lying, he would be one of the very worst of them. Now, if Allah has indeed sent him—even if only to a single town, as He sent Jonah son of Matta to the people of Nineveh—then he ranks among the noblest of creation and is utterly truthful, never attributing any falsehood to Allah and saying about Him nothing but the truth. Yet had he uttered even a single false word against Allah, he would at once belong to the class of liars and could no longer be counted among the truthful messengers of Allah. A liar does not lie in everything; he lies in some matters and speaks the truth in others. Therefore, whoever invents even one statement about Allah has forged a lie against Him and falls into the category of those who falsely claim prophethood, not among the genuine ones.

Moreover, the whole purpose of a prophetic mission is to convey Allah’s messages exactly as they are. If truth were mixed with falsehood, that purpose would be defeated. Again, if it became known that he had lied in any part of the message, nothing he conveyed could be accepted on his say-so alone; one would need independent evidence to distinguish the true from the false, and thus the very point of his mission would be lost.

For this reason all religious communities without exception agree that the messengers are protected from error in what they transmit from Allah, Blessed and Exalted be He. No one has ever asserted that a man sent by Allah could knowingly lie about Him. Indeed, Allah Himself has declared that He would never allow a fabricator to persist in attributing lies to Him:

“If he had dared to attribute to Us any false saying,
We would have seized him by the right hand,
then severed his aorta,
and none of you could have shielded him from Us.” (al-Haqqah 69:44–47)