They were not yet barred by the pelting of shooting-stars, so the male and female soothsayers continued, from time to time, to divulge certain details about him, and the Arabs paid no attention to any of it—until Allah actually sent him forth. When the very events they had predicted began to occur, the people recognized them. Then, as the mission of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ drew near and the moment of his commissioning approached, the devils were cut off from overhearing; they were driven away from the stations where they had once sat in stealth, and were pelted with meteors. The jinn therefore realized that something momentous had taken place by Allah’s command.

He said: Concerning this, Allah revealed to His Messenger ﷺ: “Say, ‘It has been revealed to me that a company of the jinn listened and said, We have heard a wondrous Qur’an; it guides to right guidance, so we have believed in it, and we shall never ascribe any partner to our Lord’” (al-Jinn 72:1–2) to the end of the sūrah. We have discussed all of its meanings in our Tafsīr.

The same applies to His words, exalted is He: “And [remember] when We turned toward you a band of the jinn to listen to the Qur’an. When they attended it they said, Listen quietly! and when it was finished they returned to their people as warners. They said, O our people! We have just heard a Book sent down after Moses, confirming what came before it; it guides to the truth and to a straight path” (al-Ahqāf 46:29–30). The full commentary on these verses has also been given there.

Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq said: Yaʿqūb ibn ʿUtbah ibn al-Mughīrah ibn al-Akhnas related to me that the first Arabs to be alarmed by the hurling of the stars were this clan of Thaqīf. They went to one of their men, ʿAmr ibn Umayya of the Banū ʿIlāj—held to be the shrewdest Arab and the most penetrating in judgment—and said, “O ʿAmr, have you not seen what has happened in the sky, the pelting with these stars?”

He replied, “Indeed I have. Now look carefully: if the very stars by which travellers navigate on land and sea, by which people calculate the seasons of summer and winter, and on which the ordering of their livelihoods depends—if it is those stars that are being struck, then, by Allah, the world is being folded up and this creation destroyed. But if other stars are being struck while those remain fixed in their courses, then it is because of some matter Allah intends for this creation—so what is it?”

Ibn Isḥāq also said: Some scholars informed me that a woman of Banū Sahm named al-Ghayṭalah, who served as a soothsayer in the pre-Islamic period, was visited one night by her familiar spirit. He swooped down beneath her and chanted:

“I know—oh, I know!
A day of slaughter…”