definite fact by the unbelievers, they would have made the verse a pretext, denied it strenuously, and tried to attack and nullify Muhammad’s (UWBP) claim to prophethood. However, the biographies of the Prophet (UWBP) and histories mentioning the event relate nothing to suggest that the unbelievers denied it. The only thing that history relates is, as the verse “And [they] say, ‘This is evident magic’”(54:2) points out, the unbelievers who saw the event declared it to be magic, and said that if the caravans in other places had seen it, it was true, otherwise he had bewitched them. The caravans arriving the following morning from the Yemen and other places announced that they had seen such a happening. So the unbelievers said of the Pride of All the Worlds (UWBP) that, God forbid, the magic of Abu Talib’s orphan had affected the heavens.1
It is therefore unreasonable to foster baseless doubts about such certain, witnessed matters. It is enough that they are not impossible. And as for the Splitting of the Moon, it is quite as possible as a mountain’s splitting with a volcanic eruption.
Tirmidhi, Tafsir al-Qur’an, 54; Musnad, iii, 165; al-Tabari, Jami’ al-Bayan, xxvii, 84-5; al-Qurtubi, al-Jami’ li-Ahkam al-Qur’an, xvii, 126; al-Bayhaqi, Dala’il al-Nubuwwa, ii, 268.
al-Iji, Kitab al-Mawaqif, iii, 405-6; al-Amidi, Ghayat al-Maram, i, 365; Ibn Taymiya, al-Jawab al-Sahih, i, 414; ii, 44; al-Shahristani, al-Farq bayn al-Firaq, i, 313; al-Taftazani, Sharh al-Maqasid, v, 17.