the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. The bishop thereupon exclaimed, “By God, you have called down ruin upon a prophet who has been sent!” Abū ʿAlqamah replied, “Indeed—by God, I shall not loosen a single knot of this camel’s tack until I reach him.” He turned his camel’s head toward Madinah, and the bishop swung his own mount round after him, saying, “Stay back from me! I only said that (1) for fear that the Arabs might hear (2) we had been seized by folly or had humbled ourselves to this man in a way no other Arabs have done, while we are the most powerful of them and possess the largest, most unified territory.” Abū ʿAlqamah retorted, “By God, I will never excuse what has come (3) out of your mouth.” Then, spurring his camel, he chanted:

“Toward you she gallops, her girth-strap quivering,
The foetus in her belly jostling side to side;
Her creed now set against the Christians’ creed.”

He kept on until he reached the Prophet ﷺ, and thereafter remained with him until he was later martyred (4).

With this established, the certainty (5) that he ﷺ is mentioned in the earlier scriptures can be known from several avenues:
First: the report of someone whose prophethood has been definitively proven, affirming that he is mentioned in their books. Since the statement comes from one whose truthfulness is confirmed by unequivocal evidence, it must be believed; to reject it under such circumstances is intrinsically impossible. This would still hold even if our only knowledge of the matter came from