awaiting a prophet whom God would indeed raise up, and whom their own Scriptures had long foretold. A short while ago we pointed to a number of leading Christians who embraced Islam during the lifetime of the Messenger—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—once his call reached them. They accepted the message because they already knew of it and recognized its Prophet from the very books that had announced him; they were not engaging in conjecture about the unseen, but rather acknowledging a truth they had found embodied in their Scriptures (1).
Such, then, is their verbal testimony, and their actual conduct is another. Both forms concur in affirming the indications of his commissioning—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—that we still encounter in the books they hold today, despite all the distortion and fabrication those books have undergone, and despite the concealment of many passages.
Notes preliminary to the prophecies:
Before presenting the prophecies assembled by the author—may Allah have mercy on him—we shall preface them with several observations concerning their nature and interpretation:
- We believe that the books now in the hands of the People of the Book, both Jews and Christians, are not the very Scriptures that Allah revealed as revelation to Moses and Jesus, peace be upon them. Moreover, they have suffered at the hands of later followers from suppression and distortion—they cloak the truth with falsehood and mix the two so that truth cannot be distinguished from falsehood; they conceal and hide the truth; they alter words from their proper places, both in wording and in meaning; and they twist their tongues when reciting the Book so as to confuse listeners about the revealed wording (2). In spite of all this, many indications still remain scattered within the folds of those books,