Proofs of Prophethood
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Restoring the Unity of God: The Prophet’s ﷺ Accomplishments
The final prophet ﷺ accomplished the rare feat of providing the world with impeccable clarity on the Oneness of God. When the Pew Research Center tried to understand what made Islam the fastest-growing religion, the main reason was that Islam restored for people the unblemished, indivisible unity of the One True God. Sh. Mohammad Elshinawy contrasts this to the concept of God in Christianity and describes how, through the teachings of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, restoring the unity of God in people's lives also meant finding and restoring purpose and meaning in life.
The Proofs for the Prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ eBook is available now. Download your copy here.
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. The final prophet Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wasalam, had accomplished the rare feat of providing the world impeccable clarity on the identity of God, and his oneness, and his absolute perfection. It was a clarity that aligned so well, both with human nature and our faculty of reason, that it became the hallmark of Islam. It became its most appealing teaching, without exception. When the Pew Research Center, which often notes how Islam's the fastest growing religion in the world, and in the Western world as well, it tried to probe further to better understand what was it about Islam that caused it to rise so swiftly among the populations wherever it went. And when it surveyed these factors, the number one and the number two reason were just this, that Islam restores for people that perfect, unblemished, indivisible unity of the one true God. They answered that it was the belief system, number one, and that I read the texts firsthand, the theology I found when I read those texts myself, that compelled me to Islam above all else. So Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wasalam, had restored for humanity and unearthed for them their long lost sanctuary, without which they were most vulnerable. And that was direct, unbridled access to the Almighty, the most merciful, the creator of the heavens and the earth, the one and only, the one true God. Such a clear belief system, such a powerful belief system, such an empowering and intuitive belief system. Compare it, for example, with the intellectual history of Christianity.
How many vicious disputes there were in the very earliest centuries on the nature of God and his person and his identity. Disputes that were so ferocious that they were only settled by the power of the state. When the state finally picked one of many doctrines of the time, namely Trinitarian theology, and imposed it on the people and codified it in the fourth century's famous Council of Nicaea or Nicaea. But when the Father, Son and Holy Spirit was in reality not three aspects of the one true God, it was the Son who was clearly a human being, a mortal from this world, and the Holy Spirit which was the Archangel Gabriel, another created being, and then the Father, God, only God is God. That conflation of God and angel and human prophet could not sit well with people, and thus with the passage of time and more and more access to the texts of Christianity, we tend to find greater and greater disenfranchisement, disillusionment, lack of conviction regarding that theology. As for the Muslims, the followers of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, as Edward Gibbon puts it, the Muhammadins, he means the Muslims, have uniformly, meaning throughout history, withstood that human tendency, that temptation to reduce their God and their object of worship to anything that could be conjured up by the imagination. He says they never allowed their God to be reduced or relegated or regarded to the visibility of even the imagination and the senses, which would in turn necessitate idolatry. He says instead, they kept God as God, and even the honor of their prophet never transgressed the bounds of human virtue.
In that lies the secret of the extraordinary explanatory power of Islam and the pure monotheism found uniquely in Islam's theology. It had both the spiritual, intuitive, and intellectual, rational appeal that drew people to it from every corner of the world until our day and age here and now. And of course, restoring the unity of God in people's lives meant restoring meaning and purpose as well. The Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wasalam, liberated the world through such a theology, through such a pure belief system, from seeing life as some destinationless journey, or from seeing themselves as the powerless victims of competing forces and supreme beings at odds with each other at their expense in this universe. And when the famous French historian, Alfonso de Lamartine, was marveling at the power of such an accomplishment of Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wasalam, he said, just think about it. This man took on the world. He wrestled humanity away from thousands upon thousands of superstitions and dogmas, indefensible beliefs, false gods, he says, and he was uniquely able to restore God to man, and man to God, meaning he was able to liberate the true conceptualization of the real God to humanity, and he was able to return through that man to sincere devotion to that God, because only that God would be worthy of our worship and our love and our adoration and our subservience. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon Muhammad, who restored for us the unity of God
until the end of time.
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