How great was this vision of the Prophet can be judged by an incident in the early period of his prophethood in Makkah. It should first be explained that the Makkans regarded him as being so insignificant that instead of calling him Muhammad, son of Abdullah, they ridiculed him by calling him Muhammad the son of Abu Kabsha.’ (Abu Kabsha was a shepherd in Makkah, whose wife had been Muhammad’s ﷺ wet nurse.) In these apparently ordinary and unpropitious circumstances, his vision was nevertheless on so high a plane that, when in the early years of his prophethood, the Makkan leaders gathered at the house of Abu Talib, the Prophet’s uncle, to ask the Prophet what it was that he aspired to, he replied with complete determination: I want only one word from you, if you are willing to give that, you will come to possess the whole of Arabia and all the other parts of the world will surrender before you. (Musnad Ahmad, Hadith No. 3419).

The day the Prophet made this pronouncement, he was all alone in the world, without a single soul to support him. To those who lacked insight he had no future, yet he could visualize something which appeared inconceivable to others. Today we all know that these words uttered by him became a part of history. Within barely twenty three years of the commencement of his mission, the whole of Arabia was brought into the fold of Islam, while in the next two decades the Roman and the Sassanid empires,— the two great empires of the world, — had surrendered before his followers. These events were so astonishing that historians have called them the greatest miracle of human history. In the words of historian M.N. Roy:

Every Prophet established his pretension by the performance of miracles. By that token Muhammad must be recognized as by far the greatest of all Prophets, before or after him. The expansion of Islam is the most miraculous of all miracles. (Historical Role of Islam, p.4)

Source: Simple Wisdom-2