'The seal of the prophets'
Muslims believe Muhammad was the last of God's messengers, superseding Moses and Christ
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
Next Thursday: The sound of the Koran
A PROPHET’S SUCCESS relies on his persuasive power and the credibility of his message. In his mind, the realisation of his prophecies is inevitable. His mission is to persuade his listeners of their inevitability. A true prophet, then, is not only sincere, he must also be seen to be sincere. By these measures, Muhammad excelled.
‘I would say rather,’ wrote the philosopher Thomas Carlyle, ‘that his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!’
Yet Muhammad’s sincerity did not persuade his tribe. The Quraysh leaders hated him for destroying their old gods. Who was he to claim to speak for a god they refused to recognise as the only one? The Quraysh chiefs ridiculed Muhammad and the young men and women who followed him.
Prophets are not welcome in their homeland, Jesus had said, because a true prophet says the unsayable, and the truth hurts his family, friends, village and government.
Muhammad was no exception. When the Prophet visited Ta’if to spread the word of Allah, ‘the people rejected him in the most cruel way, sending their children into the streets to stone him until he left the city’.
The year 620–621 CE was Muhammad’s Aam al-Huzn, or ‘Year of Sorrow’. Both Khadijah, his beloved wife of twenty-five years, and Abu Talib, his uncle and protector, died.
Allah reassured him that with ‘every hardship [there will be] ease’.
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Allah instructed Muhammad to embark on a ‘Night Journey’ (the Isra and Mi’raj), first to Jerusalem, where he would learn from and pray with the prophets of the past, and then to the Seventh Heaven to meet Allah himself.
Of this extraordinary vision there are many accounts, but they tend to agree that one night in 621 CE, as Muhammad slept, the angel Gabriel descended, opened the roof of his house, washed him, filling his chest with wisdom and faith, then lifted him onto a huge white stallion, Buraq, and together they flew through the night to Jerusalem.
On arrival, Muhammad tied up his horse and entered the ‘Furthest Mosque’, where all 124,000 prophets of the past were seated, awaiting him. Guided by Gabriel to the front of the crowd, Muhammad led them in prayer.
Every Muslim would understand this to mean that their spiritual leader and messenger of Allah was the last and greatest of the prophets.
‘In Jerusalem,’ writes the historian Karen Armstrong, ‘he discovered that all the prophets, sent by God to all peoples, are “brothers”. Muhammad’s prophetic predecessors do not spurn him as a pretender, but welcome him into their family. The prophets do not revile or try to convert each other; instead they listen to each other’s insights.’
In fact, ‘Muhammad asks Moses for advice about how frequently Muslims should pray’.
Muhammad then embarked on the second leg of the Night Journey, ascending to Heaven in the company of Gabriel.
En route to the Seventh Heaven they paused at six ‘holy stations’, where Muhammad met and talked with the greatest Jewish and Christian prophets: Adam, John the Baptist, Christ, Enoch, Moses, Aaron, and finally, at the seventh station, ‘on the threshold of the divine realm’, the prophet Abraham, who, Muhammad believed, had lived before ‘the People of the Book’.
Thereafter he met Allah, who ordered him to instruct all Muslims to pray fifty times a day, but Muhammad, on the advice of Moses, negotiated this down to five.
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Muhammad’s glorious night vision had not dispelled the perils of dawn. Assassins lurked in Mecca and his life was at risk.
The fledgling faith was endangered, forcing Muhammad and his disciples to abandon their home and move 320 kilometres north to Yathreb, which was later renamed Medinat al Nabi (‘the City of the Prophet’) or Medina.
Here they found a welcome refuge. Muhammad’s famous exodus is known as the Hijrah (or Hegira) and marked the first year of the founding of Islam, dated year 1 in the Islamic calendar and 622 CE in the Western calendar.
In Medina, his disciples revered him as the ‘most precious gift that Heaven can give the Earth’, a soul touched by the divine and sent to deliver God’s message ‘from the Infinite Unknown with tidings for us’, as Carlyle put it.
Muhammad was unusually sensitive to the poor and the downtrodden. Many of his followers were freedmen, slaves, servants and women. He preached that charity was more than a moral obligation: it was a necessity.
