A more popular, but less well-authenticated, version of the tradition states that Muhammad was a prophet “when Adam was between the water and the mud.” These hadith texts suggest that Muhammad’s prophetic mission was predetermined at some point in the process of Adam’s creation. In another widely circulated early report, Muhammad states, “I was the first of the prophets to be created, and the last to be sent.” The associated idea of a primordial light of Muhammad, transferred upon conception from one generation to another of his ancestors, also has an extremely long pedigree; it is reflected in Ibn Ishaq’s Sira, which describes how the light shone in the forehead of ‘Abd Allah before the conception of Muhammad. The motif of a supernatural light is also reflected in the widely accepted early report that when his mother was pregnant with him, she saw a light emanating from her belly that reached to the castles of Syria.
Probably at some later point, it came to be believed that the prophethood of Muhammad preceded not only the creation of Adam, but that of all other things in existence. In popular usage, the tradition that Muhammad became a prophet “when Adam was between the water and the mud” was extended to state that he existed “when there was no Adam, no water and no mud." Hadith experts emphasized that this addition, which had no basis in the textual tradition, was in circulation primarily in non-scholarly circles. It also came to be believed that the Light of Muhammad was the primordial substance from which all other elements of creation were brought forth. Later sources, both Shi‘ite and Sunni, expand on these motifs to construct elaborate cosmogonic scenarios. It may very well be that, as more than one author has suggested, Shi‘ites were the first to develop such narratives.
Given the state of the sources, it would be difficult to determine with certainty whether Shi‘ites originated the motif of the Light of Muhammad before its appearance among Sunnis. It is certainly the case that Shi‘ites elaborated it to an unusual degree, and that related traditions often have a sectarian cast that is rebutted by analogous traditions from the Sunni side. While the idea of a pure Light transmitted through the generations of the Prophet’s ancestry was well suited to (and perhaps historically rooted in) Shi‘ite belief in the immaculate descent of the Imams, it was also articulated in Sunni forms.
The Mechanism and Elements of Fatwa in Islam
