Prophethood (النّبوة )
Prophethood is an appointment of selected servants of Allah SWT, who has been appointed and selected to receive His revelation and guidance, and it is being sent through the intermediary of His angel Jibrail AS.
Prophethood begins with the first human being, Prophet Adam AS, and ended with the Seal of the Prophets, our Prophet Muhammad SAW.
There are two types of prophethood: نبي (a prophet) and رسول (a messenger).
A prophet is a selected servant of Allah SWT who has been given His revelation which includes the knowledge of His Oneness (tawhid) and the right and the correct way to worship Him and to obey His rules and laws.
It is not his task and his responsibility to call to other human beings to accept this message, and the revelation that has been given to him is not in the form of a Book.
Their number is unknown, and it could be many of them, that it is reported that there are 124, 000 prophets.
A messenger is also a prophet, and he is a selected servant of Allah SWT who has appointed him to receive His revelation, and make the message known to other human beings, i.e., to call them towards this message of Tawhid, and to instruct them on the correct way to worship Him and to obey His laws.
The revelation that is being sent to him is usually in the form of a Book.
“O Messenger! Proclaim the (message) which hath been sent to thee from thy Lord. If thou didst not, thou wouldst not have fulfilled and proclaimed His mission. And God will defend thee from men (who mean mischief). For God guideth not those who reject Faith,” (5:67).
“Whoever follows the revelation which has just come from Allah is rightly guided. This will be reckoned for him. Whoever goes astray does so at his own cost. I [Muhammad] was not sent to compel you to follow me [but to persuade and warn],” (10:108).
“He it is Who hath sent among the unlettered ones a messenger of their own, to recite unto them His revelations and to make them grow, and to teach them the Scripture and Wisdom, though heretofore they were indeed in error manifest,” (62:2).
“We have sent no messenger save with the tongue of his people,” (14:4).
It is reported that Allah SWT has appointed 313 messengers and 25 of them are mentioned in the Qur’an.
The Necessity of Prophethood:
Human mind, by itself cannot know the Truth. A human being needs guidance and a direct revelation from his Creator and the message is conveyed through many of His Messengers.
Although all human beings come from the one and only Creator and we are born with the same fitrah, these are not enough to guide us to carry the responsibility to be his ‘abd and khalifah of Allah SWT.
We need transcendental messages for the following reasons:
- To impart and remind us again the message of Tawhid, i.e., the Oneness of Allah SWT, (112:1-4).
- To interpret the entire being, and answer the metaphysical and cosmological questions, (10:5).
- To guide people to the right path, and teaching them who is their Creator, including His Names and Attributes, (14:1)
- To establish moral bases and values in human society, (6:151).
- To correct the direct impression of human senses towards the physical world, and to make distinction between truth and fallacy, (3:71).
- To make humans capable for questioning and accounting, (4:165).
- To bring about the social justice in life, (4:135), (5:8).
- To bring peace and harmony to human community (49:13).
- Important Characteristics of the Prophets and Messengers:
Truthfulness, (23:70). They must be truthful in their words and deeds, since they carry the message and exemplify the message in their actions.
Trustworthiness. They are trustworthy in teaching the message, by exemplifying it in the best perfect manner (ihsan).
They must convey or transmit all the messages to their people (tabligh), (4:165), (5:67).
They must be smart and intelligent (fatanah). In carrying and imparting the message, it is important that they must have the wisdom on the best way to argue and make his people convince with the message, (16:125).
Moreover, a prophet and a messenger are just like any other human being. They do and act like any other humans, eating, drinking, marrying, raising one’s family, and dealing with other human affairs, (18:110).
Characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad SAW:
He is the last Prophet and Messenger to the humanity until the end of the world.
“And We have not sent thee (O Muhammad) save as a bringer of good tidings and a warner unto all mankind; but most of mankind know not,” (34:610).
“O Prophet! Lo! We have sent thee as a witness and a bringer of good tidings and a warner. And as a summoner unto Allah by His permission, and as a lamp that giveth light,” (33:45-46).
“We sent thee not save as a mercy for the peoples,” (21:107).
His followers believe in all the previous Prophets and Messengers, and all the previous revealed Books.
His message addresses the human as a whole, i.e., everything about the human being, his origin, his purpose of life, his beliefs, his thoughts, his actions, and the world after his death.
Prophet Muhammad’s greatest miracle is the noble Qur’an. It is an ongoing miracle, being preserved perfectly as guidance for all humanity until the end of the world.
“O you who have faith! Have faith in God and His messenger and the Book He has sent down on His messenger, and the Book which He has sent down before,” (4:136).
“And if ye are in doubt concerning that which We reveal unto Our slave (Muhammad), then produce a surah or the like thereof, and call your witnesses beside Allah if ye are truthful,” (2:23).
“That (this) is indeed a noble Qur’an. In a Book kept hidden, which none toucheth save the purified, a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds,” (56:77-80).
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