follow them at all, or follows them in an incomplete way, will never reap the fruits that the Law and the divine decree have assigned to these deeds. Realizing this obliges a person to apply himself earnestly to every beneficial religious and worldly cause, all the while seeking Allah’s help and praising his Lord for making those causes, their prerequisites, their tools, and everything they depend on easy.
• The second category comprises the prophets’ miracles—events whose mass transmission is unparalleled in any other report and that have been handed down by every generation. It also embraces the favors with which Allah honors His servants: answered supplications, relief from distress, the accomplishment of varied needs, the repelling of harms beyond human power, divine openings, God-given inspirations, and the lights He casts into the hearts of His chosen servants. By means of these lights they attain certitude, serenity, and branches of knowledge that cannot be reached through mere pursuit and ordinary causes. The category further includes His giving victory to the messengers and their followers and His abandoning their enemies—something observed time and again.
For this category people have no way to discover the causes of such occurrences, nor were they originally given access to their true nature or essence. They are happenings decreed by the Almighty Lord—who is able to do all things—through causes, wisdoms, and patterns that created beings cannot comprehend, and to which their senses and experiments have absolutely no access. In them the messengers, from the first to the last, believed, as did their early and later followers. Through them we recognize the greatness of the Creator: that the forelocks of His servants are in His hand, that whatever Allah wills comes to be and whatever He does not will can never be. By them the truth of what the messengers brought is established—just as it is established through the first category.
Just as there is no avenue in this life for people to grasp the very essence of the realities of the Last Day, or of what lies in Paradise and Hell—they know only what the messengers have taught and the scriptures have revealed—and just as the inhabitants of this earthly realm have no path to reach the heavenly realm, nor any ability to raise the dead or breathe souls into inanimate matter, so it is with this great class of cosmic events.