A Muslim Convert Once Before

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ The following is my answer to a Quora question: “ If Adam ( a.s. ) is the first and only man on Earth, how can he be a prophet?   Who was he a prophet to?   Why do Muslims call him a prophet? ”   If we consider that Adam ( a.s. ) was the first man on Earth, that does not mean he was the only man on Earth throughout his time in this world.   He had a wife in Eve, and there were sons, and daughters.   This multitude alone constituted his people, his ummah .   In Islam, a prophet is the recipient of Revelation, wahy , from Allah (s.w.t.), who then passes this knowledge to the people.   He is their spiritual guide, and intercessor before Allah ( s.w.t. ).   Adam ( a.s. ) is that to his people, and the start of that prophethood in Earth that passed through Noah ( a.s. ), Abraham ( a.s. ), Moses ( a.s. ), Jesus ( a.s. ), and culminated in Muhammad ( s.a.w. ). Thus, while we believe that there were 124,000 pr...

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ The one moment Adam ( a.s. ) thought he loved Eve more than God, he took a bite from the fruit.  Adam ( a.s. ) took one; Eve took two.  It was that one moment caused his separation from the Beloved, the loss of heavenly privileges and separation from Eve.  But Eve had half the beauty of all women.  And for lesser beauty, men have given up this world and the next.

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ Shaykh Muhyi ad-Din Abu ‘Abdullah Muhammad ‘Ali ibn al-‘Arabi ( q.s. ) wrote, “When God Taught Adam ( a.s. ) the Names, he was in the station second to the station of Prophet Muhammad ( s.a.w. ), since Prophet Muhammad ( s.a.w. ) had already come to know the all-comprehensive words.”  He continued, “Prophet Muhammad ( s.a.w. ) was the greatest locus of Divine Self-Disclosure, and thereby came to know ‘the knowledge of the ancients and later folk’.  Among those of old was Adam ( a.s. ), who had knowledge of the Names.  Prophet Muhammad ( s.a.w. ) was Given the All-Comprehensive Names and the Words of God are never exhausted.   The Messenger of God ( s.a.w. ) said, ‘I will be the master of mankind on the Day of Resurrection.’  The reason for this is his perfection.  He said, ‘Were Moses alive, he would find it impossible not to follow me’, because of the all-inclusiveness of the Prophet’s ( s.a.w. ) message and the all...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, said that to get the full value of joy, one needs someone to share it with, and confessed he had been wrong about Eve — it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.  Twain wrote that as a joke about marriage.  He stumbled, by accident, onto something closer to Islamic theology than most sermons manage.  The Apple That Never Existed, and the Woman Who Never Took the Blame Let us deal with the apple first, because it is not in the Qur’an.  Nowhere does the text name the fruit.  More importantly, nowhere does the Qur’an make Hawa’ the sole author of the fall.  Surah al-A’raf is explicit: Shaythan whispered to both of them, and both of them ate.  Compare that to the Genesis account, where Eve is handed the fruit, hands it to Adam, and the entire weight of original sin gets pinned on her descendants for the rest of recorded history.  Two different scriptures, two ver...