Al-Naṣārā in the Qurʾān

The appellation “Christians” (al-masīḥiyyūn), ¹ used to designate the followers of Jesus the Messiah (Christos), never appears in the Arabic Qurʾān. But Christians are clearly referred to in the text of the Islamic scripture under a number of other names and titles. ² Some fifty-four times the Qurʾān speaks of “Scripture People” (ahl al-kitāb), and in many instances the Christians are obviously included among them. Once in the Qurʾān Christians are called “Gospel People” (ahl al-injīl). Fourteen times the Qurʾān uses the term al-naṣārā (once in the sing., al-naṣrānī), as the most community-specific of the names and titles it employs to refer to the historical followers of ʿĪsā, the Messiah, Mary’s son, as the Qurʾān regularly speaks of Jesus of Nazareth, who, in the Islamic view, was the last Messenger God sent to the “Scripture People” prior to the mission of Muḥammad, “the seal of the prophets” (al-Aḥzāb [33] 40). The immediate suggestion of this difference in nomenclature is that the reader should not too hastily assume that the Christians included among the “Scripture People,” or those designated as “Gospel People,” or those called al-naṣārā in the Qurʾān, are in fact the same communities of people, a point to which we shall return in due course.