watches a serpent devour his servant in the presence of
Moses; from a 1577
Qasas al-Anbiya manuscript The Qurʾān frequently mentions and uses stories of biblical figures, but only in the case of
Joseph son of Jacob does it narrate a prophet's story in a linear, complete form. Implicitly the original audiences of the Qurʾān had enough knowledge of these biblical figures to understand the allusions, but subsequent early Muslims felt the need for more information about these figures, who came in Islam to be known as prophets (,
anbiyāʾ). Particularly influential sources of biblical knowledge, whose information was transmitted by later Muslim scholars, were
ʿAbdullāh ibn Salām (d. 663),
Kaʿb al-Aḥbār (d. c. 652), and
Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. c. 730); their information underpinned the first written expositions of the Qurʾān's allusions to biblical figures,
tafsir (exegetical commentaries). Perhaps the most important work, characterised by Roberto Tottoli as "probably the most comprehensive collection of stories of the prophets, and [...] the most widely known in the Arab world", was
Abū Isḥāq al-Thaʿlabī ʿArāʾis al-majālis fī qaṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, from around the early eleventh century. Unlike the Qurʾān, the
Qiṣaṣ were never considered as binding or authoritative by theologians. Instead, the purpose of the
Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ was to offer Muslims complementary material based on the Qurʾān, to explain the signs of God, and the reasons for the advent of the prophets. Themselves derived from Jewish and Christian texts,
Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ went on to influence Jewish writing within the majority-Muslim world: for example, the fourteenth-century Jewish scholar
Shāhin-i Shirāzi drew on such sources. During the mid-sixteenth century, several
illuminated versions of the
Qiṣaṣ — such as
Zubdat al-Tawarikh and
Siyer-i Nebi — were created by
Ottoman authors and
miniature painters. According to Milstein et al., "iconographical study [of the texts] reveals ideological programs and clichés typical of the Ottoman polemical discourse with its
Shi'ite rival in
Iran, and its Christian neighbours in the West." == Major works ==