without its necessary concomitant, and the coexistence of two opposites is impossible. Human beings have no means of discovering all the concomitants required by every created thing, nor the contrary factors whose presence would nullify it. Hence, to assert categorically that something can exist while one is ignorant of its requisites and whether they themselves can exist, or of its opposites and whether they are in fact absent, is sheer ignorance.

Allah—glorified be He—is able to alter whatever He wills of the universe: He will split the heavens, set the mountains in motion, crush them completely until He turns them into scattered dust, and so forth among the matters He has foretold. He brings such events about just as He creates everything else through the means He facilitates, and this is explained in detail elsewhere.

What concerns us here is that the signs of the prophets and the proofs of their truthfulness are diverse: before they are commissioned, at the very moment of their commissioning, during their lifetimes, and after their deaths.

Before the commissioning there are, for example, the prophecies uttered by earlier messengers about them and the preliminary portents that herald their advent. At the moment of the commissioning the signs are manifest. During their lifetimes they are granted victory, deliverance, and the destruction of their enemies. After their deaths their followers are granted victory and their enemies are destroyed, as the Exalted says: