Syriac Polemics Against Islam: Muhammad Had No Miracles Aside from Quran

October 31, 2025 adminsr

Around the year 781 CE, Patriarch Timothy (727–823 CE) recorded what is now known as the Apologya transcript of his theological debate with the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi (r. 775–785 CE). This text captures a moment in the history of the Christian–Muslim encounter that should unsettle every modern defender of the miracle legends later invented about the Prophet of Islam, which are readily found in the Hadith corpus. Timothy did not confront Islam from the margins; he sat face-to-face in Baghdad with the ruler of the Muslim world, speaking not as a pamphleteer or polemicist, but as one of the most learned bishops of the East addressing one of the most powerful sovereigns of his time.

And what was one of Timothy’s central arguments? That Muḥammad could not be a prophet, for he performed no miracles. This was not a cheap provocation, nor did the Caliph respond with the avalanche of miracle claims. Instead, al-Mahdi offered no such rebuttal, because in Timothy’s day, those legends had not yet crystallized. The silence of the Caliph speaks more loudly than the volumes of miracle-stories that would only arise generations later.

This was not the naive claim of an outsider ignorant of Islamic beliefs. Timothy knew the Quran, knew the early Muslim arguments, and knew the intellectual climate of his day. He explicitly cited the Muslim admission, rooted in Quran 6:109, that Muḥammad performed no miracles—that his only “miracle” was the Qur’an’s supposed inimitability. And here lies the devastating historical truth: the Caliph did not dispute this point.

[6:109] They swore by GOD, solemnly, that if a miracle came to them, they would surely believe. Say, “Miracles come only from GOD.” For all you know, if a miracle did come to them, they would continue to disbelieve.

And they swore by God their best oaths that if a sign came to them, they would believe in it. Say, “The signs are only with Allah,” and “what makes you feel that when they come they will not believe.”

The ruler of the Muslim world, surrounded by scholars and power, did not respond with tales of splitting the moon, water flowing from fingers, trees walking, or any of the fantastical narratives now chanted as if they were unquestionable. Al-Mahdi did not bring forward a single story from the Sīra or Hadith to rescue Muḥammad’s prophetic status. Why? Because in Timothy’s time, those miracle-legends had not yet been formulated. They were still being woven, still incubating in the imaginations of later storytellers, scholars, and court preachers. The Caliph, the most authoritative Muslim voice present, accepted the charge without objection.

It reveals that the earliest and most informed Muslims—those closest to the rise of Islam, those living before the Hadith corpus metastasized into its later bloated form—did not defend Muhammad with miracle claims. They did not need fabricated wonders; they had political power, theological confidence, and the belief in the Quran’s rhetorical force. The invention of numerous miracles came later, when religious imagination outpaced historical memory, and apologetic insecurity necessitated fabricated narratives that the earliest Muslims never relied on.

This exchange is not merely an ancient curiosity; it is an archaeological core sample of Islamic belief before myth hardened into dogma. It exposes the scaffolding behind later miracle narratives and exposes modern miracle apologists as defenders of a retroactive mythology, not the Islam of the earliest generations.

You can trace the development of miracle attributions across Islamic literature like tree rings marking time. As stated in the Quran, the Prophet’s only miracle was the Quran. However, the further from him in time, the more extravagant the legends become. Timothy’s debate captures Islam in that formative moment—before centuries of embellishment, before storytellers painted halos over their hero, before the Hadith machine industrialized sanctity.

If Muḥammad truly split the moon, commanded trees to uproot themselves, poured water from his fingers, could talk with the rocks and mountains, and knew of every major event that was to take place in the future, the Caliph would not have sat quietly. He would have thundered miracle for miracle. He did not—because those tales did not yet exist.

Let those who invoke miracle traditions today reckon with this truth: The Muslims closest to Muhammad did not need mythology to defend him. Later Muslims did. Thus, they fabricated these stories to disarm this Christian argument against the prophet.

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But unlike the Syriac translator of the Chronicle ad 724Timothy did not unquestionably adopt Muslim views of Muḥammad, and he remained uncompromising on one crucial issue. However much Muḥammad may have “walked on the path of the prophets,” Timothy was darn sure that Muḥammad was not himself a prophet. Throughout his dialogue, Timothy returned to this topic, presenting arguments centered around two main points: Muḥammad could not be a prophet because (1) he never performed any miracles, and (2) scripture never foretold his coming. By Timothy’s day, Muslim scholars had already extensively debated the question of Muḥammad’s performance of miracles. In their exegesis of Qur’an 6:109, which instructed Muḥammad not to perform any signs because these came only from God, Muslim scholars quickly developed a tradition that Muḥammad’s only miracle was the icjāz al-Qur’ān (inimitability of the Qur’an). Nevertheless, the emerging cheese (biographical) tradition began to attribute other miracles to Muḥammad as well. In Timothy’s Apology, however, the caliph used neither of these traditions to refute Timothy’s claim regarding Muḥammad’s lack of miracles. Timothy and the caliph did, however, actively contest whether the Bible ever referred to Muḥammad. Central to their debate was the Muslim doctrine of taḥrīf (tampering). In several places the Qur’an speaks of the “people of the book” tampering with Scripture. Although the Qur’an remained ambiguous about what this tampering actually consisted of, later Muslim theologians more explicitly charged Jews and Christians with directly changing sacred texts. They often argued that as part of this process of scriptural corruption, Jews and Christians removed biblical prophecies that originally referred to Muḥammad. In Timothy’s Apologyal-Mahdi explicitly told Timothy, “There were many testimonies [about Muḥammad] but the scriptures were corrupted by you and you removed them.” In response, Timothy listed several objections to charges of taḥrīf ranging from outright denials (e.g., no Christian would dare) to rather innovative reasoning (e.g., Christians’ and Jews’ hatred for each other would prevent them from making the same changes to the biblical text). As with the issue of Muḥammad and miracles, al-Mahdi remained surprisingly silent and simply accepted Timothy’s defense of the Bible’s integrity.