Muhammad’s True Knowledge Of History
Messenger Muhammad gave lots of information about past people and events
1. History is an important branch of knowledge. It is not a science like physics or biology. It mostly depends on documents that have remained of the past. Although we can have knowledge of the past and past events by means of documents, it is quite often very difficult to penetrate into the facts behind those events. We can hardly know the intentions of historical ‘actors’ or ‘actresses’ and the real motives behind events. In order to be able to judge rightly about persons and events, the documents we have should be reliable. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that personal inclinations and interests, prejudices, and different other motives may have a part of their own in documents, and, worse, documents may have been distorted. For example, if the Holy Book had not been sent down to our Messenger Muhammad we could not have had true knowledge about the Israelite Messengers and especially the Messenger Jesus, and the original identity of Christianity and Judaism. The Old and New Testaments have been so frequently and badly distorted and corrupted that it is impossible to open a way through them to historical truths.
2. The Messenger Muhammad gave lots of information about past peoples and events. Much of this information is in the Holy Book. As well as the main points in the histories of many past peoples and places like the ‘Ad, Thamud, Iram, Sodom and Gomorra, and ancient Egypt, and the peoples of Noah, Abraham and Shuayb, we can also find in the Holy Book at least the general outlines of the history of the Israelite people from the beginning to the time of Jesus, particularly including the time of the Messengers Moses, David and Solomon, upon them be peace. It is highly interesting that much of this information is in the Holy Book’s chapters, which were revealed in the Meccan period of Muhammad’s Messengerhood, during which he had contact with neither Christians nor Jews. When the Messenger immigrated to Medina, Jewish and Christian scholars asked him many questions about certain topics in the Torah and Gospels and since they received from him convincing answers, they could not object to any of them.
Neither the Holy Book nor the books of Tradition have been changed the least over time and none of the information the Messenger gave about the past has ever been contradicted
3. The Messenger Muhammad did not only give information about past events and peoples, but he also analyzed them with their causes and results. Thus, the historical accounts of the Messenger are of the kind that they presented laws of history and the broad psychological, social and economic principles concerning human individual and collective life. In addition, these accounts are masterpieces of literary style and eloquence, such that it is impossible to produce a like of them.
By M. Fethullah Gulen