The Quran repeatedly
stresses the fact that Muhammad was incapable of performing a single miracle,
even though the unbelievers repeatedly asked him for a sign to validate his
prophetic claims:
They say: “Why is not
a sign sent down to him from his Lord?” Say: “God hath certainly power
to send down a sign: but most of them understand not. S. 6:37
They swear their strongest
oaths by God, that if a (special) sign came to them, by it they
would believe. Say: “Certainly (all) signs are in the power of God: but
what will make you (Muslims) realise that (even) if (special) signs came, they
will not believe.”? S. 6:108
If thou bring them not a
revelation, they say: “Why hast thou not got it together?” Say: “I but follow
what is revealed to me from my Lord: this is (nothing but) lights from your
Lord, and Guidance, and mercy, for any who have faith.” S. 7:203
They say: “Why is not
a sign sent down to him from his Lord?” Say: “The Unseen is only for
God (to know), then wait ye: I too will wait with you.” S. 10:20
And the Unbelievers say: “Why
is not a sign sent down to him from his Lord?” But thou art truly a
warner, and to every people a guide. S. 13:7
The Unbelievers say: “Why
is not a sign sent down to him from his Lord?” Say: “Truly God leaveth,
to stray, whom He will; But He guideth to Himself those who turn to Him in
penitence, -… If there were a Qur’an with which mountains were moved, or the
earth were cloven asunder, or the dead were made to speak, (this would be the
one!) But, truly, the command is with God in all things! Do not the Believers
know, that, had God (so) willed, He could have guided all mankind (to the
right)? But the Unbelievers, – never will disaster cease to seize them for
their (ill) deeds, or to settle close to their homes, until the promise of God
come to pass, for, verily, God will not fail in His promise.S. 13:27, 31
And We refrain from
sending the signs, only because the
men of former generations treated them as false: We sent the she-camel to the
Thamud to open their eyes, but they treated her wrongfully: We only send the
Signs by way of terror (and warning from evil). 17:59
Here is what the late
Jewish convert and Sunni Muslim scholar Muhammad Asad stated in respect to this
verse:
This highly elliptic
sentence has a fundamental bearing on the purport of the Qur’an as a whole. In
many places the Qur’an stresses the fact that the Prophet Muhammad, despite his
being the last and greatest of God’s apostles, WAS NOT EMPOWERED TO PERFORM MIRACLES similar to those with
which the earlier prophets are said to have reinforced their verbal messages. His ONLY miracle was and is the Qur’an itself – a message perfect in its lucidity and ethical
comprehensiveness, destined for all times and all stages of human development,
addressed not merely to the feelings but also to the minds of men, open to
everyone, whatever his race or social environment, and bound to remain
unchanged forever… (Asad, Message of the Qur’an [Dar
Al-Andalus Limited 3 Library Ramp, Gibraltar rpt. 1993], p. 427, fn. 71;
capital and underline emphasis ours)
Other verses include:
They say: “We shall not
believe in thee, until thou cause a spring to gush forth for us from the earth,
Or (until) thou have a garden of date trees and vines, and cause rivers to gush
forth in their midst, carrying abundant water; Or thou cause the sky to fall in
pieces, as thou sayest (will happen), against us; or thou bring God and the
angels before (us) face to face: “Or thou have a house adorned with gold, or
thou mount a ladder right into the skies. No, we shall not even believe in thy
mounting until thou send down to us a book that we could read.” Say: “Glory to
my Lord! Am I aught but a man, – an apostle?” S. 17:90-93
But (now), when the Truth
has come to them from Ourselves, they say, “Why are not (Signs) sent to
him, like those which were sent to Moses?” Do they not then reject (the
Signs) which were formerly sent to Moses? They say: “Two kinds of sorcery, each
assisting the other!” And they say: “For us, we reject all (such things)!” S. 28:48
The Quran is equally clear
that the only sign Muhammad brought was his so-called revelation:
Ye they say: “Why are
not Signs sent down to him from his Lord?” Say: “The signs are indeed
with God: and I am indeed a clear Warner.” And is it not enough for them that
we have sent down to thee the Book which is rehearsed to them? Verily, in it is
Mercy and a Reminder to those who believe. S. 29:50-51
And yet even though the Islamic scripture emphatically and
repeatedly insists that Muhammad failed to perform a single miraculous sign to
back up his prophetic assertions, the later Islamic sources attributed dozens
of miracles to him, many of which resemble the miracles performed by the Lord
Jesus and some of the other prophets/messengers.
