“…We have been sent to the people of this town so that we might call them to worship Allah alone, without any partner.”

The man asked them, “Do you seek any payment for this?”

They answered, “No.”

Thereupon he cast aside what was in his hand and went straight to the townspeople, proclaiming:

“O my people, follow the messengers! Follow those who ask you for no reward and are themselves rightly guided.” (Yā Sīn 36:20)

This, then, is the correct view: these envoys were messengers of Allah who lived before the time of the Messiah. They had been sent to Antioch, and Ḥabīb the Carpenter believed in them. Thus they preceded Jesus, while the townspeople themselves refused to believe; consequently Allah destroyed them, as the Quran recounts. Afterward, Antioch was rebuilt, and its inhabitants remained polytheists until some of the disciples eventually reached them, through whose efforts they embraced faith in Jesus and entered his religion.

It is also said that Antioch was the first of the great cities to accept faith in Jesus—peace be upon him—after he was raised to heaven. Yet some Qur’anic commentators mistakenly assumed that those mentioned in the Quran were the apostles of Jesus and that they were from