The Splitting of the Moon and the Eternal Miracle of the Qurʾān

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The tenth category is the miscellaneous, what does not fit the previous nine, and it holds some of the greatest of all.

❧The splitting of the moon

In the early Meccan period, one of the few miracles the Quraysh themselves demanded and received. He ﷺ asked, "If I split the moon in two, will you believe?" They said yes, and, as the Qurʾān states plainly, the moon was split, the mountain of Ṣafā standing between its two halves. Ibn Kathīr notes it is narrated through many chains, and that even without them the Qurʾān is explicit: اقْتَرَبَتِ السَّاعَةُ وَانشَقَّ الْقَمَرُ (54:1). Al-Khaṭṭābī (d. c. 330 AH) called it among the greatest miracles ever granted a prophet, for it occurred in the celestial heavens, beyond the earth and inaccessible to mortals, greater therefore than miracles worked upon the earth.

❧Al-Miʿrāj, a personal miracle

Whereas the Isrāʾ he could in part prove by describing Jerusalem, the Miʿrāj, the ascent, was a personal gift, to console him ﷺ after the losses of Khadījah, Abū Ṭālib, and Ṭāʾif: the lowest of the low answered by the highest of the high.

❧The miracle of miracles

And the greatest and final, the one still with us, is the Qurʾān. It eclipses every other miracle and is worth more than all of them combined, infinitely so. For all the rest, even the splitting of the moon, happened before other peoples: we believe, but we did not witness them. The Qurʾān alone remains, the eternal, ever-living miracle, bound by no time and no place, the one you can literally hand to a doubter and say, "Here, read this book, hear its recitation." As the Prophet ﷺ himself said (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī): every prophet was given signs by which his people believed, "and the only thing I was given is a revelation (waḥy) that Allāh sent down to me, and I hope to have the most followers of them all on the Day of Judgment." He had been given thousands of miracles, yet this one is so bright it makes the others seem to vanish before it. And in the end we as Muslims need no miracle beyond the life of the Prophet ﷺ himself: his Sīrah is miracle enough.

❧From the questions afterward

The Gospel of Thomas is a Christian scripture of a lost sect, distinct from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which belong to a Jewish community around the time of Jesus. As for the splitting of the moon, there is, as far as the shaykh's research found, no record of it in other nations' sources; it is attested only in ours. And the true Masīḥ (from مَسَحَ, to anoint) is one whom Allāh anointed and appointed: ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, who sealed the line of the Israelite prophets, as Muḥammad ﷺ sealed all the prophets; the false messiah is the Dajjāl. Finally, the purely personal miracles, the Miʿrāj, the cleansing of the heart, were not to prove his prophethood, which he already knew, but to increase his certainty (yaqīn): وَيَزْدَادَ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِيمَانًا. So too these miracles, for us who already believe, do not prove he is a prophet, they only deepen our yaqīn that he is.