{"collection":"Texts of Islam","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_pick_021_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_pick_021_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_isl_pick_021_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/isl/pick/021.htm","summary":"This is Surah 21 (Al-Anbiya\u02be, \"The Prophets\") from the Quran, presented in M.M. Pickthall's 1930 English translation \u2014 a landmark rendering notable for its archaic King James-style diction (\"hath,\" \"thee,\" \"ye\") and its aim at fidelity to the Arabic's cadence. The surah is a Meccan chapter that functions as a sustained theological argument for monotheism, directed at a skeptical Arab audience that dismisses Muhammad as a poet or madman. Its central claim is that all prophets throughout history \u2014 Abraham, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Job, Jonah, Zachariah, and Mary's son among them \u2014 received the same essential message: there is one God, and worship belongs to Him alone. The text builds this case through a series of compressed narrative vignettes, most strikingly Abraham's destruction of the idols and his miraculous survival of the fire, used to demonstrate both the absurdity of polytheism and God's direct intervention on behalf of the faithful. A distinctive structural move is the surah's framing of eschatology alongside cosmology: it invokes the cosmic origins of heaven and earth, the orbits of sun and moon, and the release of Gog and Magog as converging signs of a judgment that heedless humanity keeps deferring. Pickthall's translation preserves the rhetorical rhythm of challenge and rebuttal that characterizes the original, making it useful for readers wanting a sense of the Quran's oral-argumentative texture rather than a modernized paraphrase.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'\u00e2n,: 21. al-Anbiya': The Prophets","tradition":"Texts of Islam","translated_text":null,"word_count":2507}