Did the Prophet ﷺ Learn from Two Christian Slaves? — The Jabr & Yasar Accusation Refuted

Al-Muthanna told us: Amr ibn Awn told us, Hushaym informed us, on the authority of Husayn, on the authority of Abdullah ibn Muslim al-Hadrami: that they had two slaves from the people of ‘Ayr in Yemen, and they were children. One was called Yasar and the other Jabr. They used to read the Torah, and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would sometimes sit with them. The disbelievers of Quraysh said: ‘He only sits with them to learn from them.’ So Allah revealed:

‘The tongue of him to whom they falsely attribute it is foreign, while this is a clear Arabic tongue.’”*

• Al-Bukhari: “There is something questionable about his hadith.”
• Salih ibn Muhammad: “We used to accuse Ibn Humayd.”
• Abu Ali al-Naysaburi (to Ibn Khuzaymah): “If he had known him as we know him, he would not have praised him at all.”
• Abu Ahmad al-Assal: “I heard Fadlak say: I entered upon Ibn Humayd, and he was attaching chains of narration to texts.”
• Ya’qub ibn Ishaq al-Faqih: “I have not seen anyone more skilled at lying than Sulayman al-Shadhkuni and Muhammad ibn Humayd al-Razi.”
• Al-Nasa’i: “He is not trustworthy.”
• Abu Ishaq al-Jawzajani: “He is different from trustworthy.”

• Yahya ibn Ma’in: “He is truthful but not strong, and he practices tadlis.”
• Ali ibn al-Madini (on Yahya ibn Sa’id): “Hajjaj ibn Artat and Muhammad ibn Ishaq are the same to me, and I deliberately omitted Hajjaj and never wrote down a hadith from him.”
• Abu Zur’a: “He is truthful but practices tadlis.”
• Abu Hatim: “He is truthful but practices tadlis on the authority of weak narrators… if he says ‘he narrated to us,’ then he is acceptable — but he did not hear from al-Zuhri, nor from Hisham ibn Urwah, nor from Ikrimah.”

1. Jabr and Yasar were two Syriac children of the Banu al-Hadrami
2. They were most likely Christians
3. Their language was Syriac — not Arabic
4. The Prophet ﷺ would stop and listen as he passed by — not sit in formal instruction
5. The Quran itself refuted the accusation by pointing out the clear language difference

• Jabr and Yasar were Syriac children
• They knew only basic Arabic, sufficient to serve their master
• The Prophet ﷺ was illiterate in Arabic, let alone Syriac
• What religious knowledge could two foreign child-slaves possibly possess that the Prophet ﷺ — a Qurayshi Arab — could extract from them?

The Jews in the Arab lands were keen to conceal the Talmud and prevent Muslims from accessing it. They would discuss some of its contents orally with select Muslim scholars only when specifically inquired about…

The Talmud was not accessible to anyone other than Jewish rabbis for study and teaching until the advent of printing in Europe in the 16th century.”

They knew that he ﷺ was unlettered, neither reading nor writing, and he did not engage in formal study… The People of the Book often asked him ﷺ about this, so verses of the Quran would be revealed, and not a single one of the Christians or Jews — despite their intense enmity — reportedly contradicted him.”

• Forbidden by Church Fathers
• Confined to monks and Church Fathers in the early centuries
• Inaccessible to the general public, let alone two Syriac child-slaves

Even in the Medinan surahs, stories of Jesus ﷺ appear only in scattered verses of Al Imran and Al-Nisa.

(The chain of this transmission is good — all narrators are trustworthy and among the well-known scholars of Arabic.)

If the Prophet ﷺ learned from Christian sources, why did he deny the most universal and fundamental Christian belief?

The Hijaz, Najd, and Oman had no church organization, no missionary activity, and no Christian communities at the tribal level. Christians there were scattered individuals.

1. The Prophet ﷺ was illiterate — he could not read or write in Arabic, let alone Syriac
2. There was no Arabic translation of the Bible in the seventh century

“The Messenger of Allah ﷺ did not read, nor did he write.”

This confirms that their Syriac book would not have contained the many Quranic stories that parallel the Talmud, Apocrypha, and Midrashic texts — details that were never in translation anywhere accessible.

• Why did they never announce it?
• Doing so would have increased their standing enormously with the people of Mecca
• It would have exposed the Prophet ﷺ publicly
• It would have vindicated the Quraysh who were already making this accusation

Their silence is itself evidence that the accusation was false — and that the Quran’s refutation (“the tongue of him to whom they falsely attribute it is foreign”) was the end of the matter.

1. Hadith level: Only two chains are authentic — and they describe the Prophet ﷺ stopping to listen, not sitting in instruction. The narrations that describe formal teaching are weak or fabricated.

2. Language: Jabr and Yasar spoke Syriac. The Prophet ﷺ was illiterate in Arabic. Learning from them was impossible.

3. Content: The Quran contains Talmudic details inaccessible to anyone outside the rabbinate — let alone two Syriac child-slaves.

4. Gospel mismatch: Quranic details about Jesus match apocryphal texts that were forbidden by the Church and confined to monks — not the four canonical Gospels Jabr and Yasar might have known.

5. Distribution of content: Meccan surahs are dominated by Moses, not Jesus — the opposite of what one would expect if Christian children were the source.

6. Crucifixion: The Quran denied the most universal Christian doctrine — impossible if the source was Christian teaching.

7. Geography: Mecca had no organized Christian presence, no missionary activity, no churches or monasteries.

8. Illiteracy + no Bible: No Arabic Bible existed. No Syriac was readable by the Prophet ﷺ.

9. Silence of the accused: Jabr and Yasar never made this claim — even though it would have benefited them enormously to do so.