Five Gifts, and Provision in the Desert

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧The pool at Tabūk

Returning to the camp after the break: the Prophet ﷺ stayed twenty days, shortening the prayers throughout. How many men were there? We genuinely do not know, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand are all reported, and there was no register. Of them, one or two reached the small pool of Tabūk and used its water before he arrived, though he had said not to touch it; he was angry and rebuked them, for though the disobedience was accidental it was disobedience still. Then he took water into his mouth, rinsed and returned it to the pool, and the water rose to the brim until the whole army drank and watered its animals. It is said, the shaykh has not verified it himself, that the site is still known outside the city, with a well and a mosque called Masjid al-Tawbah built there.

❧Five things given to no one before

One day after the prayer he ﷺ stood and said that Allāh had given him five things given to no prophet before him.

First: بُعِثْتُ إِلَى النَّاسِ كَافَّةً, "I have been sent to all mankind," while those before were sent only to their own peoples.

Second: نُصِرْتُ بِالرُّعْبِ مَسِيرَةَ شَهْرٍ, "I have been aided by awe cast a month's journey ahead of me." Tabūk itself is the illustration: it lay a month from Medina, and Ghassān and the Romans were so unnerved that they never appeared.

Third: ghanīmah was made lawful for him, and was not lawful for anyone before. As mentioned at Badr, the earlier nations' accepted spoils were consumed before their eyes by a fire from heaven, the sign that the deed had been accepted; this ummah is the first permitted to keep it.

Fourth: جُعِلَتْ لِيَ الْأَرْضُ طَهُورًا وَمَسْجِدًا, "the earth has been made for me a means of purification and a place of prayer." Whoever of his ummah is overtaken by the prayer may purify and pray wherever he stands, whereas earlier communities could worship only in their houses of worship, as the Jews, at least the more orthodox, still hold to the synagogue and to far stricter requirements for purifying water (running, natural, and so on). For us, any water; and where there is no water, tayammum.

Fifth, and he asked it of himself, "what is the fifth?", Allāh told him سَلْ, "ask," and he saved his request لَكُمْ إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ, for his ummah until the Day of Judgment: al-Shafāʿah al-ʿUẓmā, the Great Intercession, for whoever of his followers says Lā ilāha illā Allāh, that they will in the end enter Paradise.

❧Provision, light, and a promise of empires

At the closest point of his life to the Roman frontier, he also announced that the treasures, the kunūz, of Rome and Persia would pass to the Muslims, and that is exactly what came to be.

The Tabūk reports return again and again to scarcity: fifteen or twenty thousand men could not carry provisions enough. On several occasions he ﷺ supplicated and the little that they had sufficed them, takthīr al-ṭaʿām, the multiplying of food and water, is a standard miracle of the Sīrah, occurring a dozen or two dozen times, and four or five times in Tabūk alone. On one occasion, as at al-Ḥudaybiyyah, he put his hand into a small quantity of water and it flowed from between his fingers as from a fountain until the Companions drank.

Ibn Saʿd records in his Ṭabaqāt that on one of the Tabūk nights some Companions lost their way in the dark. One of them said that his five fingers began to glow, and he used them as a torch to find the camp. This the shaykh calls a karāmah: prophets are given muʿjizāt, and the righteous who are not prophets are given karāmāt, a one-off supernatural gift that still points back to the truth of the Prophet ﷺ.