‘The tenth part of a man’s annual income, whatever that may be, is the property of the poor, of those that are afflicted and need help,’ he taught.
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Unlike Moses and Christ, Muhammad had no recourse to miracles. He couldn’t for the life of him turn a staff into a snake, walk on water or heal a leper. He was neither God’s interlocutor nor the Son of God.
He was a man – a man who believed that Allah had chosen him to reveal a divine message to humankind.
And ‘the Prophet’, as he would be known to all Muslims, used his mortality to brilliant effect. When asked why, if he were the messenger of God, he couldn’t work miracles, he answered that he was an ordinary mortal like everyone else.
Twenty years after the Hijrah, with his power entrenched in Medina and an army of warriors ready to die for him, Muhammad resolved to return to Mecca and reclaim his birthplace for Islam.
We haven’t the space to recount the extraordinary series of events, battles and negotiations that led to his triumphant return to Mecca, but it culminated in him being recognised throughout Arabia as the prophet of Allah, the founder of Islam and the undisputed spiritual leader of the Arab people.
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Muhammad understood the power of symbols. He sought to unite the tribes around the one constant in their lives: the Black Stone set in the Kaaba in Mecca. His first act on his return was to kiss the stone and then to smash the icons to false gods.
He left intact one icon only, to the Virgin Mary.
The Black Stone was ‘the point of continuity’, writes Tim Mackintosh-Smith in his magisterial history of the Arab peoples. It elided the pagan, polytheistic past with the glorious, monotheistic future.
The stone ‘ceased to be a source of disunity, a stumbling-block’, he writes. ‘Instead, it mediated, literally, between the disputing clans; it brought them together to carry it; and it became the property of none of them and all of them, a point not of contention but of conjunction.’
Around this stone Muhammad gathered ‘the word and the will’ of the Arab people.
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From the holy books of the Jews and Christians, Muhammad harvested several doctrines that he wove into the new faith.
He unified the Arabs around the idea of their faith as a spiritual continuum, ending in the triumph of Islam: Adam, Noah, Moses, Jesus . . . Allah would subsume and render them all subordinate.
Allah instructed Muhammad: Say, ‘We believe in God and in what was revealed to us and in what was revealed to Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob and the tribes, and in what was given to Moses and Jesus and in what was given to the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them. We surrender to Him.’
In this surah and others, the Koran acknowledges Moses and Jesus as minor prophets, and reveres Mary, the mother of God.
It dismisses the idea of original sin as an ‘absolute injustice’ that predestined an unbaptised child to Hell.
The Koran portrays Jesus as the penultimate prophet – Muhammad being the last – and even refers to him as the Messiah, capable of performing miracles that were not recorded in the gospels.
There the adulation ends, however. The Koran rejects Jesus’ divinity: he was not the Son of God, it states repeatedly. He was of woman born – the ‘son of Mary’ – and a messenger of God.
Muhammad himself said, ‘If the Most Merciful [that is, Allah] had a son, I’d be the first to worship him.’
And yet elsewhere (surah 66:12) the Koran affirms the virgin birth: ‘Jesus was born when the spirit of God breathed upon Mary, whose body was chaste.’
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As for the Jews, Muhammad found the concept of a ‘chosen’ people offensive: why were the Jews God’s favourites? Were the Arabs not God’s children?
And he had no patience with the arcane mysteries of Christianity. The Trinity, the Holy Ghost, the ‘Real Presence’, the ‘Son of God’ – what were they, in truth?
Why complicate Muhammad’s simple message, that there was one god, Allah, and that Muhammad was his messenger?
Muhammad identified Abraham as the greatest of the pre-Islamic prophets, because Abraham pre-dated Judaism and Christianity.
In that case, Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but the first ‘Muslim’, being ‘one who surrendered himself’ and a ‘man of pure faith’. Following Abraham’s example, the Muslims were to surrender themselves and pray daily to Allah.
One surah in the Koran addresses Islam’s dispute with Jews and Christians directly:
‘O people of the Scripture, why do you argue with us about Abraham, when the Torah and the Gospel were only sent down after him? . . . Why do you argue about something of which you have no knowledge? God knows. You do not know. Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was a man of pure faith . . .’
At the same time, the Koran teaches all Muslims to nurture a ‘spiritual kinship’ with Jews and Christians, who were to be respected and tolerated, not rejected, for they shared the same god.
