The Challenge of Abū Jahl

The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) understood the weight of this news and how difficult it would be to convey. He went out quiet and sombre, and began speaking to some people, and the news reached Abū Jahl. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) was sitting in the masjid, quiet and troubled by the consequences of what he had to say, when Abū Jahl heard of it and came to him. "O Muhammad," he said, "anything new?" "Yes," he replied. "What?" "This night I visited Jerusalem and came back." "Jerusalem?" "Yes." Abū Jahl said: "If I called your people right now and brought them here, would you tell them the same thing you have just told me?" "Yes, I would," he said.

Pleased, Abū Jahl went running to call the people of Quraysh together — "O people of Quraysh, come forward!" — and gathered them. When they were all present, he told the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him): "Muhammad, tell your people what you just told me." Without any hesitation, he said: "I have been to Jerusalem and back, the previous night." The narrator of the hadith says the people started clapping, whistling and laughing, falling over one another, making a great joke of it. Some of the seasoned travellers among them, who knew Jerusalem and had been there, asked him to describe the mosque, to describe Jerusalem. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: "I started describing, but then I became vexed" — he had not spent a long time there to remember every single detail of the place. But then, he said, "Allah showed me the mosque of Jerusalem right in front of my eyes, and I described it stone by stone, brick by brick" — and they said that he had given an accurate, excellent description.

Another sign is mentioned in a further narration, by Ibn Isḥāq. On his way back from Jerusalem to Makkah, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) passed by a caravan belonging to the people of Quraysh, travelling at night. They had lost one of their camels, and because he was up in the air, he was able to see it; he called out to them and told them where the camel was, though they could not tell where the voice was coming from. He also drank some of their water, and remembered the details of the caravan. He went back to Quraysh and told them: this caravan of yours lost a camel, and I gave them directions to it — ask them yourselves; I also drank some of their water, from such-and-such a container, and the caravan is headed by a camel of such a description, carrying such a load. They sent someone out to meet the caravan before it reached Makkah, while it was still some distance away, and the man found the description accurate: they had indeed lost a camel and found it again after hearing a voice from the sky, and they had indeed missed some of their water. These were all signs given to them, but even this was not sufficient for them to believe.

The account of al-Isrāʾ and al-Miʿrāj was so difficult for some to accept that it caused certain weak Muslims to fall away from the faith. It was such a difficult thing to grasp, but that is the case with these extraordinary miracles that Allah (swt) shows His ummah.