The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

prophecy

Prophecy is one of the key facets of the Islamic creed. In a famous hadith report, belief in the prophets or messengers of God is assigned the fourth rank among the six main articles of faith: belief in God, angels, scriptures, prophets, Judgment Day, and destiny. According to the Qur’an, a prophet will be sent to each nation (10:47; 16:36). The function of the prophet (nabī) or messenger (rasūl), the definition of prophecy (nubuwwa), and the definition of a prophetic message (risāla) are among the central questions of Islamic theology, philosophy, and mysticism. Disagreements among scholars on these issues have had consequential bearings on their conception of key notions such as sin, free will, and human nature. Many theologians have argued that since the Qur’an stresses that God will not punish any nation until a prophet is sent to them (17:15), the nations in which no prophet has been sent are exempt from blame for sin on the grounds that they have not yet been informed of God’s laws.

Defining the role of the prophet and the significance of prophecy was central to the development of Islamic political thought. Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, was not only the spiritual and religious leader of the first Muslim community but also its political leader. Since emulating the customary acts of the Prophet (sunna) is one of the main principles of Islamic faith and practice, this twofold role led Muslim thinkers to inquire about the relationship of spiritual wisdom to politics and to develop an Islamic view of the ideal leader and the ideal political system. This interest made medieval Muslim scholars—especially philosophers—amenable to Plato’s theory of the philosopher-king and his preference for a knowledge-based aristocracy as the ideal form of the perfect state. It also triggered many scholarly attempts, in both classical and modern eras, to interpret the dual role that the Prophet played in the course of his mission in order to show that the close relationship between politics and religion in Islam does not lead to theocratic despotism.

Interpretation of the spiritual and political leadership of Prophet Muhammad also played a decisive role in the formation of the doctrine of the imamate in Shi‘i Islam versus the notion of the caliph in the Sunni tradition. For Shi‘is, the Prophet’s role as mediator and interpreter of the word of God is one of the key justifications of the doctrine. This conception radically contrasts with the Sunni notion of the caliphate, at least according to classical Sunni theology. According to most Sunni theorists, the caliphs did not lay claim to ultimate or divine authority. This allowed later Muslim thinkers to conceive of a historical bifurcation of his spiritual and political leadership and contributed, for instance, to the emergence of the notion of the shaykh or master in Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam.

Muslim theologians treated the topic of prophecy under five main rubrics: the definition and function of prophecy, miracles and justifications of prophecy, the definition and function of divine messages, proof of Muhammad’s prophecy, and the human nature of prophets. Prophecy is described in the Qur’an as an expression of God’s mercy and compassion toward humankind. Because God cares for humans, the beings he chose to be his vicegerents on Earth, he sends messages to guide them to the absolute truth of all beings: himself. The prophet is the one who receives this message; thus anyone who receives the messages of God achieves a dimension of prophecy. The Qur’an mentions three main ways in which the message of God may be conveyed to humankind. The first is true vision (al-ru’yā al-ṣāliḥa), the second is God’s direct speech to the messenger, and the third and most common way is through Gabriel, the angel of revelation.

Most Muslim scholars distinguish between the function of a messenger (rasūl) and that of a prophet (nabī). The messenger is sent with a specific scripture and preaches a specific religion, such as Moses and the Torah, Jesus and the Gospel, and Muhammad and the Qur’an. The prophet, in contrast, preaches only the general message of the unity of God and is sometimes sent to remind humanity of the messages conveyed to them earlier, through previous messengers. The famous Mu‘tazili theologian ‘Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1025) challenged this notion, arguing that the messenger and the prophet are essentially identical. However, the distinction between messenger and prophet afforded Muslim thinkers, and especially mystics, some freedom in dealing with the notion of prophecy (nubuwwa). Many mystics, for example, bolstered their claims regarding the authority of Sufi shaykhs because of their participation in prophecy through visions.

Like Jewish and Christian theologians, Muslim theologians considered miracles the absolutely crucial proofs of prophecy. ‘Abd al-Jabbar defines four main characteristics of miracles in his theological manual Sharh al-Usul al-Khamsa (Commentary on the five fundamental principles). Miracles must point to the divine power underlying them, temporally follow the claim to prophecy, support the nature of the message, and violate the laws deemed natural and immutable. Miracles are generally divided into material and rational categories, and the miracle of Islam is of the second type. In Islam the miracle proving the veracity of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission is the scripture itself, the Qur’an.

