The Stone That Would Not Break, and the Conquests Foretold

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Along the exact line the Prophet ﷺ had demarcated for the trench, the diggers came upon a stone too large and too hard to break through with their tools. Some suggested simply digging around it, but others insisted on consulting the Prophet ﷺ first, since it was he who had personally marked out that line, Dr. Qadhi highlights this as a striking example of how meticulously the Companions followed his instructions even in a matter as small as the exact path of a trench.

The Prophet ﷺ asked for the axe, descended into the trench himself, and struck the stone while saying "Bismillāh, Allāhu Akbar." A third of the stone crumbled at the first blow, and he exclaimed, "Allāhu Akbar! I have been given the keys to Shām (قَدْ أُوتِيتُ مَفَاتِيحَ الشَّامِ), by Allah, I can see its red castles from where I stand right now." He struck a second time, and announced he had been given the keys to Fāris (Persia), seeing the white palace pillars of al-Madā'in, the Sassanid capital known to history as Ctesiphon. On the third strike, the stone shattered entirely, and he announced he had been given the keys to Yemen, seeing the gates of Ṣanʿā' from where he stood.

Each of these three predictions was fulfilled within the following two decades: Syria fell in the Khilāfah of Abū Bakr and the earliest days of ʿUmar's Khilāfah; the Sassanid Persian Empire collapsed after the battles of al-Qādisiyyah and beyond; and Yemen came fully under Muslim rule during the Khilāfah of the Rāshidūn. Dr. Qadhi frames the rapid conquest of two of the era's great empires by a materially weak and technologically outmatched Bedouin army, a phenomenon still without a satisfying purely historical explanation, as one of the clearest miraculous confirmations of the Prophet's ﷺ truthfulness, foretold openly at a moment when the Muslims controlled not even the land immediately outside Madinah.