2.38. SILENCE AND REFLECTION (to be continued)

God says

And nothing has prevented Us from sending [this message, like the earlier ones,] with miraculous signs [in its wake] save [Our knowledge] that the people of olden times [only too often] gave the lie to them:* thus We provided for [the tribe of] Thamud the she camel as a light-giving portent, and they signed against it.** And never did We send those signs for any other purpose than to convey a warning -- Q.17:59
*This highly elliptic sentence has a fundamental bearing on the purport of the Quran as a whole. In many places the Quran stresses the fact that the Prophet Muhammad, despite of being the last and greatest of God’s apostles, was not empowered to perform miracles, similar to those the earlier prophets are said to have reinforced their verbal messages. His only miracle was and is the Quran itself – a message perfect in its lucidity and ethical comprehensiveness, destined for all times and all stages of human development, addressed not only to the feelings but also to the minds of men, open to everyone, whatever his race or social environment, and bound to remain unchanged forever. Since the earlier prophets invariably appealed their own community and their own time alone, their teachings were of necessity, were circumscribed by the social and intellectual conditions of that particular community and time; and since the people to whom they addressed themselves had not yet reached the stage of independent thinking, those prophets stood in need of symbolic portents or miracles in order to make the people concerned realize the inner truth of their mission. The message of the Quran, on the other hand, was revealed at a time when mankind (and in particular, that part of it which inhabited the region marked by the earlier, Judaeo-Cristian religious development) had reached a degree of maturity which henceforth enabled it to grasp an ideology as such without the aid those persuasive portents and miraculous demonstrations which in the past, as the above verse points out, only too often gave rise to new, grave misconceptions.

Prophet said

“It is part of the excellence of a person’s Islam that he should discard what is of no benefit to him either in this world or the hereafter” – H: Tirmizi. N: Abu Hurairah.