veracity of his words and the truthfulness of his warnings.” Thus he began investigating, and of the numerous conclusive proofs that he found we will briefly indicate here only nine of the most general ones.
THE FIRST: All excellent qualities and characteristics were to be found in that extraordinary being, according to the testimony even of his enemies. Hundreds of miracles were made manifest at his hands, according to explicit Qur’anic verses or traditions enjoying the status of tawatur.1 Examples of these miracles are his splitting of the moon, And the moon split,2 with a single indication of his finger; his casting of a handful of dust into the eyes of his enemies, causing them to flee, It was not your act when you threw, but God’s,3 and his giving his thirsting army to drink from the water that flowed forth from his five fingers like the Spring of Kawthar. Since some of those miracles, numbering more than three hundred, have been set forth with decisive proofs in the remarkable and wondrous work known as The Miracles of Muhammad (The Nineteenth Letter), we leave discussion of the miracles to that work, and permit the traveller to continue speaking:
“A being who in addition to noble characteristics and perfections has all these luminous miracles to demonstrate, must certainly be the most truthful in speech of all men. It is inconceivable that he would stoop to trickery, lies and error, the deeds of the vile.”
THE SECOND: He holds in his hand a decree from the lord of the universe, a decree accepted and affirmed in each century by more than three hundred million people. This decree, the Qur’an of Mighty Stature, is wondrous in seven different ways. The fact that the Qur’an has forty different aspects of miraculousness and that it is the word of the Creator of all beings has been set forth in detail with strong proofs in the Twenty-Fifth Word, The Miraculousness of the Qur’an, a celebrated treatise that is like the sun of the Risale-i Nur. We therefore leave such matters to that work and listen to the traveller as he says,“There can never be any possibility of lying on the part of the being who is the conveyor and proclaimer of this decree, for that would be a violation of the decree and treachery toward the One Who issued it.”
THE THIRD: Such a Sacred Law, an Islam, a code of worship, a cause, a summons, and a faith did that being bring forth that the like of them does not exist, nor could it exist. Nor does a more perfect form of them
Tawatur is the kind of report transmitted by numerous authorities, about which there is no room for doubt. [Tr.]
Qur’an, 54:1.
Qur’an, 8:17.