I shall place My revelation upon him, and through him My justice will appear among the nations; he will enjoin them to keep the commandments. He does not laugh, and no one will hear his voice in the marketplaces. He opens the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf, and he revives hearts that are sealed. What I grant him I grant no one else. He will praise God with a new praise that he brings from the farthest reaches of the earth, and the wilderness and all who live in it will rejoice; they will proclaim God’s praises from every height and magnify Him from every hilltop. He will neither weaken nor be overcome, nor will he incline to caprice. He is mushaffah, and he will not crush the righteous who are like a fragile reed; rather, he will strengthen the truthful. He is the support of the humble, the Light of God that can never be extinguished; the mark of his authority is upon his shoulders.

Concerning his words “mushaffah”—with a dotted shīn and a doubled fā’, on the pattern of mukram—it is a Hebrew word that matches the name Muḥammad both in meaning and in sound, a very close correspondence,(1) indeed even closer than that of muʾadh muʾadh. The Arabs, however, cannot pronounce it exactly as it is in Hebrew,(2) for it lies between the ḥā’ and the hā’, and the vowel on the fā’ is midway between the ḍammah and the fatḥah. No fair-minded scholar among them has any doubt that it corresponds to the name Muḥammad.

Abū Muḥammad Ibn Qutaybah said: “‘Mushaffah’ is Muḥammad beyond any doubt. The proof is that they say shafaḥallāhā when they wish to say ‘al-ḥamdu lillāh’; so when ‘praise’ is shafaḥā, then mushaffah is certainly Muḥammad.”(3)

Some of the scholars among them who accepted Islam have told me—and others—that maʾidh maʾidh is Muḥammad, pronouncing both the mīm and the hamzah with a kasrah, while some pronounce the mīm with a fatḥah and bring it nearer