Answering Objections to Islam · Fulfilled Prophecies of Muhammad

The reach of the nation — and its decline

Handle with care. Do not use the decline hadith to score political points about current events; keep it descriptive.

In short

• 1.Said when the Muslims were one besieged city surrounded by superpowers and hostile tribes
• 2.Within a century Islam reached from Spain to the Indus
• 3.He also foretold that nations would summon each other against the Muslims like diners over a dish
• 4.In that narration the Muslims are described as many in number but weak — like froth on a flood

The claim being examined

The Prophet said the earth was folded for him so that he saw its east and west, and that his nation's dominion would reach as far as he had seen.

The Islamic position

The prophecy cuts both ways: he foretold not only the extraordinary spread of Islam but also the later weakness of the Muslims, which is not what a self-promoter predicts.

Analysis

Pair the two narrations deliberately. Predicting your movement's triumph is the most self-serving prophecy imaginable and carries little evidential weight on its own. Predicting its triumph and then its humiliation is a different kind of claim, and the second half is what the companions had no incentive to preserve or invent. The historian Howard Johnston's summary of the speed of the seventh-century transformation is a useful non-Muslim citation for the first half.

From the Qur'an

From the Sunnah

Sources

Abu Zakariya, Forbidden Prophecies, Ch. 2 · James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis · Sahih Muslim 2889; Sunan Abu Dawud 4297 · Forbidden Prophecies, Ch. 2, pp. 75-78

More in Fulfilled Prophecies of Muhammad

• A world where no one escapes interest
• Barefoot herdsmen competing in tall buildings
• Public sexual immorality against the tide of the age
• The Byzantine reversal within three to nine years
• The keys of Syria, Persia and Yemen at the Trench
• The land of the Arabs will return to meadows and rivers