Waraqa ibn Naw­fal : Prob­ing Chris­t­ian Polemics

In an arti­cle of his, Jochen Katz has made much of the nar­ra­tives about Waraqa ibn Naw­fal, and has con­jec­tured on his alleged influ­ence on Prophet Muham­mad’s^(P) reli­gious thought.

Fol­low­ing is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive extract of his said article :

Waraqa lived in Mec­ca and prob­a­bly Muham­mad has met him long before his mar­riage to Khadi­ja already, but at the lat­est when he mar­ried her, he is now a rel­a­tive of Waraqa, a local author­i­ty on the scrip­tures. That gave Muham­mad at least 15 years of oppor­tu­ni­ty of reli­gious dis­cus­sions with a man who knew the scrip­tures. And even if they had been writ­ten in anoth­er lan­guage, Waraqa could read it, and he would have talked about them in Ara­bic with Muham­mad. From the time he mar­ried Khadi­ja [25 years old] to the time of his first ​“rev­e­la­tion” [40 years old] there are 15 years of pos­si­bil­i­ty, or rather prob­a­bil­i­ty of learn­ing at least some­thing of what Waraqa believed and knew from the scriptures.

The prob­lem with this pas­sage (as well as with his entire arti­cle) is his putting a blind faith — appar­ent­ly because they seem to sup­port his own ​“reli­gious” con­vic­tions — on such nar­ra­tives whose his­toric­i­ty is of extreme­ly dubi­ous nature ; an atti­tude which is of no schol­ar­ly worth.

What lit­tle do we pos­sess on Waraqa ibn Naw­fal has an indu­bitable colour of leg­end and often appears to be fash­ioned as an anachro­nous sub­stan­ti­a­tion of the prophet­hood of Muham­mad^(P).

Appar­ent­ly Waraqa ibn Naw­fal is asso­ci­at­ed with the Prophet^(P) from very ear­ly on : It is Waraqa bin Naw­fal who finds the infant Prophet Muham­mad^(P) when he strayed from his suck­ling moth­er, an account which implic­it­ly pre­sumes Waraqa’s recog­ni­tion of the extra­or­di­nary nature of the young Prophet.¹

Even before the birth of the Prophet^(P), Waraqa ibn Naw­fal’s sis­ter sees the light of prophet­hood on the fore­head of Muham­mad’s father and offers her­self to him so that she could have the hon­our of becom­ing the Prophet’s^(P) moth­er.²

It is in this vein that Waraqa ibn Naw­fal is pre­sent­ed as, what Jochen Katz referred to, as ​“a local author­i­ty on the scrip­tures.” For the nar­ra­tives say :

… The Prophet returned to Khadi­ja while his heart was beat­ing rapid­ly. She took him to Waraqa bin Nau­fal who was a Chris­t­ian con­vert and used to read the gospel in Ara­bic Waraqa asked (the Prophet), ​“What do you see?” When he told him, Waraqa said, ​“That is the same angel whom Allah sent to the Prophet) Moses. Should I live till you receive the Divine Mes­sage, I will sup­port you strongly.

This is most prob­a­bly an exam­ple of an anachro­nism because, in addi­tion to the moot ques­tion of his lit­er­a­cy, the inves­ti­ga­tion of Sid­ney H. Grif­fith has made him con­clude that :

All one can say about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pre-Islam­ic, Chris­t­ian ver­sion of the Gospel in Ara­bic is that no sure sign of its actu­al exis­tence has yet emerged.³

and :

The old­est known, dat­ed man­u­scripts con­tain­ing Ara­bic trans­la­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment are in the col­lec­tions of St. Cather­ine’s monastery at Mt. Sinai…dating from 867 AD.ibid., 131 – 2

Clear­ly, the appar­ent intent of such nar­ra­tives is to find cor­rob­o­ra­tion from among the old­er fol­low­ers of monothe­ism of Muham­mad’s^(P) prophe­cy. They may con­tain a ker­nel of truth but it would be fal­la­cious to attach over­due sig­nif­i­cance to all their details, and con­se­quent­ly, it is just not pos­si­ble, owing to lack of trust­wor­thy data, to agree with Jochen Katz’s the­sis that Waraqa ibn Nau­fal played a role in the com­po­si­tion of the Qur’an.

1. Ibn Ishaq, ed., Guil­laume, pp. 72 – 3[↩]
2. ibid., pp. 68 – 9[↩]
3. Sid­ney H. Grif­fith, The Gospel In Ara­bic : An Enquiry Into Its Appear­ance In the First Abbasid Cen­tu­ry, in : Oriens Chris­tianus, vol. lxix, 1985, p. 166[↩]