target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_395e6bbc-3055-5afb-a55f-553adb9cacf8.jpg"/>h, and Ibn Maryam). Nuh/Noah is mentioned 43 times; Yusuf/Joseph and Lot/Lut, 27 each; Hud, 25; Sulayman/Solomon, 17. Harun/Aaron is mentioned 6 times. The Qur’n even says Pharaoh’s name more than that of Muammad (and all prophets except for Moses) at 76. Iblis, the Devil, is mentioned 11 times by name, more than twice the instances of Muammad’s name; this does not even include references to Iblis as shayn. From a superficial first glance, it would appear as though Muammad is not the central character in the Qur’n.
When the Qur’n speaks of my companion, it is usually to argue for its own legitimacy. Such is the case with 53:2; the Qur’n mentions only my companion, the means by which we have access to the Qur’n, to say that he has not gone astray or spoken from his own desire. Both of the Qur’n’s other uses of ibukum, “your companion,” serve this concern, promising that there is nothing in him from a jinn (34:46) and that he is not majnn, “jinn-possessed” (81:22). Some Muslims, arguing that Muammad should not be seen as representing the crucial essence of Islam, choose to emphasize the Qur’n’s paucity of direct references to him.
There’s another way to look at it: The Qur’n is always talking about Muammad and his community, because even if people hold the Qur’n to be eternal and universal, the words must still make sense in their own world. A close read might suggest that the Qur’n employs previous prophets as stand-ins for Muammad; when the Qur’n speaks of the rejection and mockery of Noah by his people, we are supposed to learn something about Muammad’s experience. In Muammad’s time, the consistency of these stories—a prophet comes to warn his people, they ignore him, and Allh subsequently removes them from the planet via natural disasters—would have served as a warning to the people of Mecca. The Qur’n asks that its audience consider the fate of these previous peoples. If Moses dominates the Qur’n’s stories, it could lead us to consider that Moses, more than any other prophet, reflects the prophetic archetype in which the Qur’n casts Muammad.
It is usually the people around Muammad that we call ab; for the Qur’
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