‘Do not argue,’ the Koran says, ‘with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner – unless it be such of them as are bent upon evil-doing . . . for our God and your god is one and the same, and it is unto Him that We all surrender ourselves.’
‘You could not be a Muslim unless you also revered Moses and Jesus,’ Karen Armstrong observed. ‘True faith required surrender to God, not to an established faith.’
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The Koran declares Muhammad the ‘seal of the prophets’ – ‘seal’ meaning the latest and final, the ultimate revelation in the Abrahamic story.
The word of Allah thus superseded all that had gone before. ‘[I]f revelation had started with Adam,’ writes Mackintosh-Smith, ‘it had stopped with [Muhammad]. In the relay of revelation, he was the last recipient of the baton . . . History, in a sense, had ended.’
The Koran, then, was (and is) thought by Muslims to subsume the Judeo-Christian texts, a claim the earlier faiths were bound to oppose. Those texts included the scrolls of the Torah, the Zabur (or Psalms) of David, and the Injil (Gospels) of Jesus:
‘We revealed the Torah, in which there is guidance and light, by which the prophets who had surrendered [themselves to God] gave judgement to the Jews.’ And: ‘We caused Jesus, the son of Mary, to follow in their footsteps, confirming that which [had been revealed] before it in the Torah, and We bestowed on him the Gospel in which is guidance and light . . .’
This idea mesmerised the Arab people and outraged the Jews and Christians: had God chosen the Arabs, a once nomadic people living in the harshest of lands, to receive his last word through his prophet Muhammad?
They believed God had. And the principle of submission to Allah became their lodestone, their binding power, the very soul of Muslim spirituality.
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Belief in Muhammad as the prophet of Allah inspired in the proudest Arab warrior a sense of humility, submission and surrender.
With pilgrimages, prayer, raids and taxes, the first Muslim communities in Arabia were born, and would soon spread beyond the peninsula.
The first mosques and the earliest calls to prayer rose around the oases. Converts to Islam were obliged daily to recite the Al-Ikhlas, the surah of sincerity, and the Shahada, the declaration of faith, the most sacred lines in the Koran.
One Friday, during prayer, in January 624 CE, Muhammad heard the familiar carillon of bells that heralded a revelation from Allah.
He listened. He understood: henceforth, the early Muslim congregations would pray not in the direction of Jerusalem but towards Mecca, the provenance of Abraham, the man they revered as the first of the Muslims.
And they would obey, on pain of death, their spiritual leader Muhammad, the man they saw as the last, or the seal, of the prophets.
Next Thursday, 1st May 2025: The sound of the Koran
Selected sources and further reading:
Armstrong, K. (2007) Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time, London: Harper Perennial.
Carlyle, T. (1993) On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History, Oakland CA: University of California Press.
Faruqui, S. ‘Al-Isra’ wal-Mi’raj: The Story of the Miraculous Night Journey’, Muslim Hands.
Hisham, I. (2022) The Biography of the Prophet, independently published.
Hodgson, M.G.S. (1977) The Venture of Islam (Vols. 1–3), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ishaq, I. and Guillaume, A. (transl.) (1989) The Life of Mohammad, Oxford: OUP Pakistan.
Jones, A. (transl.) (2007) The Qur’an, Harrow UK: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust.
Khaldun, I. and Rosenthal, F. (transl.) (2005) The Muqaddimah, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mackintosh-Smith, T. (2019) Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Matthews, A.J. (2 April 2021) ‘An Orthodox Look at the Place of the Virgin Mary in Islam’, Orthodoxy in Dialogue.
Powers, D.S. (2015) ‘The Finality of Prophecy’ in Silverstein, A.J. and Stroumsa, G.G. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reynolds, G.S. (2001) ‘Jesus, the Qā’im and the End of the World’, Rivista degli studi orientali, 75(1/4), pp. 55–86.
Rippin, A. (ed.) (2006) The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Rodinson, M. and Carter, A. (transl.) (1985) Mohammad, London: Penguin Books.
Rubin, U. (2014) ‘The Seal of the Prophets and the Finality of Prophecy on the Interpretation of the Qur’anic Surat al-Ahzab’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 164(1), pp. 65–96.