among his closest disciples (ḥawāriyyūn), but this assumption is mistaken for several reasons:

First: Allah declares in His Book that He destroyed the peoples to whom the messengers were sent, whereas the inhabitants of Antioch, when someone later invited them to the religion of the Messiah, actually believed and were not destroyed.

Second: The Quran mentions three messengers, together with a man who came from the farthest part of the city running. By contrast, the emissaries who arrived as followers of the Messiah were only two, and no one—neither Ḥabīb nor anyone else—came running to support them.

Third: Those men appeared after the Messiah; therefore Allah had not sent them as messengers. A comparable misunderstanding occurs with Midian. Allah states in the Quran that He destroyed the people of Midian by means of the overshadowing cloud when Shuʿayb came to them, yet the Quran also recounts that Moses later visited that land and married the daughter of one of its men. Some people therefore supposed that this man was the Prophet Shuʿayb—peace be upon him—but the scholars of Islam, such as Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, Ibn Jurayj, and others, unanimously held that the man who became Moses’ father-in-law was not the Prophet Shuʿayb. The claim that he was Shuʿayb is transmitted only from persons unknown among the scholars and is not authentically reported from any Companion or Successor, as we have explained in detail elsewhere.