The following renowned
Islamic scholar explains how and why this happened:
Down to the Abbasid times
there was evidently opportunity for the exchange of ideas, as the Risala of
Al Kindi, written in the reign of Al Ma’mun, proves. The hadith literature
preserves a very large number of examples of this borrowing, ranging from the
earliest and best-known doctrines of Islam, which were taken over from
Jews and Christians, and are already incorporated in the Quran, to those
sayings attributed to the prophet which betray a knowledge of Christian
writings. Muslim theologians were not content to borrow the sayings of their
predecessors in the counsels of God they borrowed also events from the
life of Jesus, attributing them to their own prophet. Muhammad himself constantly
insisted that he was not sent to work miracles. His miracle for all time
was the Quran. This is the opinion held by the authors of the oldest
hadith: the chapter Fadailu-l-sayyidi-l-mursalin does
not contain a single miracle of Muhammad’s: on the contrary, there is the
express statement of Abu Huraira that whereas the former prophets were given
signs to induce the people to believe, Muhammad was given only the Quran,
which nevertheless might secure him more followers than all that were before
him. Naturally people who were familiar with many of the noblest writings of
all time denied the claim of Muslims to possess a book of surpassing literary
merit; and the polemical literature of the time abounds in taunts that Muhammad
could not have been a prophet because, unlike the Messiah and the earlier
prophets of Israel, he worked no miracles.
It is interesting to notice
that apparently the only miracles said to have been performed by Muhammed and
known to Al Kindi are: the wolf and ox that spoke; the tree that moved towards
the prophet; the shoulder of goat’s flesh, poisoned by Zainab bint Harith the
Jewess, which called out that it was poisoned, and the miraculous production of
water. Some, this writer says, the Ashabu-l-Akhbar reject altogether, while
others are from reporters branded da’if1. Al Kindi’s
testimony to enlightened opinion on these miracles is worthy of note, because
he wrote some years before Al Bukhari’s collection was made, and he expressly
refers (p. 60) to the traditions in terms which imply that they were not
written.
Muhammadan apologists could
not afford to allow their apostle to labour under the disadvantage apparent
when his everyday mundane life was compared with the mighty works of Christ,
which seem to have been believed without question. And thus the curious
and interesting fact is that the later picture of Muhammad approximates in
tradition ever more closely to that of the Jesus of the gospels. No
biographer, either ancient or modern, has succeeded in giving his readers an entirely
satisfactory appreciation of the baffling personality of the great prophet of
Arabia. His loyalty and treachery, abstinence and debauchery, wisdom and
ignorance, mediocrity and inspiration, demand the pen of a Boswell.
The most prejudiced
among his followers or his enemies could hardly trace in the authentic record
of Muhammad’s life the lineaments of the Prince of Peace. Yet this is what a certain group of traditionists and
theologians have constructed. Weary of hearing of the acts of love and mercy,
of supernatural power and forgiveness of ‘Isa b. Maryam, they have made
a Muhammad after his likeness. Not content with the picture of a courteous,
kindly, and able man, famed as the possessor of all human virtues, the idol of
his race, if he was to compete with the Messiah they must represent him
as a worker of miracles. There is an unmistakable reference to the slavish
imitation of Christians in the plaint put into the prophet’s mouth, ‘Verily you
would follow the paths (sunan) of those who were before you
foot by foot and inch by inch so that if they went down a lizard’s hole you
would follow them!’ ‘Do you mean the Jews and Christians?’ said they. ‘And who
else?’ he answered. (Alfred Guillaume, The Traditions of Islam, pp.
133-135 https://answeringislam.net/Books/Guillaume/Traditions/ch6.htm; bold emphasis mine)
1 The great tolerance displayed towards Jews and Christians
during the first centuries is well illustrated in the saying reported by Abu
Huraira (Bukhari): The People of the Book used to read the Torah in Hebrew and
expound it in Arabic to the people of Islam. The apostle of God said: ‘Do not
believe the people of the book and do not disbelieve them, but say, “We believe
in God and what he has revealed to us.”’ (Ibid., p. 133)
1 He calls them Akhbarun baridatun wa-kharafatu
‘ajdiz, ‘witless fables and old wives’ tales’.(Ibid., p. 134)
Controversy with Christians
on the rival merits of Jesus and Muhammad may fairly be regarded as the
origin of the pretended miracles, flatly contradicting the plain statement of
the great Arabian and those of many of his immediate followers that he was not
sent with power to work miracles. Whether the object of the inventors was
to elevate their prophet to a position equal to that held by Jesus in the
estimation of His servants, or whether it was to furnish themselves and their
pupils with a messenger of God who satisfied a natural craving of the human
heart for a visible manifestation of divine power, it is not our purpose to
determine. There are good reasons for believing the deliberate imitation was
resorted to for the reasons already given and because the ashabu-l-hadith did
not stop ascribing the works of Christ to their prophet. His words and those of
his apostles are freely drawn on and put into the mouth of Muhammad.1 (Ibid.,
p. 138; bold emphasis mine)
1 Muhammadan critics quite frankly draw a clear line between
hadith of a legal and an edifying nature. They confess that where a pious
motive underlies a tradition there is not the same necessity for scrutinizing
the isnad. Thus Al Nawawi says of a hadith of this kind, ‘it is weak, but
one is delighted by it’; and Ahmad says that he deals gently with the genealogy
of traditions concerning virtuous behaviour. (Ibid.; bold emphasis mine)
The foregoing makes it
abundantly clear that, as time went on, Muslims turned Muhammad into a
Christ-like figure, a demigod of sorts, in order to make him more comparable to
Jesus Christ and the other true prophets/apostles of God. These Muhammadans
shamelessly lied by inventing miracle stories of their prophet since they were
embarrassed by Muhammad’s lack of supernatural, miraculous verification for his
prophetic claims. As the late Dr. Robert A. Morey wrote:
Miracles
During his lifetime, Jesus did many
great and mighty miracles. He healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out
demons, and even ruled the wind and the waves.