Muslim theologians addressed the proof of the prophecy of Muhammad in various ways. In Ma‘arij al-Quds fi Madarij Ma‘rifat al-Nafs (The ladder to God in the plains of knowing one’s soul), Ghazali (d. 1111) holds that while it is impossible to define a prophetic message exactly, the truth of a message can be proven both rationally and effectively. In Ghazali’s view, God grants prophets the honor of receiving divine messages as a form of grace. A contrasting approach was primarily concerned with proving that Muhammad was necessarily and indisputably a messenger through a systematic rational analysis, taken up by ‘Abd al-Jabbar in his lengthy work Tathbit Dala’il al-Nubuwwa (Confirming the evidence of prophecy).

Some of the most interesting contributions to the Islamic theory of prophecy are found in theological, philosophical, and mystical discussions of the human nature of the Prophet. The Qur’an’s description of Muhammad as an ordinary man and its assertion that prophets are essentially a select set of people led Muslim thinkers to analyze prophets ontologically and psychologically as perfect humans. Muslim philosophers appropriated Platonic and Aristotelian psychology, ethics, and politics and sought to harmonize them with Islamic religious concepts, especially the concept of prophecy. According to Farabi (d. 950), the prophet, like the philosopher, seeks to actualize his humanity by acquiring both practical and theoretical wisdom. Since he, like the philosopher-king, is concerned mainly with the most exalted human activities, or in Aristotle’s language, thinking the forms or universal ideas that are in fact divine thoughts, the prophet is capable of leading his community to perfection. In order to assume this role as guide, however, the prophet must have a unique imaginative faculty that allows him to represent universal rational ideas in an immediate, practical way so that his people might understand, even if they are incapable of the rational inquiry practiced by expert philosophers. Strong imagination is thus an essential dimension of prophecy.

This naturalistic view of prophecy and prophetic psychology led to a similar perspective on religion and its role in society. In Kitab al-Milla (The book of religion), Farabi uses the term ri’āsa (leadership or rule) to refer to religion. Similarly, he refers to the Prophet as the first leader or ruler of the community. Practical and theoretical wisdom, the main components of philosophy, are both required for the preservation of the virtuous religion that was revealed to the first ruler, the Prophet. However, philosophy remains superior to religion, for what the Prophet merely received as revelation and represented to his people through his imagination can be demonstrated rationally through philosophy. For Farabi, the true heirs of the Prophet are philosophers, and the best extrapolation of prophecy is rational inquiry, on both theoretical and practical levels.

Adopting the same Aristotelian framework, Ghazali analyzes the psychology of the prophet in Ma‘arij al-Quds fi Madarij Ma‘rifat al-Nafs. He argues that what sets the prophet apart from other humans is not only his possession of theoretical and practical wisdom but also his possession of a strong imagination that enables him to represent rational, universal ideas to his people in tangible, sensible terms. The prophet is thus a perfect human who can use all his faculties, especially the rational and imaginative faculties, in the best way possible to attain happiness and lead his community to its attainment as well.

In his seminal work Fusus al-Hikam (The bezels of wisdom), the mystic and philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240) addresses the concept of the prophet from a radically existential perspective as the perfect human (al-insān al-kāmil). The first chapter of his work presents the human-divine relationship as the most fundamental ontological reality, for the divine cannot be divine unless his divinity is recognized as such by a being with free will. The fulfillment of humanity consists in letting the absoluteness of the divine manifest itself in all its possible forms—as absolute justice, absolute beauty, and so on. There are as many possible divine manifestations as there are divine names. Through spiritual, philosophical, and contemplative exercise, the perfect human manages to let the divine names manifest themselves in each and every experience of his or her life. Ibn al-‘Arabi’s distinctive use of the term walī (saint) to refer to the prophets stems from the essential equation of the two categories in his thought. The only difference between prophets and other saints is that they have special or exclusive prophecy (nubuwwat ikhtiṣās), whereas saints have general prophecy (nubuwwa ‘āmma). Special prophecy is the grace God bestows upon the prophets to convey His special messages and laws to mankind. In Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology, prophecy is the highest, most perfect level of being human, and he interprets the entire history of prophecy as a series of attempts to perfect the fundamental human–divine relationship that constitutes the essence of human existence. Ibn al-‘Arabi associates each prophet with a specific wisdom that reflects the way in which that prophet managed to let the divine manifest Himself through his life. Muhammad is the seal of the prophets because he is the prophet whose life best manifested the divine attributes. In other words, Muhammad achieved the highest level of human perfection.