The Bewitchment of the Prophet
Browse all parts & issues
Sahih al-Bukhari 5763 (cf. 3268) reports that a Jewish sorcerer, Labid ibn al-A‘sam, bewitched Muhammad “so that he used to think that he had done a thing which he had not done” — a condition lasting, in some reports, months. Yet the Quran indignantly denies the pagans’ charge “you follow only a bewitched man” (Quran 25:8; 17:47) as the slander of wrongdoers. Islam’s most authentic hadithhadithA report of Muhammad's words, actions, or tacit approvals. The hadith corpus is the second source of Islamic law after the Quran.Full glossary → collection thus affirms the very condition the Quran treats as a disqualifying accusation — and a prophet who cannot distinguish what he did from what he did not do has, on Islam’s own terms, a compromised channel of testimony.
Common Muslim Responses
Scholars respond that the magic affected only mundane domestic matters (famously, whether he had approached his wives), never the reception or delivery of revelation, which Allah guaranteed (5:67: “Allah will protect you from the people”); the episode ends with revelation (the mu‘awwidhatayn) exposing and breaking the spell, vindicating prophecy. The pagans’ “bewitched man” taunt meant “a madman whose whole message is delusion,” which is different from a temporary domestic affliction.
Counter-Rebuttal
The critic notes that the domestic/prophetic firewall is asserted, not evidenced — the report itself says he thought he had done things he had not, a global statement about his reality-testing; no narrator audited which utterances during those months were affected. A tradition that affirms its prophet spent a period unable to track his own actions, while resting its entire epistemology on that man’s reports of invisible encounters, has an internal credibility problem that the firewall hypothesis papers over. Notably, some Muslim modernists (and the Mu‘tazila historically) rejected the bewitchment reports precisely because they saw the contradiction — but the reports sit in Bukhari, the collection the tradition calls the most authentic book after the Quran.