Eat Like the Best of Men

There is the account of a student who went to study in Mauritania. There, it seems, they eat as the Saudis do, taking the rice in whole handfuls: they take a whole handful of rice, roll it in a bowl, and then eat it. He was trying to act on the Sunnah by eating with three fingers. They said to him, as a joke: kul akla al-rijāl, eat like a man. He turned around and said: anā ākulu akla afḍali al-rijāl, "I eat like the best of men", meaning the Prophet (peace be upon him).

So in everything of the Prophet (peace be upon him) there is something for us to emulate. And al-Ṭaḥāwī says ʿabduhu al-muṣṭafā: His especially selected servant. So he is not just any servant of Allah; this one is a specially selected servant.

Wa nabiyyuhu wa rasūluh: there are two points mentioned here, nabī and rasūl. First is nabī: he is the selected nabī, or prophet. Prophet is an okay translation; so is apostle: somebody whom Allah (swt) sends. Rasūl: messenger. Prophet and messenger are used here to make that distinction. There is actually a distinction between nabī and rasūl, which is explained below. Nabī is more general than rasūl.

There is a hadith in Musnad Aḥmad in which the Prophet (peace be upon him) was asked: how many prophets did Allah send? Or, how many prophets were there? How many anbiyāʾ (nabī, plural anbiyāʾ), how many anbiyāʾ were there? And the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: about 124,000. 124,000.

Now, this hadith is not that strong, and that is why the ʿulamāʾ mention that we cannot insist on that figure in terms of our ʿaqīdah. If somebody says there were only 124,000, that would mean that had there been more, and there is a possibility of more, we would actually be negating prophethood from the additional ones, and that would be problematic. Or if there were fewer than 124^*, then we would be establishing prophethood for more than were prophets. That is why it is an approximate figure given by the Prophet (peace be upon him). We take it just to get an idea.

He also said that 313 of them were rasūl, which means messenger, which is a more specific category. The Prophet (peace be upon him) was both a nabī and a rasūl. Mūsā (peace be upon him) was both a nabī and a rasūl. Ibrāhīm (peace be upon him) was both a nabī and a rasūl. Yūshaʿ ibn Nūn was only a nabī (peace be upon him). Likewise, Hārūn (peace be upon him) was a nabī, while Mūsā (peace be upon him) was a messenger; he was a rasūl. Every rasūl has to be a nabī, but not every nabī has to be a rasūl, because rasūl is more specific; it is a special category.