Did Christians Expect Prophet Muhammad? Qedar and Isaiah 42

Islamic scripture and tradition say that some learned Jews and Christians recognized signs of the final Prophet. Isaiah 42 is often brought into this discussion because it names Qedar, a son of Ishmael associated with Arabia, and calls Qedar’s settlements to rejoice. That connection is real—but the larger historical claim needs careful wording.

Three different kinds of evidence

Discussions of this subject often blend different sources together. A Quranic statement is a claim of revelation. A hadith or biography preserves what Muslims transmitted about an encounter. A contemporary Christian inscription, letter, or chronicle is external historical evidence. Each can matter, but they do not answer the same question or carry the same kind of authority.

What the Quran claims

This is the Quran’s clearest general statement: the “ummi Prophet” is found written with the People of the Book in the Torah and Gospel. The verse does not identify one surviving sentence as the entire proof. It describes a recognizable prophetic profile—his message, moral commands, lawful and unlawful things, and the burdens he removes.

Here the Quran attributes a direct announcement to Jesus: a messenger named Ahmad would come after him. Ahmad and Muhammad share the Arabic root related to praise. This is an explicit Quranic claim, even though Christians do not find that wording in the canonical New Testament and do not accept the Muslim reading of later passages about the Paraclete.

The classical commentaries retrieved for this study connect this verse with reports that some Jewish groups near Medina had spoken of an approaching prophet and hoped for victory through him, only to reject Muhammad when he came from the Arabs. This passage concerns Jewish expectation, not Christian expectation, but it belongs to the same late-antique setting in which communities were reading scripture for signs of what God would do next.

Who was Qedar?

Qedar—often spelled Kedar in English Bibles and transliterated Qēdār from Hebrew—is not an invented Islamic name. Genesis 25 lists Kedar as Ishmael’s second named son. The same passage describes Ishmael as Abraham’s son and speaks of twelve princes and their settlements. Later biblical texts use Qedar for an Ishmaelite or north-Arabian tribal people known for tents, flocks, archers, and desert trade.

“These are the names of Ishmael’s sons … Nebaioth (Ishmael’s firstborn), Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam …” — Genesis 25:13–16 · NET Bible

This establishes the basic chain that makes Isaiah 42 interesting to Muslim readers: Abraham, then Ishmael, then Qedar, then an Arabian people. It does not by itself prove Muhammad’s descent from Qedar or identify every later Arabian community with him. Genealogical tradition and a prophetic interpretation are additional claims.

What Isaiah 42 actually says

Isaiah 42 begins with a servant upheld by God. The servant will bring justice to the nations, act gently, persevere, and establish justice; the coastlands wait for his teaching. The chapter then expands into a “new song” of praise reaching the sea, distant islands, wilderness, cities, and mountain settlements.

“Let the wilderness and its cities raise their voices, with the villages that Kedar inhabits. Let the inhabitants of Sela sing. Let them shout from the top of the mountains!” — Isaiah 42:11 · World English Bible

Qedar is therefore explicitly present in the chapter, and people connected with Qedar are summoned to rejoice. But notice the grammar: Isaiah does not directly say that the servant is a Qedarite. Qedar and Sela appear among the regions called to praise God as the divine work reaches outward.

Why Muslims connect Isaiah 42 to Muhammad

The Muslim reading is not based on the word Qedar alone. It sees a cluster of themes: a chosen servant bringing justice beyond Israel; teaching awaited by distant peoples; a new song; the wilderness and Qedar rejoicing; praise from mountain tops; and, later in the same chapter, God advancing with power against His enemies. Muslim readers see these themes converging on Muhammad’s mission in Arabia and its movement from Mecca to Medina and beyond.

Where that reading is disputed

Jewish readings

In the surrounding chapters, Israel or Jacob is repeatedly called God’s servant. Jewish interpretation therefore commonly reads the servant corporately as Israel, or within the book’s message about Israel’s restoration and witness among the nations. Rashi’s comment on Isaiah 42:11 treats the wilderness, Qedar, and rocky settlements as places that will themselves raise their voices in praise; it does not identify the servant with Muhammad.

Christian readings

Matthew 12 applies Isaiah 42:1–4 to Jesus, and Christian tradition usually reads the servant through Christ. Christian scholarship also acknowledges that the servant language in Isaiah 40–55 can refer to Israel, so Christian interpretation itself contains debate about individual, corporate, and messianic dimensions.

