Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper is devised in the form of a reflection about the epistemic value that Islamic theology places in miracles and how to reformulate and restate belief in them today, while we inhabit postmodern societies characterized by relativism, disenchantment, and atheism.I would like to start with a personal anecdote.I am regularly being asked by non-believers about what it means to believe in God, believe in revelation, and believe in stories related in the Scripture and in the life of the prophets.On one such occasion, a person very close to me had started reading a book on the life of Prophet Muḥammad, but she stopped shortly after the story of the year the prophet was born, remembered in Islamic sources as the Year of the Elephant.The name is derived from an event where Abraha, the Christian King of Himyar (contemporary Yemen) marched upon Mecca, with a large army and accompanied by war elephants with the intention to demolish it.However, the elephants refused to enter the precinct of the Ka'aba and the Qur'ān related in sūra al-Fīl reports how birds sent by God destroyed the entire army by throwing pebbles on them.Thus, Mecca was preserved as the House of God, against newly erected and rival houses, such as that built by Abraha in Sana'a.At this point, the person would turn to me and say, how can one believe in this?Implied here is the broader question of how can one believe in the reality and veracity of revealed scriptures and prophecy?They are just based on tell-tales.Of course, at this stage, the first instinctual reaction is to come up with rational explanations for what is now marked as ›irrational‹ and ›doubtful‹.For this specific miraculous episode, one finds elements of explanation, derived from archaeological finds, 1 philological analyses, and allegorical interpretations, 2 which remove the episode from its theophanic 1 See William Montgomery Watt, Muhammad.Prophet and Statesman, Oxford 1961, 7. 2 See in particular the tafsīr of Muhammad Asad for sūra al-Fīl in his book The Message of the Qur'an.He translates abābīl not as »birds« but as »great swarms of flying creatures« (Q 105:3) and sijjīl not as »stones« but as »chastisement pre-ordained« (Q 105:4).So that the two āyas »He sent ranks of birds against them« (Q 105:3) »pelting them
Source: Hermeneutische Blätter
Author: Claire Gallien
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4416397211
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