Method

What the site affirms

Muhammad ﷺ is the messenger of God and the last of the prophets. This is the certainty on which the site is built. It does not put that certainty on trial: it tells who he was, from his birth to his death, through what those who knew him passed on, and it answers what is raised against him.

The Qur’an also affirms that he ﷺ is mentioned in the Torah and the Gospel, and that Jesus foretold him:

On this point too, the site shows what, in the texts still read today, confirms it. It does the same for what the Prophet ﷺ foretold.

What it relies on

• The Qur’an, cited from the Tanzil text, with a translation of the meaning made by the site.
• The hadiths, with the sunnah.com numbering, those of the authentic collections first. For a collection without the rigour of al-Bukhari and Muslim, the site gives the judgment of the hadith scholars.
• The classical biographies of the Prophet ﷺ: Ibn Hisham (the Sira of Ibn Ishaq), Ibn Sayyid al-Nas, Ibn Kathir and al-Salihi, cited by volume and page of their printed editions, together with the commentators (Ibn Hajar, al-Qurtubi, al-Nawawi) and the historians (Ibn Taghribirdi).
• The Bible, as it is read today: Louis Segond 1910 in French, the King James Version in English, the Van Dyck in Arabic. The site quotes the present text, the only one the reader can check.
• The modern authors who have studied the announcements: Sami Ameri, Munqidh al-Saqqar, Ali Ataie; for the life of the Prophet ﷺ, Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Nadwi. Their books are under copyright: the site summarises them and refers to their pages.

Nothing is written from memory: every fact points to its source, in parentheses, and every page ends with the list of its sources.

How each argument is weighed

Not all arguments have the same force, and the site says so.

• What is established, by the Qur’an, by an authentic hadith or by the agreement of the sources, is affirmed.
• Where the sources diverge, the matter is given with its versions and their authors.
• What rests on a weak report, or on a mere likeness of words, is presented as such, or left aside. A whole page explains the readings we do not use: a weak argument does not serve the truth; it leaves it exposed.
• What the Prophet ﷺ foretold and has not yet come to pass is presented as still to come: the believer awaits it.

For the biblical announcements, identifying a passage is an effort of interpretation: the site writes that the clues point to the Prophet ﷺ. Certainty comes from the Qur’an, and from the convergence of all the announcements, which meet in a single man (the convergence).

The date of the collections

The great hadith collections were committed to writing in the ninth century, at the end of chains of transmission that the hadith scholars examined. That date does not lessen the value of an authentic prophecy. And when a prophecy came true after the collection that carries it was written down, the text preceded the event: these are the strongest proofs, and the site points them out with both dates (the test of a true prophet).

Objections

Each objection is stated honestly, in its strongest terms, and then receives its answer, with sources. The Qur’an itself reports what its adversaries said, and answers it. The section Objections answered takes up the main ones.

Dates and translations

The early sources date events in years of the Hijra or by the age of the Prophet ﷺ. Their equivalents in our calendar are calculated, and approximate wherever the sources are. The translations of the meaning of the verses and of the early texts are made by the site; the Arabic and English versions are translated from the French and reviewed.

Sources for this page

• Qur’an: Tanzil text (Uthmani).
• Bible: Louis Segond 1910, King James, Van Dyck, from ebible.org.
• Hadiths: sunnah.com numbering.
• Early texts: printed editions, from the OpenITI corpus.