Guidance

Now we know that for all of humankind's time here on the earth

Allah has sent guidance for them

through people chosen to be God's Messengers,

so that people in every time and place

will have help in knowing the truth

of the creation that they live in,

and in knowing the best way to live their lives,

the best way for themselves and other people.

And during the times that those Messengers lived,

there were always people writing down the Messages that they told,

passing on the Words of God to their peoples.

And those words passed on by the Messengers

are known as their Books,

and a few of them even have names that are mentioned in the Qur'an,

such as Zubur, the Psalms of Daud,

and Injil, the Message of Isa.

But these and other Messengers that we know of for certain

are all from the family of people that trace back to Ibrahim,

centred on that part of the world that in Scotland we know of as the Middle East.

As for Messengers from other parts of the world,

we can only judge them by the content of their Messages.

And of course, the Messengers that we do know

may have been sure of the words they were saying,

but those who heard them

and those who wrote those words down

were only human,

and what was passed on,

even with the best of intentions,

was not always reliable.

People could be distracted by miracles

and confuse their Messenger

with the One Who was sending the Message,

or mistake the words of their Messenger

with the words of God's Message.

Until the time of Muhammad the Messenger,

when things were done quite differently.

Because Muhammad always made it very clear

when he was speaking the Words of God

as opposed to words of his own.

And those words were constantly repeated

by the whole of the muslim community,

five times each day in the Sala prayers,

preserving them.

And then after the death of Muhammad,

those words were gathered together

by those who knew him best,

and placed in the order he had told them,

and written down

to be fixed for all the times to come.

And so it is that Muhammad the Messenger

is known as the Seal of the Prophets,

the last of a chain of Messengers,

whose Message is both complete and perfect,

the same words recited by muslims today,

and preserved not just on paper,

but on the tongues of muslims all around the world

as they make their prayers.