenger before him. The second, defended by Ibn Taymiyya in his book on prophethood, places the difference in the audience. A rasul, on his account, is sent to a people who reject God, to call them to Him, while a nabi is sent to believers who already follow a law, to teach and judge among them by it. He gives the prophets of the Children of Israel between Moses and Jesus as his example, since they ruled by the Torah.^[7] The third view, recorded by several commentators, treats the words as close to synonyms and holds that the Quran pairs them for emphasis.

A reader who meets this disagreement may conclude that the scholars could not make up their minds. The more accurate conclusion is that the Quran gave them two words and a verse that separated them, and left the boundary between them to be worked out from the stories of the prophets themselves. That is a familiar situation in any scripture. The New Testament uses “apostle” for the Twelve, for Paul, for Barnabas and for others, and Christian writers still discuss who counts as one and why.

The critic is right that later teaching did more with the distinction than the Quran does. He is wrong to say that the distinction itself came later, since 22:52 is in the Quran.

The objection runs: a rasul receives a book through Gabriel عليه السلام, yet Adam, Noah and Abraham are called messengers and received no book, so the definition fails on its own terms.

Part of the premise is mistaken. The Quran twice mentions “the scrolls of Abraham and Moses” (suhuf Ibrahim wa Musa, 87:18–19), and asks whether a man has not been told of what is in “the scrolls of Moses and of Abraham, who fulfilled his duty” (53:36–37). It then quotes their content: that no bearer of burdens bears another’s burden, and that a person has nothing but what he strives for.^[8] So Abraham did receive written revelation according to the Quran, even if no copy is known to survive.

Noah is a harder case for the “book” definition, which is why most of the scholars who used it spoke of a sharia, a law, and not of a book in the sense of a bound volume. Noah is the first messenger sent with a law to a people who had fallen into idolatry, and the Quran says so: “He has ordained for you of the religion what He enjoined upon Noah” (42:13). A well-known hadith on intercession has the people on the Day of Resurrection go to Noah and address him as “the first of the messengers to the people of the earth”.^[9] On the law-bearing definition Noah qualifies, since he brought a code of conduct and was commanded to warn his people. On Ibn Taymiyya’s definition he also qualifies, since he was sent to a people who rejected God.

Adam is the case on which the scholars themselves divided. He is called a prophet in a report that the hadith critics accept, and whether he was also a messenger was discussed without a settled answer.^[10] The critic who places Adam in the list of messengers who received no book is citing one side of an open question as if it were the agreed doctrine.

The “book” test, then, is a shorthand that some later manuals used. It was never the only definition, and the Quranic evidence it is tested against contains the scrolls of Abraham.

The objection treats the numbers as part of the doctrine: tradition holds that there were 315 messengers, so the believer is asked to accept that most nations before Muhammad received one.

The figures come from a report attributed to Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, in which he asked the Prophet how many prophets there had been and was told 124,000, of whom 315 were messengers, “a large company”.^[11] A similar report is narrated from Abu Umama. These reports are found in the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, in the Sahih of Ibn Hibban and in other collections, and they are not in the Sahih of al-Bukhari or the Sahih of Muslim. The chain of the Abu Dharr report passes through narrators whom the hadith critics weakened, and scholars have graded the reports differently: some declared the Abu Dharr report weak, while al-Albani judged the Abu Umama version authentic through its supporting chains.^[12]

The Quran gives no number. It says only: “We sent messengers before you; of them are those whose stories We have told you, and of them are those whose stories We have not told you” (40:78).^[13] It also names twenty-five prophets in its text. A Muslim is required to believe in the prophets the Quran names and in the principle that God sent others, and he is not required to believe any particular count. The statement “tradition assumes 315 messengers” is accurate about some hadith literature and overstates its weight.

The second half of the objection, that most nations received a messenger, follows from the Quran and not from the number. It is answered in its own article on this site, since it raises a separate question about how God deals with peoples.

The critic notes that Persian and Turkish use a single word, payghambar or peygamber, a Persian compound meaning “bearer of a message”, and suggests that the Quran would have avoided confusion by doing the same.

Persian and Turkish Muslims did not drop the distinction when they adopted payghambar. Their theological works borrowed the Arabic nabi and rasul and kept both, as English-speaking Christians keep both “prophet” and “apostle”. The everyday word covers the general idea, and the technical words carry the precise one.

The two Arabic words also record two different things about a prophet. Nabi describes the reception of news from God. Rasul describes the commission to deliver it. A prophet may receive revelation for his own guidance and for those already following a law, as many of the prophets of Israel did, without being sent to confront a people with a new message. A single word would have obscured that difference.

The Bible makes a related distinction. The Hebrew navi, prophet, is the cognate of the Arabic nabi. The New Testament’s apostolos, one who is sent, corresponds in meaning to rasul, and the Gospel of John uses the verb apostello when Jesus speaks of being sent by the Father. In Hebrews 3:1 Jesus himself is called “the apostle and high priest of our confession”.^[14] The Quran’s pairing of the two words therefore stands in a line that both Jewish and Christian scripture already knew.

Muhammad’s own titles show the two words working together. The testimony of faith calls him rasul Allah, the messenger of God. The Quran also addresses him as “O Prophet” (ya ayyuha al-nabi), and calls him “the seal of the prophets” (khatam al-nabiyyin, 33:40).^[15] The choice of nabiyyin in that verse matters. A seal of the messengers alone would have left room for further prophets without a mission; a seal of the prophets closes both categories, because every messenger is also a prophet.