Why did God stop talking to us?
On Eid, which ran this year from Sunday evening and ended Thursday evening, Muslims celebrated the story of Abraham. We celebrated the connection that we invoke every day in our prayers: “Oh God, bless Muhammad and Muhammad’s family, just as you blessed Abraham and Abraham’s family.”
The line of prophecy, in which Abraham played a starring role, ends with Muhammad. The last prophet, we are taught. A simple enough belief.
But if Muhammad is the last, why did God stop sending prophets? Is he mad?
Muslims believe God created Adam and Eve in the garden. But they only became caliphs, God’s representatives on Earth, after Satan tempted them. A bite from the tree, and all was broken. We had fallen, but we were taught how to repair the breach.
That’s what revelation is. Guidance. Inspiration. Direction. First given to Adam, and thereafter to thousands, only some of whose names were known.
The prophets include Noah, Abraham, Jesus and John the Baptist. After Muhammad, though, it’s over. After speaking to us repeatedly, selecting thousands of prophets, God cuts off communication.
That’s not to say we can’t talk to him. But he assigns no more emissaries delegated to speak to us on his authority.
I’ve long wondered: If nothing happens without a reason, and maybe nothing does, then what was the reason God ended prophecy — and with Muhammad? Maybe Muhammad is just the best of all creation, as I was taught to believe, and that’s that, and if he lived in the 7th century, then that’s why the line was sealed with his death.
Lately I’ve been asking myself about this, and much more frequently. I don’t know if God is far away from me, or I am far away from him, but I don’t hear him like I used to, nor does it seems he hears me like he used to.
Shouldn’t I at least find the distance decreased on a day such as Eid?
On Sunday, millions of pilgrims concluded the hajj, an annual pilgrimage that commemorates the journeys of Abraham and his son Ishmael through Mecca. Eid al-Adha, Monday, was our biggest holiday, three days of feasting to mark the end of the pilgrimage and to remember the world-changing moment when Abraham’s hand, about to slay his son, was stayed by God.
See, God had asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. And Abraham had agreed. His son, too. They were going to go through with it. They had faith enough to change the world. God said to Abraham, your descendants will be like the stars.
Today, some half the planet is their spiritual family. That would include me, too.
Sunday marked not just the end of this year’s hajj but the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. When I recently toured the 9/11 Museum and Memorial, it was almost too painful to pass through. It was hard to see so many names etched in stone, the thousands murdered; it was horrible, too, to see that no one had etched into stone the names of the thousands who have been killed since.
The Muslim world today seems trapped. If you think it’s frustrating as an American to be forced to follow GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s every thought, imagine what it’s like to be a Muslim watching two hegemonic regimes (that between them do not even contain 10 percent of the world’s Muslims) pretend to speak for all of Islam — in pursuit of which they have brought destruction and death to many countries. Hegemonic religion fused to authoritarian politics. The sentiment I feel is almost physical.
On my optimistic days, I believe that God stopped speaking to humanity because he wished to inaugurate an age in which we would be thrown back entirely on our own reason.
At more lowery times, I suspect prophets were repeatedly selected because every message fades, every idea rusts, every people declines. It is only with the selection of a new messenger that faith can be restored. What does it mean that no new messengers will be selected? That this time, there is down — but no up?
It’s not surprising most Muslims believe that near time’s end, a sacred figure called the Mahdi, the “rightly guided,” will rescue the world from darkness. He will be opposed by great evil but aided by the Messiah, Jesus. Islam’s end-times narrative is unique among its Abrahamic peers, so far as I can tell, for its intense self-flagellation: Great evil comes from within, practiced in the name of Islam, until the helplessness of the Muslim world to face its own demons compels God to intervene. We fail but we are rescued.
Abraham began his journey to God when he looked up at the sun, the stars and the moon, and found that none of these sufficed his search for meaning. I, too, find nothing in the world sufficient to explain it.
But today, we remember when God reached down into the world and changed the course of history through the kind of father and son who could. The cessation of revelation compels us to accept that we can debate among us what God meant, but we can no longer ever know for sure. We are blessed to be free to disagree, and cursed to never reach a conclusion. We look back today at Abraham with astonishment, and not a little envy.
Haroon Moghul is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy. He has previously written about Muhammad Ali, the Taj Mahal and why Muslim fans loved the Lakers.
