I would simply like to point out the absurdity of the progress of this topic.
The original question was “Why do Muslims Accept Muhammad as prophet?”
Hamba’s original response to this concerned prayer posture.
Then, for about three pages, Hamba discusses prayer posture, not as a means of accepting Muhammad as a prophet, but as the proper way to pray, pure and simple, in that it brings one closer to God. Then, later, he revisits the original argument for a brief period before abandoning the whole thing and saying the Qu’ran is the reason Muslims accept Muhammad as prophet.
So…following the entirety of Hamba’s argument…and I’m going to apply logic to what he has said.
Muslims accept Mohammad because they pray correctly.
The proof for this is that proper prayer position leads one closer to God as described in the Qu’ran.
Closeness to God can logically be cited as a means of being able to discern who is a prophet and who isn’t.
Because Muslim’s pray correctly and are close to God, they accept Mohammad as their prophet.
Problem: proper prayer method was described by Mohammad. Being the source of this information, Mohammad is responsible for all Muslims being close to God. Vis-a-vis, we can deductively reason that Mohammad must be divine for him to have pre-existing knowledge of the closeness of God prior to it being written down.
THEREFORE, if we accept the problem at face value and dismiss it as a problem but rather accept it as a “mystery,” we add the qualifier that Mohammad had a pre-existing divine nature that allowed him the closeness to God that otherwise requires proper prayer posture and we can properly reason that
Mohammad is God.
Final problem? Mohammad says he is not God, that God is one, and any partnership with God is sin. Accepting Mohammad as God via Hamba’s logic requires one to have a belief in the divinity of a supposedly not-divine man, violating the entire Qu’ran. Belief in Mohammad, therefore, is a violation of the very text Hamba claims to be the miracle of Mohammad and the final proof-positive of his prophethood. Therefore, the fundamental statement of Islam: “There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger” contains within it the very contradiction that violates the entire religion.
Vis-a-vis, Mohammad is NOT the messenger of God, Islam is NOT in any way a vessel of any iota of truth, and Allah is NOT God.
There is no God but God, and Jesus Christ is His Son.
I like that one better anyway.
