The Torah likewise contains further prophecies concerning Ishmael and his descendants: that they would become a tremendously great nation, and that “the stars of the sky may be numbered, but they themselves cannot be numbered.”(1) This promise reached its full realization only with the appearance of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh—peace and blessings be upon him—and his community.

For the children of Isaac had long been exiled and scattered, reduced to servitude under the Pharaohs and the Copts, until Allah rescued them through His prophet and intimate, Moses son of ʿImrān. He granted them the land of Greater Syria, which became the seat of their kingdom. Yet later He stripped them of that land and dispersed them as peoples across the earth, their honor and dominion taken away: they were cut down by the swords of the blacks, and rough red-skinned foreigners rose over them,(2) until the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—appeared. Then those ancient prophecies were fulfilled, those glad tidings manifested after a long age, and the sons of Ishmael gained ascendancy over all around them, crushing their opponents completely and grinding them down. They spread to the horizons of the earth; nations stretched out their hands to them in humility and submission; and they rose as high as the Pleiades in the lands lying between India, Abyssinia, the farthest reaches of Sūs, the territories of the Turks, the Slavs, and the Khazars. They ruled what lies between the two ends of the world and the meeting point of the two seas. The name of Abraham came to the tongues of all nations, so that from the time of the Prophet’s advent—peace and blessings be upon him—there has not been a child or a woman, a free person or a slave, a male or a female, who does not know Abraham and the family of Abraham.

As for Christianity, though it did spread among many great nations, it never possessed any manifest sovereignty or overwhelming might in the homeland of Ishmael and his mother Hagar; the hand of this community was never placed above the hands of all others, nor did the nations extend their hands to it in submission.