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The Makkan Period, Part 7: The Glad Tidings of Muhammad

Section 11 of 14 · The Life of the Prophet Muhammad: The Makkan Period

The Test of a True Prophet

In Deuteronomy 18:21-22: "And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?" So here the Bible gives the test for knowing whether a man is speaking on behalf of God or not — how is a liar to be distinguished from someone telling the truth? It goes on to say: "When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him." If a prophet says something and claims that it is coming from Allah, and it does not come to happen, then those words were not spoken by the prophet. Therefore, everything a prophet says will come to pass. The Qur'an, which is the words of Allah (swt) given to Muhammad (peace be upon him), is proving every day new miracles — scientific miracles — showing the truth of the Qur'an. Now, there might have been scientific verses in other books that preceded the Qur'an that came to pass, but one would also find mistakes in those books, because they are written by men. With the Qur'an, everything it mentioned was proven to be true, there are no contradictions in it, and nothing in the Qur'an was ever proved false. So not only did the Qur'an prophesy about things that would happen in the future, but the Qur'an does not contain any errors in it — because, for example, out of pure coincidence and probability, a man two thousand years ago could go ahead and write predictions about the future, and one could turn out to be true and ten false. So it cannot be said, "This man is receiving this information from God," because it has one single thing mentioned in it about the future. For it to be from God, everything in it needs to be true, and that holds true of no book other than the Qur'an. There is nothing in the Qur'an that has been disproved, and that will never happen. And Allah (swt) is challenging the people in the Qur'an to produce anything similar to it, and the challenge is still open — nobody has been able to face the challenge of Allah in the Qur'an. The challenge started by producing a book similar to it, and then it was reduced to ten sūrahs, and then finally one sūrah. Now the challenge is to produce one sūrah similar to the Qur'an.