In the Qur’an, Allah (God) reveals that Muslims should believe in Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) and all the prophets sent before him, and in all the scriptures given to those prophets. In verse 4 of Surat al-Baqara, our Lord refers to Muslims as “those who believe in what has been sent down to you and what was sent down before you . . .”
As is mentioned in the Qur’an, the Old and New Testaments, the Psalms and the pages of Prophet Abraham (pbuh) are scriptures sent down to prophets who lived in past centuries. A portion of these books has been lost, and what remains has been corrupted or altered. Nonetheless, they still contain many true and accurate statements regarding the true faith. Muslims evaluate all these statements in the light of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and consider those to be valid that are compatible with the divine verses and the hadiths. For that reason, Muslims can make use of passages from both the Old and the New Testaments that are compatible with the Qur’an and in agreement with the Sunnah. The fundamental precondition, however, is that they should be compatible with the Qur’an as well as the hadiths.
Allah has revealed that these scriptures were guides for the societies to which they were sent. In one verse (Surah Al ‘Imran, 3-4), He reveals:
He has sent down the Book to you with truth, confirming what was there before it. And He sent down the Torah and the Gospel, previously, as guidance for humanity, and He has sent down the Furqan. (Surah Al ‘Imran, 3-4)
Another verse reveals this about the Old Testament:
We sent down the Torah containing guidance and light, and the prophets who had submitted themselves gave judgment by it for the Jews—as did their scholars and their rabbis—by what they had been allowed to preserve of Allah’s Book to which they were witnesses. (Surat al-Mai’da, 44)
In examining the portents of the End Times in the Old and New Testaments, the corrupted or distorted parts of those scriptures are not considered in this book. Only those passages compatible with the Qur’an and the hadiths of our Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) have been used.
