After Hunayn, before Ramadan, Dr. Yasir Qadhi steps out of the timeline for one evening. Not a battle today, not a delegation, but a question that sits under the whole story: what made people believe him ﷺ in the first place? The Arabic word for miracle, mu'jizah, comes from a root that means weakness, helplessness, the inability to do a thing. A miracle is exactly that: an act the rest of mankind is too weak to reproduce, given to a man who claims to be a prophet, so that the claim is proven true.
There are, by the count of the scholars who wrote whole books on this, more than a thousand of them documented in his life ﷺ. Tonight is ten categories and a handful of examples from each, and it ends on the one miracle you can still hold in your hands.
A miracle is not the only proof
Before a single wonder, the Sheikh clears away a misunderstanding that has tripped people up for centuries: that the only thing proving a prophet is a miracle. If that were true, then everyone who believed must have seen one. But did Abu Bakr radiyallahu anhu see a miracle before he believed? Did Umar? Did most of the early companions, or most of the converts sitting in any masjid today? No. A miracle is one proof among several. The character of a prophet, the truthfulness of his life, the weight and beauty of his message: these convince the sincere just as surely.
And here is the harder truth the Qur'an states plainly: miracles do not help the arrogant. They help two kinds of people only, those who already believe, whose faith deepens, and those who are open and genuine, who ask honestly, show me, and then submit when they are shown. To the arrogant, no sign is ever enough.
Hearts that will not be argued with
وَقَالُوا لَن نُّؤْمِنَ لَكَ حَتَّىٰ تَفْجُرَ لَنَا مِنَ الْأَرْضِ يَنبُوعًا
“And they say, "We will not believe you until you break open for us from the ground a spring”
Surah al-Isra 17:90 Read 17:90 with tafsir
وَلَوْ فَتَحْنَا عَلَيْهِم بَابًا مِّنَ السَّمَاءِ فَظَلُّوا فِيهِ يَعْرُجُونَ
“And [even] if We opened to them a gate from the heaven and they continued therein to ascend,”
Surah al-Hijr 15:14 Read 15:14 with tafsir
لَقَالُوا إِنَّمَا سُكِّرَتْ أَبْصَارُنَا بَلْ نَحْنُ قَوْمٌ مَّسْحُورُونَ
“They would say, "Our eyes have only been dazzled. Rather, we are a people affected by magic."”
Surah al-Hijr 15:15 Read 15:15 with tafsir
Listen to what the Quraysh demanded. Make a spring gush from the ground. Grow us a garden of palms and grapes with rivers running through it. Drop the sky on us in pieces. Bring Allah and the angels to stand in front of us. Build yourself a house of gold, or climb a ladder into the sky, and even then, they said, we will not believe in your climb until you bring us a book down from heaven that we can hold and read. To all of it Allah told His Prophet ﷺ to answer with one line: glory be to my Lord, was I ever anything but a human messenger?
And Allah lays the arrogance bare. Even if a gate of heaven were opened and they spent the day climbing through it, they would say their eyes had been drugged, that they had been bewitched. The Sheikh says he has heard the modern version of this with his own ears, in every debate with someone determined not to believe: show me God himself, and then I will accept. The Qur'an answered that demand fourteen centuries ago.
Nothing in front of a closed heart
وَلَوْ أَنَّنَا نَزَّلْنَا إِلَيْهِمُ الْمَلَائِكَةَ وَكَلَّمَهُمُ الْمَوْتَىٰ وَحَشَرْنَا عَلَيْهِمْ كُلَّ شَيْءٍ قُبُلًا مَّا كَانُوا لِيُؤْمِنُوا إِلَّا أَن يَشَاءَ اللَّهُ وَلَٰكِنَّ أَكْثَرَهُمْ يَجْهَلُونَ
“And even if We had sent down to them the angels [with the message] and the dead spoke to them [of it] and We gathered together every [created] thing in front of them, they would not believe unless Allāh should will. But most of them, [of that], are ignorant.”
Surah al-An'am 6:111 Read 6:111 with tafsir
وَقَالَ الَّذِينَ لَا يَرْجُونَ لِقَاءَنَا لَوْلَا أُنزِلَ عَلَيْنَا الْمَلَائِكَةُ أَوْ نَرَىٰ رَبَّنَا ۗ لَقَدِ اسْتَكْبَرُوا فِي أَنفُسِهِمْ وَعَتَوْا عُتُوًّا كَبِيرًا
“And those who do not expect the meeting with Us say, "Why were not angels sent down to us, or [why] do we [not] see our Lord?" They have certainly become arrogant within themselves and [become] insolent with great insolence.”
Surah al-Furqan 25:21 Read 25:21 with tafsir
Why begin a lecture on miracles by warning that they do not always work? Because by the end of the night, the Sheikh says, you will be tempted to ask: how could anyone hear all this and still deny? And the Qur'an has already told you how. Send down the angels, let the dead speak, gather every created thing before their eyes, and they would still not believe, not because the proof was thin, but because the heart had decided.
So a question people often ask answers itself: why were the Quraysh not shown more miracles? Because more would not have helped, and because it would have sealed their doom. Allah does not deal in games. When the Quraysh asked the Prophet ﷺ to turn the mountain to gold and swore they would believe, he was offered exactly that, on one condition: if the sign came and they still refused, there would be no more reprieve. He ﷺ chose to leave them their time instead. That mercy is why most of the miracles you are about to meet happened in front of believers, and only a few in front of those who came to mock.
