Ask most non-Muslims what Islam says about Jesus and they will guess: not much, and not favourably. Both halves of that guess are wrong, and the correction is worth making carefully, because the actual picture is stranger and more interesting than either side's summary of it.
What the Quran affirms
He is named repeatedly — Isa ibn Maryam, Jesus son of Mary — and the material attached to him is substantial.
He is born of a virgin. The Quran gives the annunciation to Maryam at length, in Surah Al Imran and again in Surah Maryam, and is explicit that no man had touched her. Mary is the only woman named in the Quran, and a chapter carries her name.
He is called al-Masih, the Messiah — a title the Quran applies to no one else.
He is a word from God and a spirit from him. The phrasing in Surah Al Imran and Surah an-Nisa is striking, and Muslim commentators have expended considerable effort on what exactly it means.
He works miracles, by God's permission: healing the blind and the leper, forming a bird from clay and giving it life, raising the dead.
He speaks in infancy, defending his mother from the accusation her pregnancy invited.
He is given a scripture, the Injil — a point with consequences we take up in what happened to the Injil.
He is taken up to God, rather than dying at his enemies' hands, and Islamic tradition holds that he will return.
That is a remarkable body of material. On any reading, the Quran treats Jesus as extraordinary.
What the Quran denies
Two denials, and they are emphatic.
That he is the Son of God, or divine. The Quran addresses this directly and repeatedly, treating the attribution of partners to God as the gravest of errors. Surah an-Nisa urges the People of the Book not to exceed the limits in their religion, and states plainly that God is one.
That he was crucified. Surah an-Nisa states that they did not kill him and did not crucify him, but that it was made to appear so to them — a verse we examine on its own in did Jesus die on the cross, because the historical question it raises is a serious one.
A misunderstanding worth clearing up
One point deserves attention because it recurs constantly in conversation between Muslims and Christians and generates a great deal of pointless argument.
The Quran contains a passage in Surah al-Ma'idah in which Jesus is asked whether he told people to take him and his mother as two gods besides God, and denies it. Many readers understand this as a description of Christian belief in the Trinity.
Christians do not believe that. No Christian church in any century has held that Mary is a person of the Trinity. Whatever one makes of the doctrine of the Trinity — and it is genuinely difficult — the thing being denied in that passage is not the thing Christians affirm. Arguments that proceed as though it were are arguing past each other from the first sentence.
The tension inside the picture
Here is what a careful reader is left holding.
The Quran gives Jesus a virgin birth, the title Messiah, the power to raise the dead, a description as a word from God, and an ascension — and gives none of this to Muhammad. It then insists he is a servant and prophet, and no more.
Muslim scholarship has answers to this, and they are not foolish ones: the miracles are performed by God's permission and are signs authenticating a prophet, not evidence of his nature; God can do as he likes with a birth; titles need not carry the freight Christians load onto them.
But the tension is real enough that a great many people have noticed it on their own, without anyone pointing it out. The category the Quran assigns him sits somewhat awkwardly on the material the Quran itself supplies.
Where the two accounts diverge in full is set out in Jesus in the Quran and the Gospels, and the question of his own claims about himself in prophet or something more.
Why this matters for the dreams
There is a practical reason so many people arrive at this question.
The figure people describe encountering in the dreams reported across the Muslim world does not present himself in the way the Quranic category would lead you to expect. He does not point past himself to God. He says follow me. He speaks as though the dreamer's response to him personally is what is at stake.
That mismatch is what sends a great many dreamers looking for a fuller answer than they already had. If it is what sent you, this page is written for exactly that.
Common questions
Do Muslims respect Jesus?
Yes, genuinely and without reservation as a prophet. Believing in Isa is a required article of faith; disrespect toward him is not acceptable in Islam.
Is Isa the same person as Jesus?
The Quran refers to the same historical figure, son of Mary, of first-century Palestine. What is said about him differs substantially, which is the whole of the discussion.
Why does the Quran say so much about him?
It emerged in an environment where Christianity was well established and its claims widely known, and a considerable portion of the Quran engages directly with the People of the Book.