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The Praiseworthy Station (al-maqām al-maḥmūd), which is the Supreme Intercession. Allah, the Exalted, says: “It may be that your Lord will raise you to a Praiseworthy Station” 1. In the long, rigorously authenticated hadith of intercession it is related that Allah will gather the first and the last on a single plain. People will say to one another, “Will you not look to your Lord?” They will go to Adam, then to Noah, then to Moses, then to Jesus, and finally to Muhammad—may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon them all. Each will say, “Go to someone else,” except Muhammad ﷺ; he will say, “I am for it,” then fall in prostration until he is granted permission to intercede. By this his superiority over all creation is made manifest, and he alone is singled out for that station.
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The universality of his mission to both species—the jinn and humankind. Allah, the Exalted, says: “Say, O mankind, I am the Messenger of Allah to all of you” 2; “We have sent you only as a bearer of good news and a warner to all people” 3; “Blessed is He who sent down the Criterion upon His servant that he might be a warner to the worlds” 4; “We sent you only as a mercy to all the worlds” 5; and, “When We directed a company of the jinn toward you to listen to the Quran, and when they attended it they said, ‘Be silent and listen!’ Then, when it was finished, they returned to their people as warners” 6. This is a point of unanimous agreement.
The verses Allah revealed to Muhammad ﷺ address every creature, jinn and human alike, for his message is universal. Although some occasions of revelation arose among the Arabs, no verse is—by consensus of the Muslims—confined to the particular incident that occasioned its descent. No Muslim has ever claimed that the verses concerning divorce, ẓihār, liʿān, the prescribed punishment for theft, for highway robbers, and the like, apply only to the specific individual who prompted their revelation.
The intention here is to show that certain Quranic verses, even when their immediate cause was matters that occurred among