But according to the Quran in dozens of
places such as Sura 17:91–95, Muhammad never performed a single miracle…
Muhammad did no miracles. He did not
heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, or rule the wind and the waves.
He had no more power than any normal man.
The only sign that Muhammad could point
to was the existence of his revelations, the Suras that made up the Quran (Sura
29:47–51). (Morey, The
Islamic Invasion: Confronting the World’s Fastest Growing Religion [Christian
Scholars Press, 1992], pp. 106-107)
And:
Now to be sure, Western scholars are perfectly aware of the fact
that in later conflicts between Muslims and Christians there were those Muslims
who attempted to renovate the life of Muhammad so that it would more closely
correspond to the life of Jesus Christ…
These later legends claim predictions were made for Muhammad’s
coming, add a supernatural element to his birth, depict him doing
miracles, and claim that he was sinless and perfect and that he ascended into
heaven. But these claims are not found in the Quran or in early Muslim
traditions.
As all the standard reference works point out, they are later
fabrications made by embarrassed Muslims who were faced with the rather obvious
fact that Muhammad was inferior to Jesus Christ. This led them to remold the
life of Muhammad to parallel the life and miracles of Jesus…
A
Hindu Parallel
We are reminded of the followers of Krishna in India who, in
response to the Christian teaching that Jesus died on the cross for our
sins, immediately answered, “Well, then Krishna too must have died on a cross
for our sins.”
This fabrication did not last long as it was revealed that in
all the literary sources concerning Krishna, no such death or crucifixion was
mentioned until after the followers of Krishna had engaged in debate with
Christians.
In the same way, Muslim legendary material concerning the
miracles of Muhammad all date after heated debates between Christians and
Muslims.
These myths and legends were created in response to the
challenge that Jesus Christ was obviously superior to Muhammad. (Ibid.,
pp. 115-117)
Finally:
The
Miracles of Muhammad
There are no recorded miracles of
Muhammad in the Quran. We already documented from the Quran that Muhammad
denied that he did any miracles except for the Quran.
But after his death, Muhammad’s
disciples began to invent miracles for him because they had to escape the
stigma that their prophet was inferior to the miracles of Moses, Jesus, and the
pagan soothsayers.
What is so amazing about some of these
pretended miracles is that they were often originally performed by Moses, Jesus,
and pagan magicians but now transferred to the prophet!
One gets the distinct impression that
when a Jew or a Christian pointed out some miracle recorded in the Bible, the
Muslims replied, “Then our prophet Muhammad must have done that too.” (Ibid., p.
227)
What makes this all the
more ironic is that the Quran mentions the miracles performed by Moses, Jesus,
and a host of others, but doesn’t even list one supernatural feat performed by
Muhammad. This silence is quite deafening, as even one celebrated convert to
Islam noted in discussing the miracles found in the Islamic tradition:
(2) The authenticated
traditions contain numerous reports of the Prophet performing miracles – with
God’s permission, of course. Many of these are similar to ones
attributed to Jesus in the New Testament, such as transforming small
quantities of food into enough to feed a whole host of hungry followers and
curing blindness with his saliva. Although the Qur’an recalls miracles
of past prophets in its narratives, it identifies itself – and perhaps one
other supernatural phenomenon – as the ONLY observable miracle(s)
granted to the Prophet. Moreover, the Qur’an states that the Prophet’s
opposition frequently complained that he produced no other miraculous signs.
