AFFIRMATION OF PROPHETHOOD

Affirmation of Prophethood ~ 265 ~ hardly repudiate him as a liar or a fraud, because this would have been totally at variance with the life he had led uptill then. His message was regarded rather as a form of poetic exaggeration, the result of mental disorder, or witchcraft, while some held that an evil spirit possessed him. His opponents gave voice to all these misgivings, but they did not dare cast aspersions on his personal honesty, truthfulness and integrity. How remarkable it is that a people, provoked to the extreme at his call, turned into his direct enemies, expelled him from his home town, yet continued to refer to him as being ‘honest’ and trustworthy’. In Ibn Hisham’s The Life of Muhammad,4 this is testified to: It happened that whenever in Makkah anyone had to keep anything safely, he would entrust it to the Prophet, as everyone was sure of his truthfulness and honesty” (Vol.II. p. 298). In the thirteenth year of his prophethood, at the very moment when his opponents had blockaded his house in order to assassinate him as he came out, the Prophet was instructing Ali, his cousin, to tarry in Makkah until he had returned all the things