Jesus in the Tales of the Arabs

The Arabs possess in their ancient literature a body of narrative material well worth study and reading, which scholars have divided each according to his own inclination. I divide it as follows: chronicle tales, heroic tales, religious tales, philological tales, and philosophical tales. These narrative kinds all fall under genuinely Arab storytelling. As for borrowed or adapted storytelling, the Arabs have two literary narrative monuments rich in material for lovers and connoisseurs of the story — I mean the Thousand and One Nights and Kalila and Dimna.

We do not intend, in this article, to expand upon any one of these narrative kinds, but rather to take up the religious tales: to touch briefly on religious storytelling and then to sketch a picture of Christ the Lord as he appears in these tales.

By religious storytelling we mean every tale whose essential subject is religion, and the messengers and the prophets. Certain men of letters in the Abbasid age took up the lives of these messengers and prophets for study, and recounted their history in their own narrative style, so that we have two valuable story-books: the Kitab al-'Ara'is of al-Tha'alibi (A.H. 427, or 437?) and the Qisas al-Anbiya' of al-Kisa'i (fifth century A.H.).

The Arabic sources name for us certain religious story-books other than those we have mentioned, such as the Tale of the People of the Cave; the Tale of the Prophet Samson, by al-Nisaburi; the Tale of our Lord Jesus and his Mother Mary; the Tale of our Lord Moses, who spoke with God, son of Amram; the Tale of our Lord Jacob, son of our Lord Abraham; and the Tale of our Lord Joseph the Truthful. But most of these tales have not come down to us, either because they were never published or because they are lost. The greatest of these religious story-books, however — the longest, and the most closely bound to the art of religious storytelling — are the book of al-Tha'alibi and the book of al-Kisa'i.

In them the two authors treated the lives of all the prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran, and it is on them that we have relied in drawing this picture of Christ the Lord.

We must hasten to say that the Jesus of the storytellers is other than the Jesus of the Gospel; for his mother Mary's pregnancy with him lasted eight months according to some, six months according to others, and three hours — or a single hour — according to a third group.

Jesus is born without a father, the angel Gabriel breathing into the neck-opening of Mary's shift. And the birth of Jesus was a great historical event that threw the devils into an uproar. They held meeting after meeting and consulted with Iblis, "seated upon his throne in a green abyss," telling him that a mighty thing had befallen the idols and bowed their heads down to the ground. Iblis set out to discover the matter and flew off, "and surveyed the whole earth in three hours, its east and its west, its land and its sea, the two horizons and the air," until he passed the place where Jesus was born — and behold, he found it surrounded by angels, keeping watch over him on every side. He returned defeated and told his company of the matter, saying: "No female womb ever held a child but with my knowledge, nor gave birth to one but that I was present at her side. And never was there a prophet harder upon me and upon you than this newborn."

The storytellers would have it that Jesus went to the writing-school to learn, when he was nine months old; and behold, the schoolmaster asks him to say: In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate — and behold, Jesus repeats the sentence word by word. The master takes courage and asks him to say "abjad," whereupon Jesus lifts his head and says to his teacher: "Do you know what abjad is?" And when the master could not find the correct answer, Jesus set about explaining to him the meaning of abjad hawwaz hutti sa'fas qarashat — an explanation containing a great deal of drollery, and containing, beyond that, much of the storytellers' naïveté and their want of scholarly and historical scrutiny.

The Wonders of Christ the Lord

The Holy Quran affirmed the wonders of Christ, or some of them, as they appear in the Gospels (1); why then should the transmitters of these religious tales not affirm them, when such storytelling was originally composed to expound the Quran? Indeed, why should they not go further, and attribute to Christ the Lord wonders and miracles mentioned neither in the Gospels nor in the Quran? Thus Jesus was able to know the characteristics of a certain king's son before he was born, saying to his father: "In your wife's womb is a beautiful boy; one of his ears is longer than the other; on his chest is a black mole, and on his belly a white beauty-mark... etc...."

And he can change the colors of dyes whenever he wishes into whatever he wishes... exactly like the sorcerers!!

And in confirmation that he raises from the dead, he raised Shem son of Noah, who leapt up from his grave — though four thousand years had passed since his death!! And Shem spoke after his rising from the dead

(1) The Quran — Surat Al 'Imran, verses 28, 29, and 40; Surat al-Ma'ida, verse 109; Surat al-Zukhruf, verses 62 and 63.

and said: "When I heard the cry of Jesus I thought it was the cry of the Resurrection, and my head and my beard turned white from the terror of it."

These miracles are adapted, for the most part, from the Gospels, or from Jewish transmitters who had embraced Islam and had some acquaintance with the Christian and Jewish religions; and in some of these miracles — such as the miracle of raising Lazarus from the tomb — there is a great resemblance, in the telling, to the Gospel account, which shows clearly that borrowing took place, though in a distorted form. In short, the Christ of Arab religious storytelling works wonders small and great: he creates birds from clay, heals the man born blind and the leper, cures the blind and raises the dead, knows the unseen, tells people what they eat and what they drink and what they store up in their houses, and walks upon the water. All this he does at God's command and by His leave: "It is related that Jesus went out on one of his journeys, and with him was a short man from among his companions, who kept close company with Jesus. When Jesus came to the sea he said: In the name of God, in soundness and certainty — and he walked upon the face of the water. Then wonder entered the man, and he said: This is Jesus, the Spirit of God, walking on the water — and I too walk on the water! And, it is said, he sank into the water and cried out to Jesus for help; and Jesus took him from the water and drew him out and said to him: What did you say, O short one? So he told him what had passed through his mind. And Jesus said: You set yourself in a place other than that in which God set you, and God abhorred you for what you said; so repent to God of what you said. And the man repented, and returned to the station in which God had placed him." This account is nothing but an echo of what appears in the Gospel of Matthew, in the fourteenth chapter, when the disciples of Christ the Lord were troubled at seeing him walking on the face of the water and said it was a phantom, and cried out in their fear; and Jesus spoke to them and calmed their alarm, saying: It is I; be not afraid. And Peter wished to make certain of him and said: Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he went to come to Jesus; but when he saw the wind strong he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, saying: Lord, save me. And straightway Jesus stretched forth his hand and caught him, and said unto him: O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?