Is Sela Medina?

A mountain called Sela exists near Medina, which makes the Muslim association understandable. Yet Sela is also a biblical place-name strongly associated by many commentators with Edom and often with Petra. Because Isaiah pairs Qedar and Sela poetically, the verse evokes the Syro-Arabian and Edomite wilderness world. The text alone cannot securely decide between the later Muslim Medina association and the common Petra-Edom identification.

Christians who recognized the signs

Waraqa ibn Nawfal: recognition after the first revelation

Sahih al-Bukhari describes Waraqa as a Christian who read or wrote from the Gospel. After Khadijah brought Muhammad to him and Muhammad described the encounter in the cave, Waraqa identified the visitor with the angelic messenger sent to Moses. He also predicted that Muhammad’s people would expel him and promised support if he lived to see that day.

Waraqa is powerful evidence inside the Islamic tradition for a learned Christian recognizing a familiar prophetic pattern. But the timing matters: he made this judgment after hearing Muhammad’s first-revelation experience. The report does not say that Waraqa had publicly announced Muhammad by name years beforehand.

Salman al-Farisi: the clearest report about the land

The conversion account of Salman al-Farisi, preserved in Musnad Ahmad and early biographical tradition, comes closest to the specific claim in this article. Salman says that his final Christian teacher told him the time of a prophet following Abraham’s religion was near. The prophet would arise in Arabia and migrate to a land of date palms between two stony or lava tracts. He would accept gifts but not charity and would bear the seal of prophethood.

Salman later reached Medina and tested those signs. In Muslim memory, this is not a vague prediction assembled afterward: it is a location, a religious lineage, and recognizable personal marks transmitted to a seeker by a Christian ascetic. Historically, however, the written report reaches us through Muslim hadith and sira transmission rather than through a surviving pre-Islamic Christian manuscript.

The Syrian monk and the limits of the Bahira report

Jami al-Tirmidhi preserves a report of a monk recognizing signs in the young Muhammad during a caravan journey to Syria and warning that others would recognize him. Al-Tirmidhi calls the report hasan gharib. Scholars have nevertheless debated parts of its chain, chronology, and expanded retellings. It is useful as evidence of early Muslim memory, but it should not carry the article by itself.

Heraclius: recognition after the mission was public

Bukhari’s long Heraclius report portrays the Byzantine emperor questioning Abu Sufyan about Muhammad’s ancestry, truthfulness, followers, and conduct. Heraclius concludes that these are signs of prophethood and says he expected a prophet, though not that he would come from the Arabs. Whatever conclusion one reaches about the report’s historical details, it concerns recognition after Muhammad had openly claimed prophethood and sent a letter—not a Christian prediction before his appearance.

What non-Muslim sources can establish

Near-contemporary Christian writings are valuable precisely because they come from outside the Muslim transmission. The Doctrina Jacobi, a Greek Christian polemic usually dated to the 630s, speaks hostilely of a prophet appearing with the Saracens, though it does not name him. A Syriac chronicle associated with Thomas the Presbyter, written around 640, refers to Arabs of Muhammad. The Armenian history attributed to Sebeos, written a few decades later, describes an Ishmaelite called Muhammad who taught the Arabs about the God of Abraham and knew the story of Moses.

These witnesses establish that Christians became aware of Muhammad and understood the movement’s Abrahamic claims very early. They do not establish that Christian churches across Arabia or Byzantium had been expecting him beforehand. The earliest surviving external texts react to an already-emerging movement; they are not advance notices.

A balanced verdict

A Muslim does not need to pretend that Isaiah 42 contains the Arabic name Muhammad. The more serious argument is that the Quran announces continuity with earlier revelation, that Qedar places the Ishmaelite-Arabian world inside a prophetic song about justice and praise, and that Muslim tradition remembers scripturally learned individuals recognizing the final Prophet’s signs.

A Christian or Jewish reader can reasonably answer that Isaiah belongs first to its own Hebrew literary context and that later identification with Muhammad is retrospective. That disagreement should be stated rather than hidden. The most fruitful question is not whether one isolated place-name forces belief, but which reading best accounts for the servant’s mission, the chapter’s geography, the history that followed, and the wider claims of each scripture.

For the larger family story behind Ishmael and Qedar, read What Are the Abrahamic Religions?.

For a broader comparison of how the two scriptures make and preserve their claims, continue with Did Kings Change the Bible—and Did Early Christians Call Jesus God?.