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The trials of the prophets (1/2): the crucible of the chosen one

By Rédaction soufisme.org · December 28, 2025 · 7 min read

Part 1 of 2 · Les épreuves prophétiques

Contents
Tasbih, meditation rosary

There are trials, on the way of God, that come not to break but to transform. They shake acquired certainties, displace landmarks and invite us to go beyond attachment to established representations. They open a space of truth in which each one is invited to a reflexive return upon himself and to inner discernment. They invite us to resituate ourselves within the order of spiritual reality and to reconsider the very meaning of our commitment on the spiritual path.

When an event of such gravity occurs and seems to overturn the established order and destabilise our spiritual landmarks, we must replace ourselves within the long, continuous thread of sacred history. Sidi Hamza (may God sanctify his secret) insisted on the need to read and re-read the prophetic sira, not as a chronicle of the past, but as the matrix of a single teaching that unfolds through the centuries. The narratives of the prophets and the saints are so many hermeneutic keys for understanding present trials: they reveal that the crises which seem to unseat us are in reality moments of formation, of inner maturation and of elevation.

The crucible of the chosen one

Sacred history shows that God’s chosen ones have known moments of forced withdrawal, of apparent effacement, before being reinvested with a still vaster mission. From Sidna Sulayman (peace be upon him) to Sidna Muhammad (may God bless him and grant him peace), the history of the prophets teaches us that dispossession and the bracketing of visible action are not the end of the story, but the preparation for a higher revelation.

It is here that the full depth of the trial manifests itself: a purification that separates the essential from the accidental, the spiritual mandate from its contingent forms. The masters have taught that the loftier the chosen one, the more intense his passage through the crucible of trial. Thus, placed in a station of withdrawal, the saint (wali) loses nothing of his spiritual secret (sirr); on the contrary, it develops and strengthens, to be afterwards deployed with increased fecundity.

Solomon’s vacant throne

The prophetic narratives do not merely report past events: they reveal the laws by which God accompanies and refines His chosen ones. The episode of the prophet Sulayman occupies, in this respect, a singular place. ‘We tested Solomon by placing upon his throne a lifeless body; then he renewed his bond with God’ (Sad, 38:34).

This episode shows how a prophet-king may be led, by divine wisdom, to a radical dispossession in order to recover the essence of his mission. This moment of the throne’s apparent vacancy is not a mere parenthesis in his reign: it is the initiatic stage that will prepare him to receive a kingdom of an unprecedented order, and to exercise fully the function of lieutenancy (khalifa) over the visible and invisible worlds.

The jasad, ‘a lifeless body’, may be understood as a form devoid of life, a sign indicating that authority can subsist in its mere appearance, even when the spirit that animated it has withdrawn. This reading invites us to distinguish between the visible function and the spiritual reality that founds it. As many masters have recalled, sainthood (wilaya) is transmitted neither by decree nor by mere human designation: it resides in the infusion of a divine sirr, a breath that vivifies the function. Without this secret, the throne remains occupied, but it is uninhabited in its essence.

It is after this initiatic passage that Sulayman utters his famous invocation: ‘Lord, forgive me and grant me a kingdom such as none after me shall have. You are, in truth, the Great Bestower’ (Sad, 38:35). The kingdom then entrusted to him is not a mere restoration: it is a cosmic sovereignty, in which the visible and the invisible place themselves at his service. The Qur’an recalls that the winds were subjected to his command, that the jinn worked under his orders and that he understood the language of creatures. He thus attains the summit of the function of khalifa evoked in the verse: ‘I am going to establish upon the earth a vicar’ (II, 30). The royalty of Sidna Sulayman becomes a theophany, the concrete manifestation of a harmonised divine order.

This singular kingdom, far from being a mere outward privilege, was the visible manifestation of a spiritual secret. The sovereignty of Sidna Sulayman was not an ornament of worldly glory but the sign of an election that had passed through the trial of the jasad and recovered its centre in God. The authority he exercised over creatures and over the invisible forces had meaning only as a prolongation of his inner submission.

It is precisely this link between spiritual reality and its apparent form that Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah would illuminate in his hikam: ‘There are forms that have a reality, and realities that have no form.’ This wisdom warns against the temptation of confusing the permanence of a seat or a title with the effective presence of the divine breath. Thus the episode of Sulayman becomes paradigmatic: the throne, emptied of its true occupant, reveals that authority is only a deposit and must ceaselessly be reinvested through a return towards the Giver.

From Ta’if to the Ascension

This dynamic is found in exemplary fashion in the very life of the beloved Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him). The episode of Ta’if marks one of the most painful moments of his mission: rejected by the notables, jeered and stoned by children and slaves until his blood ran down onto his sandals, he withdrew into an orchard and uttered one of the most moving invocations reported in the sira:

O Lord, I complain to You of my weakness, of my lack of means and of my insignificance in people’s eyes. O most Merciful of the merciful, You who are the Lord of the oppressed, to whom do You abandon me? To an enemy who ill-treats me? Or to a kinsman to whom You have given power over me? If You are not angry with me, I care for nothing. But Your protection is vaster still for me.

This prayer expresses the summit of surrender (taslim), where all human help is set aside and where only recourse to God remains. Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah would say that this is the moment when ‘the causes are broken and one is sent back to the Causer of causes’.

It is in this state of total vulnerability that the episode of the encounter with ’Addas, the Christian servant, takes place. The Prophet, still exhausted and wounded, addresses him gently, evokes Yunus (peace be upon him), and the man immediately recognises the truth of his mission and prostrates himself before him. This scene manifests the power of the Muhammadan secret: even deprived of all human support, in weakness and rejection, the Prophet remains a centre of spiritual attraction, capable of illumining hearts.

Shortly after this extreme humiliation, the Prophet is honoured with the Isra’ and the Mi’raj: transported from Mecca to Jerusalem then raised through the heavens, he meets the prophets and becomes their imam in the celestial prayer. Finally, he advances as far as the sidrat al-muntaha, the extremity of the Lote Tree, where no other has advanced, and receives the commandment of prayer, the seal of the bond between God and humanity. This passage, from the greatest abasement to the highest spiritual degree, is no mere historical coincidence: it constitutes a divine pedagogy, a staging of the principle according to which effacement precedes manifestation. The Ta’if-Mi’raj sequence thus illustrates the initiatic law whereby he who must bear a universal spiritual charge must first be totally purified of all dependence on human gazes.

Further reading

Further reading