the Prophet’s daughters—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—and that ʿĀʾishah was the daughter of Abū Bakr; that Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān succeeded him as caliphs; and that Abū Bakr and ʿUmar were buried in his chamber.

Once this much is established, it becomes clear that these hadith reports—and multiples upon multiples of them—are far more numerous than what is related about any one of those earlier figures, and their transmitters are more eminent, more plentiful, and more reliable than the transmitters of those other accounts. Collectively, they confirm that Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—was the vehicle for extraordinary, supernatural signs and astounding wonders, the like of which is unknown for any other human being. The certainty Muslims have regarding this surpasses the certainty the People of the Book possess concerning the signs they attribute to Moses, Jesus, and others, for the number of people who conveyed the signs of Muhammad outside the Qur’an is many, many times greater than those who conveyed the Torah and the Gospel, to say nothing of other prophetic narratives.

Indeed, the Torah was never memorized in its entirety by the generality of the Children of Israel the way the Qur’an is memorized by the masses of Muslims. After the destruction of the Temple, only a very few still retained it, to the point that people began to differ over whether it had been transmitted through mass reporting (tawātur). The same applies to the Gospel: its transmitters are far fewer than those who preserved the signs of Muhammad.