Section: Independent Qur’anic Proofs of His Prophethood, may Allah bless him and grant him peace

The Qur’an itself sets forth numerous categories of signs attesting to his prophethood and proofs confirming his messengership, with each category comprising several distinct evidences.

One such example is his informing his people about past unseen matters that no human being could know unless he were a prophet, or had received that knowledge from a prophet. His people were fully aware that he had not learnt any of this from another person, neither from the People of the Scripture nor from anyone else.

This evidence is of two kinds:

1. What the polytheists and the People of the Book used to ask him about in order to see whether he was truly a prophet. Indeed, his own tribe would send envoys to scholars of the Scripture living far away—such as those in Medina and elsewhere—requesting from them the very questions with which they should test him. They would then pose those questions to him to determine whether he was a prophet or not.

2. What Allah disclosed to him directly, making it a distinguishing mark and sign of his prophethood and a proof of his messengership, while the recounting of these stories also contains lessons relevant to other matters.

Thus each of these two kinds served simultaneously as evidence and as an admonition pointing to his prophethood in two ways: first, as proof through his disclosure of the unseen, knowledge of which can only come to a prophet; and second, as an admonition through the accounts of the believers and the unbelievers contained therein, which compel one to follow the path of the believers who followed prophets like him and to avoid the path of the disbelievers who opposed prophets like him. And the ruling of a thing is the ruling of