Auron ka hai Payaam aur, mera Payaam aur hai, / Ishq key dardmand ka tarz-e-kalaam aur hai! (Iqbal)
Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, is God’s living miracle on earth – for ever and ever. Unlike any other miracle of any kind this world has ever known. He was and continues to be a miracle among other things of peace and blessings for the entire world for all times to come.
His body may have departed this world, but his spirit lives on as nothing else does in this world.
His voice may no longer ring in ordinary human ears, but his message is alive and well after the passage of nearly a millennium and a half.
His birth may have occurred in a small desert township called Makkah and his death in a shady oasis named Madinah after him, but his teachings echo from every valley and hill and they float over every sea and ocean around the world.
He may have come and gone before the world ever thought of the printing press or the Internet, or radio or television, but nothing is more carefully preserved to this day, or more widely disseminated today, than the words that issued forth from his noble mouth over 1400 years ago.
God gave him a book that God called “The Reading” – The Noble Reading.
God also called that book The Wise and Smart Reading.
The Qur’an!
And God told him in that book: “Read!” And he set about teaching the world to read and write, even though he himself could do neither.
You want a bigger miracle than that? Go find one.
And to this day – after the passage of over 14 centuries – the world reads and recites and chants and sings that book in every part of this world, every hour, minute and second of every day and night, as perhaps no other book is or ever was.
While the world is lost in speculation and conjecture about everyone and everything that came or occurred in the past, his life, teachings, words, deeds, models and examples are alive and visible today in the form of eyewitness accounts and primary data and reports just as they were to the tens of thousands of people who personally and physically surrounded him when he was alive.
They were simple children of the desert – brave, talented, decent, loving, kind, truthful, wild. And they were just, fair and honest beyond compare.
In a larger context, they were part of the broad mass of ordinary people that God in that most amazing of all books called “The People.” Not lords or nobles, not kings or priests, not landlords or aristocrats, just plain “People.”
And these amazing and gifted people that surrounded him day and night, and that leaped to carry out his every command and fulfill his every wish, he himself referred to, sweetly and modestly, as his “Companions.”
And in so doing he drove a powerful nail in the coffin of racial, religious, birth, status and gender distinctions, privileges and preferences for all times. His message was clear: if anyone was with him, and accepted and embraced his message and followed him, then that person was his “Companion,” period.
Not his servant; not his lowly follower, even though they were all his humble and most devoted followers; not a lesser person or human being than him in any way; but his co-equal. His Ashaab or Companions.
Everyone of them.
Well almost his equal, I am going to say, given the fact that not only was he superior in every quality of head and heart, and body and mind, to everyone else, but he was also God’s chosen messenger to humanity.
Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, the man died over a 1000 years ago, but Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, God’s ever-living miracle of peace and blessings on earth and in heaven lives on.
Forever!
A MAN MOST PRAISED
So, praise him, for, his very name – Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam – means the most praised one. Just like his other name, Ahmad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, which also means more deserving of praise than anyone else.
It means a superabundance of all things good, noble, wonderful and beautiful that inhere in him. It means the one who is deserving of all kinds of praise from everyone.
He is the man whom God and his angels bless and praise all the time. So says the Noble Qur’an.
And he is the man God commands the believers everywhere to bless and praise all the time. So also says the Glorious Qur’an.
Hear this message – this divine proclamation as well as directive – from beginning to end, loud and clear, and in God’s own pure and immortal words, in the Qur’an.
Here goes:
Innallaha wa malaa-i-katahoo yusalloona ‘alan nabiyyi, yaa ayyuhalladheena aamanoo salloo ‘alaihi wa sallimoo tasleema!
That is in heaven – and everywhere else.
Now, join that heavenly chorus, right here on earth, and bless and glorify the man Muhammad using his own words. These were words that he taught his “Companions” in order to help them fulfill their divine mandate of blessing him and thus invoking, manifold, God’s choicest blessings on themselves and the rest of the world.
These words that echoed God’s own speech to near perfection were: Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam!
God commanded in the Qur’an: Salloo ‘alaihi wa sallimoo! Muhammad taught his “Companions” how to comply with that divine command by saying: Sallallaahu Alaihi wa Sallam!
Heaven and earth were thus fused together seamlessly in a living miracle that will roll and rumble around the world as long as the world will last. This will be a real-life miracle that anyone and everyone can see, if only they had eyes, and their ears were open, and their hearts and minds were not clouded by hate and prejudice or atrophied beyond repair.
This is one simple and small way – if you want to call it that – in which God Almighty fills his earth, and the lives of its inhabitants, with his noble peace and blessings. With his Salaam.
Blessing the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, then becomes the occasion for, and Muslims then become the ongoing instruments and mechanisms of, doing so. And this never-ending story continues to unfold its ever-living miracle of peace and blessings in every age and in every place on earth.
And it shall continue to do so for as long the world lasts.
THE MIRACLE LIVES ON
That is part of the perpetual miracle that Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, was and is: people everywhere blessing his name saying these words every time his name is mentioned – whether it is you saying his name or someone else saying it in your hearing or presence.
In saying all this, I am not saying that he – Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam – performed and produced miracles during his lifetime, which he did, and in plenty, as did so many other prophets and messengers of God – blessed be their names and memories – such as Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Noah, David, Solomon, Joseph and others.
Alaihimus Salaam – God Almighty bless them all.
In other words, I am not presenting him here as a producer or maker of miracles, which he was by any definition of those expressions. What I am saying is that he himself – his very life and existence on earth – was a miracle while he lived. Just as everything about him was and continues to be a miracle in and after his death.
And he continues to be the greatest miracle of all time even today, 1400 years after his death and departure from this world.
While Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, performed all kinds of miracles, both large and small, if there indeed is such a thing as a “small” miracle, he himself was, and is, the biggest miracle of all.
And he is an ever-living miracle that anyone in every culture, place or time can personally discover, behold and relate to at any time. Provided there is an element of purity left in the soul in the midst of all the corruption that surrounds human life in every age and place.
And provided a ray of integrity continues to illumine the intellect that may be mired in layers upon layers of darkness and doubt.
And provided a shade of humility and openness continues to mark the attitude and penetrate the heart whose spiritual arteries may have been clogged and corroded by wealth, power, lust, greed, a wayward life and personal arrogance.
[Write to the author at [email protected]. Also visit www.IslamicSolutions.Com and Listen to Pasha Hour International.]