Prophethood: Who a Prophet Is and How He Is Known

“Seal” means the best of them, or prophethood without a law continues

The response

The verse, the ḥadīth of the brick, and the consensus close every door of it. In the ḥadīth the house is complete when the brick is placed, and nothing is added after a completed house. The Prophet ﷺ also said, as Muslim reports: “There is no prophet after me.” He said to ʿAlī: “You are to me as Hārūn was to Mūsā, except that there is no prophet after me.” Hārūn was a prophet without a new law, following the law of Mūsā, and that is exactly the kind of prophethood the Prophet ﷺ denied after himself.

And the language. The khātam is the seal that closes a thing and the ring with which it is sealed. Both readings, khātim and khātam, mean the last, by the agreement of the mufassirūn. The Companions understood it so, and they fought Musaylimah and al-Aswad and Ṭulayḥah for claiming prophethood, though Musaylimah testified that Muḥammad was the Messenger of Allah. Whoever claims prophethood after him, or believes such a claimant, has belied the Book and left Islām by the consensus of the Muslims.

“The miracles are natural events, or stories meant as symbols”

The response

The one who says it has to deal with the Qurʾān before he deals with the stories. It is a sign present now, and he cannot call it a natural event that the people did not understand, because it is in front of him, and he cannot bring a sūrah like it either.

As for the others, the Creator of the laws of nature is not bound by them. He made fire burn and He made it cool for Ibrāhīm; He made the sea flow and He split it for Mūsā. Whoever believes that Allah created the heavens and the earth from nothing has no ground on which to say that He cannot split the moon. The denial of miracles is the denial that Allah acts by His will, which is the doctrine of the philosophers that the world proceeds from Him by necessity. It was answered in the chapters on the volitional attributes and on Allah never ceasing to act.

“The miracles of Muḥammad ﷺ reach us only by single reports, and they are not known with certainty”

The response

Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah (raḥimahullāh) answered this in al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ li-man Baddala Dīn al-Masīḥ, written in reply to the Christians. He showed that these signs were not seen by one or two men but by armies, and that they were transmitted in every generation by more people than transmitted rulings that no Muslim doubts.

He said:

Hence, the one who rejects these reports as single narrations has to reject with them the times of the prayer, the number of its units and the amounts of zakāh, for they came by fewer specific reports than the signs did. The army at al-Ḥudaybiyah drank and made wuḍūʾ from water that flowed from his fingers; the army at Tabūk was fed from a little food; the people of the Trench ate from the food of Jābir; and the palm trunk wept in the mosque on a Friday before the congregation. Every one of these was told by many Companions to many Followers, and al-Bukhārī and Muslim and the compilers after them gathered the routes. A thing seen by fifteen hundred men and reported by them to their children is not a story of one narrator.

And the Christian who raises the objection is the last man entitled to it. His Gospels are four accounts that do not name their sources, that contradict one another, and of which the earliest manuscripts come from centuries after ʿĪsā, with no chain of transmitters at all. If the miracles of Muḥammad ﷺ, transmitted by known men with connected chains, give no knowledge, then the miracles that he attributes to ʿĪsā are known to him only through the Qurʾān, which confirms them, and through the Muslims.

“Ibn ʿAbbās said that ʿĪsā died: mutawaffīkah means ‘I will cause you to die’”

The response

Tawaffā in the language of the Arabs is to take a thing in full. The Arab says tawaffaytu ḥaqqī min fulān, I took my right from so-and-so in full, and death is called wafāh because the soul is taken in full; and sleep is called wafāh in the Book: “And it is He who takes you (yatawaffākum) by night” (al-Anʿām 60), and “Allah takes the souls at the time of their death, and those that do not die, in their sleep” (al-Zumar 42). So the word does not by itself mean death, and the one who makes it mean death in every place has denied two verses of the Book in order to deny a third.

Imām al-Ṭabarī (raḥimahullāh), the imam of the mufassirūn, gathered the sayings of the Salaf on the verse, and then he gave his judgement and its reason.

Al-Ṭabarī said in Jāmiʿ al-Bayān:

Hence, the imam of the mufassirūn settled the verse by the Sunnah, and he named the Sunnah mutawātir. The descent of ʿĪsā is not a single report to be argued over; it is in the two Ṣaḥīḥs and in every book of the Sunnah, and al-Bukhārī placed it in the Book of the Prophets.

Al-Bukhārī reported from Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib that Abū Hurayrah said: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

Abū Hurayrah explained “before his death” as the death of ʿĪsā, after his descent, when the People of the Book will believe in him. So ʿĪsā has a death that is still to come, and the verse of al-Nisāʾ speaks of it, and the verse of al-Nisāʾ before it says: “They did not kill him and they did not crucify him… rather, Allah raised him to Himself” (al-Nisāʾ 157–158). Raising to Allah is not the death of the body in a grave in Kashmir, as the liar of Qadian claimed; it is the answer to those who said that they killed him.

As for the narration of Ibn ʿAbbās, it comes through ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭalḥah, and the critics stated that he did not hear the tafsīr from Ibn ʿAbbās, so it is a broken chain. And even on its wording, al-Ṭabarī reported another saying of the Salaf, that the order of the verse is reversed: I will raise you to Myself, and then take you in death after I send you down to the world. Whoever leaves the mutawātir Sunnah, the explanation of Abū Hurayrah, the choice of al-Ṭabarī and the agreement of the Ummah, for a broken chain that he does not even read correctly, has not followed Ibn ʿAbbās. He has followed his own prophet, and his own prophet is a liar by the text of the Book: “but he is the Messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets.”

“Dhū al-Qarnayn is Alexander the Macedonian, so the Qurʾān praises a pagan and copies the Alexander legend”

The response

The imams of tafsīr and history distinguished the two and declared the identification an error. Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathīr (raḥimahullāh) said in his Tafsīr, after mentioning a weak report that makes Dhū al-Qarnayn a young man of the Romans who built Alexandria:

Ibn Kathīr said in Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm:

And Ibn al-Qayyim (raḥimahullāh) separated them by their religion, which is the distinction that matters, in his account of the philosophers in Ighāthat al-Lahfān.

Ibn al-Qayyim said:

Hence, the description in Sūrat al-Kahf excludes the Macedonian by its own words. Dhū al-Qarnayn says: “This is a mercy from my Lord; and when the promise of my Lord comes, He will make it level” (al-Kahf 98). He punishes the wrongdoer and rewards the one “who believes and does righteousness” (al-Kahf 87–88). That is the speech of a believer in Allah and the Last Day, and the Macedonian and his minister Aristotle worshipped idols and denied the Resurrection, as Ibn al-Qayyim said. The figure of about three hundred years before the Messiah, given by Ibn Kathīr, agrees with what the histories record of the Macedonian, and Ibn Kathīr placed the Dhū al-Qarnayn of the Qurʾān in the time of Ibrāhīm.

As for the claim that the Qurʾān copied a Syriac legend, the legend makes its hero the Macedonian, and the Qurʾān makes its hero a believing servant whose description contradicts him. A borrower does not correct the very identity of the hero he borrows. And the question was put to the Prophet ﷺ by the Quraysh at the suggestion of the Jews of Madīnah, as Ibn Isḥāq reported, as a test of whether he was a prophet; the answer came by revelation, and it was received by those who had set the test. Whoever makes the Qurʾān the student of a Syriac sermon has to explain why it disagrees with its teacher on the one thing that the teacher was written to praise.