Proofs of Prophethood
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A Mighty Book: The Inimitable Qur'an
The Qur'an is a Mighty Book. Its power is best seen in the way that it influenced the lives and softened the hearts of its earliest listeners. Sh. Mohammad Elshinawy describes the influence of the Qur'an on people's lives, both past and present, and explains its miraculous preservation.
The Proofs for the Prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ eBook is available now. Download your copy here.
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This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. The Qur'an describes itself as Kitabun Aziz, a mighty book, that falsehood cannot approach from any angle. The preservation and incorruptibility of the Qur'an were boldly promised therein when Allah said in another verse, We have certainly sent down this reminder, and we will certainly be its guardians. And it is certainly fascinating how a book of the Qur'an's length, primarily committed to memory, and documented when documented, on bones, on palm leaves, on scraps of leather, over the span of 23 years, could even survive. People would learn some Qur'an from the Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wasalam, and from his companions, then travel back to their homelands and teach it to their families, or to their children, or to their students, or to their friends, and then they would relay it yet another time to others. These separate oral transmissions continued independently for centuries and all across the earth. Despite that, all 1.8 billion Muslims today still recite the Qur'an in the same exact way the Prophet Muhammad taught it to his companions. As for the established variant readings of some verses, these only add to the beauty of the Qur'an's multi-layered meanings and pose no contradiction to them. To accept that such consistency is a mere coincidence, or that a global collusion on a spoken version of the Qur'an had taken place, or to even accept that a conspiracy of this magnitude is even logistically possible, is irrational. Another manifestation of the might of this book is the might of its impact on those who
hear it and what imprint it leaves on them for a lifetime or for generations to come. The Qur'an continues to have a unique and extraordinary impact on people wherever it goes. A person is amazed once they study how impactful and potent the Qur'an has been at reforming people's souls and uprooting some of the most deeply entrenched false convictions in people's lives. Just during the Prophet Muhammad's lifetime, there are multiple accounts of vengeful, murderous Arabs who sneak up to the Prophet for no other reason than awaiting a moment to catch him off guard and assassinate him. And yet they would find themselves disarmed by hearing his recitation of the Qur'an, and find themselves transformed from his staunchest enemies to his greatest allies, and from stubborn rejecters of the faith to some of the sincerest devotees among the faithful. It is difficult to identify any three people who did more harm to the Prophet Muhammad or showed him greater enmity than Abu Jahl, Umayyah ibn Khalaf, and Al-Walid ibn Al-Mughira. They spent their lives and died fighting the Muslims for being Muslim. And yet their sons, Ikrimah the son of Abu Jahl, Safwan the son of Umayyah, and Khalid the son of Al-Walid, all embraced the Qur'an and accepted it and lived by it for the rest of their lives. And these are but some early examples of how the potency of the Qur'an transformed the hearts of its listeners. But until today, many of those who hear the Qur'an, many of which don't even understand yet the meanings of the message of the Qur'an, find themselves mesmerized by its charm and pulled by its magnetic allure.
A useful demonstration of this is to scan the bestsellers list of English books in our day and age. You'll find that the Holy Bible is the most read English book of all time, selling over 4 billion copies just in the last 50 years. Second place, the quotations of Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese thinker, and third place, the Harry Potter series, combined only sold 25% of the number of copies that the Bible did. While this disparity between the Bible and other works seems staggering, it is eclipsed by the amount of Muslims who do not purchase or read the Qur'an but memorize it in its entirety by heart. They not only recall all of its 600 plus verses, all of its 114 chapters, all of its 6236 verses, down to the letter and the vowel sound, but they do so in the original Arabic form while observing the Tajweed rules which govern Qur'anic recitation. And while the vast majority of them are not Arabs to begin with, after all, less than 1 fifth of the Muslim world population are Arabs. What can explain this other than the unique power and might of this book from the Almighty, as Allah Himself said in the Qur'an, we have indeed made this book, miraculously so, easy to be remembered, so is there anyone willing to take heed and remember? So with regards to this aspect now of the Qur'an's inimitability, that of its riveting allure, does any other book in all of human history even begin to compare?
And we have not even considered here the thousands of volumes of intellectual sciences and laws and ethics that were either extracted from or sparked by this concise Qur'an. No single work, man-made or divine, has ever gotten people and societies to thrive in such a holistic way. On every level, be it spiritual, be it moral, be it social, be it civilizational, it breathes new life into the world and illuminates it for centuries at a time. It has done so and continues to do so and will continue to until the end of time. As Allah the Mighty and Majestic says, And in this way, O Muhammad, we have revealed to you a spirit from our command. It breathes life, a soul, for the world. You did not know what the book was, O Muhammad, or even what faith was, until we chose to make this a light, a light by which we guide whomever we will of our servants. May Allah make us and you of them, fill us with conviction in His oneness and the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad.
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