Yet if the Prophet indeed performed most of the miracles recorded in the Hadith literature, then
it is a wonder that his opponents consistently complained of a lack of
supernatural signs or that the Qur’an did not at least cite more of them in
response to pagan objections. (Jeffrey Lang, Losing My Religion: A
Call For Help [Amana Publications, 2004], pp. 249-250; bold and
capital emphasis ours)
One cannot help but recall
the words of the late Iranian Muslim scholar, Ali Dashti, who sadly wrote:
Moslems, as well as others,
have disregarded the historical facts. They
have continually striven to turn this man into an imaginary superhuman being, a
sort of God in human clothes, and have generally ignored the ample evidence of
his humanity. They have been ready to
set aside the laws of cause and effect, which governs real life, and to present
these fantasies as miracles. (Dashti, 23 Years: A Prophetic Career of
Muhammad [Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, CA 1994], p 1; underline
emphasis ours)
Dashti also wrote about how
this process of deification began and how it directly contradicts the teachings
of the Quran:
Many Iranians have been
raised on a diet of myth and are ready to believe that any emamzada,
of however ancestry, can at any moment perform a miracle. But if they were to
read the Qor’an, they would be surprised to find no report of a miracle in it
at all. They would learn from twenty or more Qor’anic passages that whenever
the Prophet Mohammed was asked by doubters to perform a miracle, he either
stayed silent or said that he would not do so because he was a human being like
any other, with no function except to communicate, to be a “bringer of good
news and a warner.” (Ibid., 38)
The Qor’anic verses on this
subject are explicit and clear, and the Hadith and the contents of the reliable
biographies confirm that the Prophet Mohammed never laid claim to either
sinlessness or knowledge of unseen things. He was well aware of his human frailties,
and he openly and frankly admitted them. According to a well attested Hadith,
he had this to say about an attempt by some polytheists to fluster him with
irrelevant questions: “What do these folks expect from me? I am one of God’s
servants. I only know what God has taught me.” (Ibid., p. 60)
Taken together, these
explicit and incontrovertible Qor’anic passages prove that the Prophet
Mohammed, far from claiming the infallibility and superhuman rank later
attributed to him by others, knew himself to be prone to sin. For anyone
willing to study and to think, this greatly enhances Mohammed’s spiritual
stature.
In matters such as
religious and political beliefs and social concerns, which lack the certainty
of mathematics and the relative demonstrability of the natural sciences, human
beings are always disinclined to use their rational faculty. Instead, they
first acquire a belief and then rack their brains for arguments with which to
support it. The ‘olama of Islam were no exception to this
rule. In their zealous devotion, they began with belief in the Prophet’s
infallibility and then, in the hope of proving it, tried to explain away clear
Qor’anic statements.
The eager sophistry of the
Qor’an-commentators in this matter brings to mind a story about Sahl Tustari (a
renowned early Sufi preacher in Khuzestan, d. 273/886). One of his disciples
came and told him, “The people say that you can walk on water.” Sahl answered,
“Go and ask the muezzin! He is an honest man.” The disciple went and asked the
muezzin, who answered, “I do not know whether or not Sahl can walk on water.
But I do know that when he walked up to the pool one day to perform ritual
ablutions, he fell in and would have drowned if I had not pulled him out.”…
Notwithstanding the
testimonies of the Qor’an, the Hadith, and the biographies, Mohammed was
quickly dehumanized. The process began as soon as he passed from the scene. On
the day after his death, ‘Omar (or perhaps another leading companion)
threatened with drawn sword in hand to cut the throat of anyone who said that
Mohammed was dead, and Abu Bakr protested, quoting the Qor’anic words, “You are
mortal and they are mortal” (sura 39, ox-Zomar, verse
31). How right Abu Bakr was!
The greater the distance in
time and space from the Prophet’s death in 11/632 and from Madina, the more the
Moslems let their imaginations run loose. They exaggerated and rhapsodized so
much that they forgot two premisses [sic] which are stated in the five
daily prayers as well as in many Qor’anic verses, namely that Mohammed was
God’s servant and God’s messenger. Instead, they turned him into the ultimate
cause of the creation, saying “But for you, the universe would not have been
created.” One zealous writer, Shaykh Najm od-Din Daya (d. 654/1256), went so
far as to assert in his book Mersad ol-‘Ebad that the
omnipotent Creator, who could make all things exist by uttering the single word
“be”, first had to bring the light of Mohammed into existence and then, after
casting a glance at the light and thereby causing the light to sweat with
embarrassment, was able to create the souls of the prophets and angels from the
sweat beads. (Ibid., pp. 61-63)
Dashti’s assessment is only
partially correct, in that the Quran itself provided the basis for later Muslim
deification of Muhammad, even though it goes out of its way to present Muhammad
as a fallible, mortal sinner. The Islamic scripture presents two conflicting
pictures of Muhammad simultaneously.
All quranic references taken from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s version.
Further Reading
Muhammad and
Miracles (https://answeringislam.net/Responses/Azmy/mhd_miracles.htm)
IHS
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