Azami 12272

Tabarani reported it in al-Kabir (6/305) from Hasan bin Harir Sawri, who said, Zakariya bin Nafi Arsufi told us, who said, Sari bin Yahya told us, from Sulayman Taymi, from Abu Uthman Nahdi, from Salman, and he mentioned it. Its isnad is sahih. It has other chains besides this one, but what I have mentioned here is the most sahih of them.Note, "from Abu Uthman Nahdi" was dropped from the isnad, as is evident from Tabarani's biographical entry.These priests and monks were followers of Arius the Egyptian, who appeared in the third century CE and called people to believe in the prophethood of Christ , denying his divinity, for which he and his companions were persecuted. Some of their followers remained and lived on to witness the era of the Prophet ﷺ, so they believed in him.Perhaps Negus, the king of Abyssinia, was also secretly one of his followers, and did not reveal this out of fear of the majority of Christians who followed the doctrine of Paul. This is why he considered the Quran and the Injil to be from a single lamp-niche, even though the existing Gospels do not deny the divinity of Christ. Perhaps he had also come across the Gospel of Barnabas, which was discovered fifty years before his reign, and which denies the divinity of Christ, affirms his prophethood, and contains glad tidings of the prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ.So his statement, "from a single lamp-niche," refers to the Quran and the Gospel of Barnabas, or to the ideas of Arius carried within it.