When the things of the earth answered him
The first category is the miracles worked through lifeless things: stones, pebbles, food, wood. He ﷺ said he still recognized a stone in Makkah that used to greet him with peace before he was even given prophethood. The companions sitting around him heard the food in his blessed hand say subhanallah as he raised it to his mouth. Once, in a gathering with Abu Bakr and Umar and Ali, he took a handful of gravel, and the pebbles praised Allah aloud in his palm. He passed them to Abu Bakr, and they kept praising. To Umar, and they kept praising. When he set them down and the companions picked them up, there was only silence.
It is as if everything is already glorifying its Maker, all the time, and we simply cannot hear it. There is nothing that does not praise Him. When the Prophet ﷺ touched those stones, the veil between the people and the rocks lifted for a moment, and they heard what creation never stops saying. Then he left, and the veil came down again.
The trunk that wept for him
And here the Sheikh slows down, because this one he sets in its own place for its sheer enormity. In the early days of Madinah the Prophet ﷺ used to give the khutbah leaning against the trunk of a palm tree, off to one side of the masjid where the tree happened to stand. A few years on, when some wealth had come, the companions offered to build him a proper pulpit, three steps, carved by a skilled carpenter, and they set it in the middle of the masjid. The first Friday he climbed it, more than a thousand people were packed inside.
And the masjid heard a sound like a camel sobbing. Not a creak: the crying of a baby camel, loud, breaking. It was the trunk. The Prophet ﷺ came down from his new pulpit, went to the abandoned trunk, and embraced it, holding it and patting it the way you would calm a weeping child, until it went quiet. He said that had he not held it, it would have kept crying until the Day of Judgment. This is among the most certain reports in the whole seerah, narrated by so many companions at once that doubt has no foothold. The Sheikh tells us that one of the early scholars could never recite this hadith without weeping, and he would say: a tree cried because it missed the Prophet ﷺ and the knowledge he spread from it. So what excuse do our hearts have, that never sat in front of him at all?
Water from his fingers, food that would not run out
The largest category, by sheer number, is food and water. Again and again a little fed a multitude and a little quenched an army. At Hudaybiyyah the water ran out, and the Prophet ﷺ put his hand into what little was left, and from between his fingers the water came flowing like a spring, like an open tap, until more than three hundred people had made wudu from it. Dr. Yasir Qadhi pauses on a scholar's observation here: this was a greater wonder than Musa striking water from the rock. Water does, on rare occasions, seep from stone. But water has never once gushed from flesh and bone.
And the one the whole city of Madinah witnessed: the day of the Trench. The men were starving, digging, the enemy massed around them. Jabir radiyallahu anhu had heard the hunger in the Prophet's ﷺ own voice and went home to whatever his family had, one small goat and a little flour, enough for a handful of people. He whispered a quiet invitation. The Prophet ﷺ stood and announced it to the entire trench: Jabir has made a feast for you all, come. A thousand and four hundred starving men. Jabir ran home in a panic, but the Prophet ﷺ came, spat baraka into the dough, blessed the pot, and told them not to lift the bread from the oven until he came. Then the army ate, batch after batch after batch, every man filled, and when the last of them left there was more food than when they had begun.
The moon, split in two
اقْتَرَبَتِ السَّاعَةُ وَانشَقَّ الْقَمَرُ
“The Hour has come near, and the moon has split [in two].”
Surah al-Qamar 54:1 Read 54:1 with tafsir
وَإِن يَرَوْا آيَةً يُعْرِضُوا وَيَقُولُوا سِحْرٌ مُّسْتَمِرٌّ
“And if they see a sign [i.e., miracle], they turn away and say, "Passing magic."”
Surah al-Qamar 54:2 Read 54:2 with tafsir
There is a tenth category for everything that fits nowhere else, and in it sits one of the greatest signs ever given to any prophet. In the early Makkan years the Quraysh challenged him, one of the very few times a miracle came at their dare: if I split the moon in two, will you believe? They said yes. And the moon split, one half on one side of the mountain and one half on the other, in full view, and the Qur'an itself records it without flinching: the Hour has drawn near, and the moon has split.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi carries a scholar's verdict on why this sign stands so high: every other miracle of every other prophet happened here, on the earth we know. This one happened in the heavens, beyond our reach, in a place no human hand could touch. That is what made it greater. And still the next verse tells you exactly what the arrogant did with it: they saw the sign, turned away, and called it passing magic. Just as Allah had said they would.
The miracle still in your hands
And the Sheikh saves the greatest for last, the one that eclipses all the rest and is, by itself, worth more than every other miracle combined. Think of what they have in common: the water from his fingers, the weeping trunk, the food of the Trench, the moon in halves. Every one of them was witnessed by other people, in another time. We believe in them, but we did not see them. We were not on that shore.
There is one exception, and only one. When a person asks how he can know this religion is true, there is a miracle you can physically place in his hands and say: here, read this, listen to it, sit with it. The Prophet ﷺ said that every prophet was given signs by which his people believed, and that what he was given was the revelation, the Qur'an, and that because of it he hoped to have the most followers on the Day of Judgment. It carries no time limit and no border. It is the living miracle, renewed every time a child opens his mouth to recite it. After a whole evening of wonders, the Sheikh leaves you with the one that never ended: indeed, a Muslim needs no miracle beyond the Qur'an, and beyond the life of the Prophet ﷺ itself.