Muhammad Ataur-Rahim Biography

Muhammad Ataur-Rahim was a twentieth-century Pakistani-British Muslim scholar and writer best known internationally as the principal author of Jesus, Prophet of Islam — first published in 1977 by MWH London Publishers and continuously reprinted by Diwan Press, Ta-Ha Publishers, and others — one of the most widely circulated English-language works of Islamic comparative religion of the past half-century. He pursued his higher education in Britain, where he settled and produced the bulk of his writing, and was associated for many years with the wider Muslim intellectual community around the Murabitun and the Norwich-based publishers and study circles that grew out of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi's leadership.

Jesus, Prophet of Islam — co-authored in its later expanded editions with Ahmad Thomson — argues from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic sources that the historical Jesus (peace be upon him) was a Hebrew prophet who preached strict monotheism in continuity with Moses (peace be upon him) and the Israelite prophetic tradition, and that the doctrines of trinitarianism and divine sonship arose in the post-apostolic era through the influence of Greco-Roman religious categories on early Christianity. The book draws extensively on Christian biblical scholarship, the Apocrypha, the writings of the early Church Fathers, and the Qur'an and hadith. Ataur-Rahim also authored other shorter works in the genre of comparative religion and Islamic civilization.

Specific biographical details about Ataur-Rahim's birth and death dates remain unevenly documented in publicly available sources. His enduring contribution rests with Jesus, Prophet of Islam, which has shaped the Muslim discourse on Jesus (peace be upon him) for English-speaking audiences for nearly five decades, regularly recommended to inquirers approaching Islam from a Christian background and continuously stocked in Islamic bookstores worldwide.