Calendar · ChildrenDemographics ·

Muslims identify the prophets of Islam (Arabic: نبي‎) as those humans chosen by Allah to teach mankind. Humans may rely on revelation or tradition to identify prophets.[citation needed]

According to Islamic tradition, each prophet conveyed the same basic ideas of Islam (defined as submission to God, to his words and to his orders). They brought the belief in a single God and in the avoidance of idolatry and sin. Each came to preach Islam and told of the coming of the final law-bearing prophet and messenger of God: Muhammad. Each prophet directed a message to a different group and each prophet taught minor variations in sharia (or the practice of religion) to a different target audience. These variations constitute applications of Islam: mainstream Muslims do not consider them discrete versions of Islam.

Islamic tradition holds that God sent messengers to every nation. Muslims believe that God finally sent Muhammad to "seal" and to convey the divine message to the whole world (to sum up and to finalize the word of God), whereas he had previously sent the other messengers (rusul) to convey their messages to a specific group of people or to an individual nation.

Muslims regard Adam as the first prophet and Muhammad as the last prophet; (from the traditional interpretation of Muhammad's title Seal of the Prophets). Islam regards Jesus as a rasul (and sometimes as a nabi) because he received wahy (revelation) from God, through which God revealed the Injil (Gospel) to him. Muslims have great respect for Jesus (known by the Arabic form of his given name as Eesa or Isa) and for his mother Maryam. They do not, however, regard Jesus as the son of God.

Islamic theology recognises as many as 224,000 prophets. According to Wheeler, the Qur'an identifies 25 prophets by name, starting with Adam and ending with Muhammad.

In both Arabic and Hebrew, the term nabī (plural forms: nabiyyūn and anbiyāʾ) means "prophet". Forms of this noun occur 75 times in the Qur'an. The term nubuwwa (meaning "prophethood") occurs five times in the Qur'an. The terms rasūl (plural: rusul) and mursal (plural: mursalūn) denote “messenger” or "apostle" and occur more than 300 times. The term for a prophetic “message”, risāla (plural: risālāt) appears in the Qur'an in ten instances.

The Syriac form of rasūl Allāh (literally: "messenger of God"), s̲h̲eliḥeh d-allāhā, occurs frequently in the apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas. The corresponding verb for s̲h̲eliḥeh — s̲h̲alaḥ, occurs in connection with the prophets in the Old Testament (Exodus 3:13-14, 4:13; Isaiah 6:8; Jeremiah 1:7).

The words "prophet" (Arabic: nabi, نبی) and "messenger" (Arabic: rasul, رسول) appear several times in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The following table shows these words in different languages: