Any Claim to Prophecy After Him

Article 33. Any claim to prophecy after him is deviation and heresy.

Any claim to prophethood after him is a form of deviance, of ignorance; and it is probably spurred on by hawā, which means desire: for position, or for gain.

Musaylimah al-Kadhdhāb was one of the famous ones, indeed one of the notorious ones, who did strange things. Even during the Prophet's (peace be upon him) final days, there were people who came up trying to declare prophethood. They thought it was a good way to gain some popularity and material means. And after the Prophet (peace be upon him), quite a few others actually sprang up, nearly immediately. There was a woman who did that as well. So one impostor and a female: they got married to each other.

Musaylimah tried to do some things in trying to emulate miracles. One is that there was a well he tried to spit in, saying that it would become more pleasant; and it actually became worse. He put some saliva on somebody's eye, and the eye that was good became bad. These were some of the things by which Allah (swt) humiliated such people. Abū Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) fought against a lot of these, and quelled these problems during his khilāfah.

Musaylimah came to the Prophet (peace be upon him) and said: let it be half mine and half yours, as an agreement. The Prophet (peace be upon him), despite his great generosity in all other states, actually said that if Musaylimah asked him for this (whether it was a little piece of rope, or a twig), he would not even give him this much. Because this was a matter of putting down a deviance.

Muslims have had the Qādiyānī; they have had Bahāʾullāh, of the Bahāʾīs. Among the Christians, too, there have been quite a few. One of them was somebody Smith, in New York: the Mormon one, of the Church of Latter-day Saints. The majority of Christians really hate Mormons; that is somebody they just can't stand.

The thing is that they are multiplying faster than many other Christian sects. They actually have a major school, a daʿwah centre, where people are sent for a good year or so of training, and then they are sent out throughout the world. And they have a particular attire that they wear. They ride their bikes; they've got their rucksacks on the back; they're suited, two men all the time; and they go. Many will probably have seen them. There are amazing figures, actually, for anyone who reads about them. Time magazine reported on this: from what they were just a decade ago to where they are right now, it's just amazing. Their centre is in Salt Lake City, Utah, where their main cathedral is, and everything. They've actually got the most in-depth database of genealogy and ancestry in the world.