What stands out in this miracle — and what, in my view, moved the storytellers to set it down — is the element of doubt, which, the moment it seeps into the believer's conscience, corrupts his faith. We say this after reading, from the composers of these tales, a tradition such as this concerning the noble Arabian Prophet. It is said:

"Abu Mansur al-Hashawi related to us, with his complete chain of transmission, from Mu'adh ibn Jabal, that the Messenger of God — God bless him and give him peace — said: Had you known God as He truly ought to be known, you would have known the knowledge after which there is no ignorance. And no one has ever attained that. They said: Not even you, O Messenger of God? He said: Not even I. They said: O Messenger of God, it has reached us that Jesus son of Mary walked upon the water. He said: Yes — and had he increased in fear and in certainty, he would have walked upon the air. They said: O Messenger of God, we did not think that the messengers fell short. He said: God Most High is too exalted in station for anyone to attain His station."

The truth is that the Jesus of these religious tales has in him something of everything: something of the color of the Gospel, something of the color of the Quran, and, over and above both, something of the color of the storytellers, who were infatuated with everything strange and curious, with every legend and every fable. For while you find one report of Christ the Lord, told as it is known in the Gospel, showing Christ's tenderness, his love for mankind, and his great compassion for them, suddenly you read that he mounts a raid against the children of Israel and kills a great multitude of them.

And Jesus — God clothed him in majesty and granted him what he hoped for; He purified him and raised him up to Himself; He covered him with feathers and clothed him in light, and cut off from him the appetite for food and drink; so he flies with the angels around the Throne, for he is human and angelic, earthly and heavenly.

And Jesus is the Word of God, "for God said to him, without a father: Be — and he was; so the name of the Word fell upon him, because through it he came to be."

And the storytellers wished to add to Christ's majesty and honor, so they brought forward traditions, attributed to the Arabian Prophet, in support of their view. They said: al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Ali related, with his chain of transmission, from Ibn Abbas, who said: the Messenger of God — God bless him and give him peace — said: "How should God destroy a nation at whose beginning I stand, at whose end is Jesus, and in whose midst is the Mahdi, of the people of my house?" And it is said: "Muhammad ibn al-Qasim al-Farisi reported, with his chain of transmission, from Abu Hurayra, who said: the Messenger of God — God bless him and give him peace — said: When God sends down the Messiah, Jesus, he will live among this nation as long as he lives, then die in this city of mine and be buried beside the grave of Umar. Blessed, then, are Abu Bakr and Umar, who will be raised up between two prophets."

And again:

"Abu Salih Shu'ayb informed us... the Messenger of God — God bless him and give him peace — said: The prophets are brothers of one father by different mothers; their mothers are diverse, but their religion is one. And I am the nearest of men to Jesus son of Mary — upon her be peace — for there was no prophet between me and him. And soon the son of Mary will descend among you as a just judge; he will descend upon my nation as my successor over them... He will fight the people for Islam until in his time all creeds perish save Islam, and prostration will be to God alone, Lord of the Worlds; and in his time God will destroy the messiah of error, the lying Deceiver; and security will settle upon the earth, so that lions will graze with camels, and leopards with cattle, and wolves with sheep,

and children will play with serpents, and none will do harm to another. Then he will remain on the earth forty years; he will marry and beget children, then die; and the Muslims will pray over him and bury him in Medina beside Umar."

The storytellers exploited this tradition to the full, and al-Kisa'i wrote, in the course of his account of Christ the Lord:
"... Then God raised him up to Himself, and he remains alive in heaven until God gives leave for the descent, to fight the Deceiver; he will kill him, and the earth will be filled with justice as it was filled with tyranny and wrong... Then he will marry a woman of the Arabs, who will bear him children; he will make the greater and lesser pilgrimage, and then die. Then Gog and Magog will come forth — and they swarm down from every height — until the earth is filled with them, and no place is left for the beasts and the creeping things to settle in; then they will turn toward Jerusalem to fight Jesus..." And here the storyteller gives his imagination free rein and sorts these creatures that fight Jesus into kinds: some are like towering palm trees in their height and their breadth, and they eat the trees and the fruits; some are one cubit in height and one cubit in breadth, and they eat the plants; and some are a span in height with ears a cubit long — they spread one ear beneath them and the other above them, and they drink up all the waters!! But Jesus calls down a curse upon them, and God sends against them the ifrits of the jinn, who destroy them to the last one...
Then, when Jesus completes forty years, God sends to him the Angel of Death to take his soul; and Gabriel comes, bearing musk from Paradise, which he hands to Jesus; he takes it and smells it, and his soul is taken up in it. Then the angels come down to him, wash him, shroud him, embalm him, and bury him beside the grave of the Prophet Muhammad!...