The stories of the Qur'an

Sha'rawi holds that the stories of the Qur'an are events that happened, and that God told them not to pass the time but to strengthen the Prophet and the believers in the situations that shake them ^{1 2}.

Sha'rawi says the word "qissa" comes from the tracker of marks in the sand who follows the trail to its end. The Qur'an therefore tells the truth, and its stories are not fiction ¹.

Sha'rawi notes that God named Maryam daughter of Imran and Isa son of Maryam, because the miracle of his birth does not recur. Pharaoh of Musa, the People of the Cave and Dhu al-Qarnayn are not named, because the aim is wisdom and not one person ^{2 3}. He reads Pharaoh as every ruler who wants to be worshipped, the People of the Cave as every believing group fleeing the tyranny of disbelief, and Qarun as the worship of wealth ².

He does not treat a repeated story as repetition. Each occurrence adds information, and gathering the occurrences gives a whole story ³. In the story of the mother of Musa, one passage prepares her for the event, another describes the moment it happens, and a third shows that the enmity was mutual ^{3 4}.

He explains that the story of Musa is not given in one piece as the story of Yusuf is, because God wanted to strengthen the Prophet and the believers with snapshots that do the work of strengthening at each point ⁵.

This is Sha'rawi's reading of the nature of the stories. No academic reading of the historicity of Qur'anic stories and no symbolic reading from other traditions is set out here, and none is checked. The edition is unverified; numbers are scan pages, not printed pages.