Seerah Series | Part 1: Specialties of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) | Shaykh Yasir Qadhi

As for his specialties, what is called in Arabic “khasaais” something that only he was given, and no other human being was given, and there are many books written by the early scholars about khasaaisun nabiyy and about shamaailun nabiyy, which means that his characteristics and what is unique to him, and there are many many characteristics that are unique to him. Some scholars in our times have listed up to fifty specific and unique characteristics and blessings that only he was given and no other human being was given.

Some of these, again this is all a summary, there’s so much more that can be said, some of these:

Number one  -He is the final prophet of Allāh. No prophet of Allāh has obviously ever been the final prophet.  And there is only one prophet that can be the final. And Allāh chose him to be the final prophet and this is explicitly mentioned in the Qurʾān: “Maa kaana Muhammadun abaa ahadimmirrijaalikum wa laa kirrasulAllāhi wa khatamman nabiyyeen” (and in another recitation: wa khatimman nabiyyeen) and that is the seal and end of the prophets.

Number two – the prophethood of our Prophet had been decreed by Allāh even before Adam existed. Even before Adam was a living soul. Allāh had decreed the prophethood of our Prophet Muhammad even before the ruh was blown into Adam. One of the sahabah asked the Prophet “When were you decreed to be a prophet, Ya Rasul Allāh?” The Prophet said, “When Adam was between the theen (between the mud) and the ruh, in other words, Adam was not yet combined with ruh and theen. When Adam was still two separate entities, and that is the ruh and the theen. Before the ruh was blown in, Allāh had already destined and decreed that I would be coming for mankind.”

Of the specialties of our Prophet , number three, is that he is the only prophet to have been sent for all of humanity. In fact the only prophet to have been sent even to the jinn. No prophet before our Prophet was sent to all of humanity. No prophet. Every single prophet was sent to a specific nation. Now, somebody can say here: “Adam was a prophet and he was sent to all of the people of his time, because his children, there were only his children there. And Nuh was a rasul and he was sent to the people of his time and there were no other people of his time, so he too was sent to the people of all of humanity. How then can this be a unique thing for our Prophet [saws]?

The response is that Adam and Nuh were both exceptions that simply happened by a coincidence of early history in that Adam is the first human and the only human beings will be his descendants. It is not that Allāh destined him with the title: “You have been sent to humanity.” It just so happens that the only humanity are his children. And the same goes for the first messenger ever sent, and that is Nuh . There’s only one city in all of humanity, there was only one city. Nuh , when he was sent, there weren’t villages and qariyahs all over the place. There was just one group, one people, one nation, one community…that’s his people. And so when Allāh wipes that one village out, the world is wiped out because that’s the only one village out there. So once again, it is not as if Nuh was intended to be sent for all of humanity. It just so happened that all of humanity was one village. And that’s why both of these are the earliest two prophets, right? No prophet after them, when there were multiple cities, was sent to both cities. No prophet after them, when there were other civilizations, was sent to more than two civilizations, other than our Prophet [saws]. He wasn’t just sent to two civilizations. He was sent to all of humanity, and not just this, another specialty, he was actually even sent to the jinn. And this is a uniqueness that no other prophet has ever been sent for.

And inshaAllāh, in the course of our lectures, we will mention a very famous incident in the early Makkan seerah. It is called the night of the jinn. The night of the jinn. And on this night, the jinns came to Makkah, Muslim jinns, and they wanted the Prophet to teach them about Islam so the Prophet went and he taught them what they needed to know, and there are details that we know of that night and we’ll talk about it during that time.

Of the specialties of our Prophet that no other nation and no other prophet has been given, our Prophet said, Allāh has helped me with ru’ub. Ru’ub means a type of fear that Allāh will inflict into my enemies even before I reach them, even one month’s journey before I come to them, they will become terrified of me. So Allāh helped him without even physical combat. In his time of course, this is unique to him only. Not to the rest of the prophets or even to his ummah. To him only, that when he went into battle against an enemy, then the people became terrified of him even before he reached them. And this he said, Allāh helped me with ru’ub, and ru’ub is frightening, or fear. And Allāh struck fear into the hearts of my enemies for the distance of one entire month.

Of the specialties that he has been given was that he has been given the largest ummah out of all of the prophets. And this is mentioned in a hadith in Sahih Bukhari, that he said that Allāh showed me the ummams and I saw an ummah as large as the eye could see, and I said maybe this is my ummah, and I was told “No, this is the ummah of Musa ” and then I saw an ummah even larger than that, and it was larger than the horizon. It blocked my vision. And I was told, “This is your ummah.”

And in another hadith, he said to the sahabah, “’Do you wish that your ummah (meaning the ummah of the Prophet should be 1/3 of the people of jannah?’ They said, ‘Allāhu Akbar’ there have been hundreds of thousands of ummahs and if one ummah is one third of jannah, Allāhu Akbar. So he was silent. Then he said, ‘Would you be happy if I told you that your ummah is ½ of the people of jannah?’ They said, ‘Allāhu Akbar.’ Then he was silent and then he said, ‘By Allāh, my hope is that my ummah shall be 2/3 of the people of jannah.’” Not that we want to kick the other ummahs out, Astaghfirullah, they’re all going to get in if they deserve it, but that our ummah will be so large..SubhanAllāh, modern estimates say how many people are Muslim on the face of this earth, around one billion. One billion. Do the  math: from the time of the Prophet until Yawm’l-Qiyāmah, imagine…already the percentages are so huge and then compare them to the real followers of the prophets..the actual, true Christians, not the Christians who believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The Christians who believed in Jesus Christ as being Rasūlullāh. How few must they be? And then the actual Bani Israel, at the time of Musa, at the time of the prophets of the old, who believed in the prophets. They must have been in the hundreds of millions, great number, mashaAllāh, great number. But you cannot compare to the billion that we have now, and throughout history for 14 centuries, and Allāh knows how many centuries till Yawm’l-Qiyāmah. And so when you look at that, inshaAllāh, you can see how true the Prophet , and imagine he’s speaking at a time when there’s only one city of Muslims, that’s Madinah. He’s speaking at a time when there are maybe 15,000 Muslims on earth. And there are probably 2-3 million Christians, and hundreds of thousands of Jews. And he’s telling a group of 50 sahabah in his masjid that I hope that inshaAllāh you will be 2/3 of the people of jannah. When we hear this hadith now, we say “of course it’s common sense,” but when he said it, it was a miracle. And we see this now, ra’yal ‘ayn, with our two eyes.

Of his specialties that no other prophet has been given, is that he has been given the most powerful miracle, and that is the miracle of the Qurʾān. I’ve given many lectures about this issue and inshaAllāh one day we’ll talk also about this issue in more detail, but there is no miracle that compares to the Qurʾān. There is no miracle that compares to the Qurʾān. And one thing will demonstrate this for you and that is that, look at any other miracle that you can imagine: the splitting of the Red Sea, or the lecture of Lazarus-Jesus Christ resurrected by the permission of Allāh the dead. All of these miracles, we have no access to them. We didn’t see the splitting of the Red Sea. You weren’t there when Jesus Christ called out to Lazarus and he came out walking from the grave. It’s not really a miracle for me and you except that we believe in it. But the Qurʾān is a miracle that I can hand to a non-Muslim, say “Here. This is the miracle of my prophet.” The Qurʾān is a miracle I can recite and the people can hear. It’s a living miracle. It’s a miracle that all of humanity has access to and there is no miracle that compares to the miracle of the Qurʾān in many different ways. And that is the topic of an entire other lecture.