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His views on Jews include his theological teaching of them as People of the Book (Ahl al-Kitab), his description of them as earlier receivers of Abrahamic revelation; and the failed political alliances between the Muslim and Jewish communities.
Middle Age Christian writers claimed that Muhammad was predicted in the Bible, as a forthcoming Antichrist, false prophet, or false Messiah. According to historian Albert Hourani , initial interactions between Christian and Muslim peoples were characterized by hostility on the part of the Byzantines because they interpreted Muhammad in a ...
Muhammad respected the Jews, and his early teachings appeared to borrow from Jewish tradition. The Jews began to distance themselves from Muhammad, however, when he became critical of their not recognizing him as a prophet.
These interactions inform the earliest relations between Muslims and Jews and serve as precursors to the social, cultural, religious, political, and institutional relations between Muslims and Jews from the 7th century to the present.
A number of stories from the Islamic tradition about Muhammad entered mainstream Jewish thought incidentally due to the great cultural convergence in Al-Andalus from the 9th to 12th centuries, known as the Golden Age of Iberian Jewry.
Jews lived among Sunnis, Shi‘a, and Druze, and had well-functioning trade and communal relations with all of them. The nature of Jewish-Muslim relations, however, changed with the emergence of the Palestine conflict. The first strains in Sunni-Jewish relations appeared with the 1936–39 Arab Revolt.
For Islam, Moses was matched by a subsequent prophet whose life paralleled his but was ultimately exceeded by him: Muḥammad. This study analyzes the nature of the Jewish reaction to the Muslim claim of Mu ḥammad’s superiority over Moses. The analysis opens with a discussion of Jewish polemics against Muhammad in the early Islamic era.
