According to them, God does not even know the very person of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, or any other individual being in this world—much less the precise details of what happened on the Day of Badr, the Day of ʿUhud, the Day of the Confederates, and the other events God Himself recounts in the Qur’an, where He informs us of specific matters, past and future.

Because of this premise, they maintain that prophethood is something acquired: an effusion that overflows upon the prophet’s spirit once his soul has readied itself for it. Whoever disciplines his soul until it is prepared, they say, will receive that overflow. The angels, in their view, are no more than luminous images the prophet pictures within himself, and the speech of God is nothing but the sounds he hears inwardly—akin to what a sleeper perceives in a dream.

Anyone who knows what God has revealed about His angels—Gabriel and others—at numerous points in the Qur’an realizes that what they allege conflicts with the message brought by the messengers even more starkly than the distorted claims of the unbelievers among Jews and Christians. God states that angels came to Abraham in human form as guests, then went on to Lot, and that Gabriel came to Mary, appearing to her as a perfectly fashioned man and blowing into her.

Gabriel would also visit the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—on several occasions in the form of Dihyah al-Kalbi, and once in the form of a Bedouin. In the two Ṣaḥīḥs it is related from ʿĀʾishah, may Allah be pleased with her, that al-Ḥārith ibn Hishām said, “O Messenger of Allah, how does revelation come to you?” He replied, “It comes to me at times …”