Quranic Perception of History

QURANIC PERCEPTION OF HISTORY The Quran contains symbolic events about the past and predictions about the future covering the entire history of mankind until the Day of Judgement. A part of a long tradition about the Quran is: “The Quran is the book of God, containing the news of those before you and the news of those after you” (Tirmidhi, Hadith 2906). Abdullah ibn Masud, a senior companion of the Prophet of Islam, has explained this tradition to mean that the Quran contains the knowledge of earlier people as well as the knowledge of the people who will come later in the future. (Al Baihaqi, Shub al Iman, Hadith 1808) This does not mean that the Quran contains a detailed history of the human race. It simply means that the Quran presents events representing human history. That is to say, we find in the Quran such historical references by perusing which one can arrive at a complete picture of the entire human history.