God’s Last Dictator

Prophecy has always claimed to speak for God, but in doing so it silences humanity. Every prophet begins by asserting that his voice is not his own, that he merely transmits the will of the divine. The moment that claim is accepted, moral responsibility shifts from man to myth. The prophet ceases to be questioned, because he claims to be the mouthpiece of the unquestionable. In that act, reason dies.

The prophetic tradition was never about wisdom; it was about authority. The prophets of the ancient Near East were not philosophers but legislators who dressed their commands in divine costume. Moses declared law as revelation; Jesus claimed to embody the law; Muhammad claimed to complete it. Each iteration tightened the noose on human freedom. The philosopher says, “Think.” The prophet says, “Obey.”

The genius of prophecy lies in its ability to merge political ambition with metaphysical language. The so-called “revelation” is always delivered in a context of power. Moses led tribes in the desert and forged a covenant that bound them into a nation. Jesus spoke in an occupied province and promised a kingdom not of this world—but one that would later become the moral empire of Christendom. Muhammad transformed the Arabian Peninsula by welding monotheism to conquest. Prophecy is not the voice of heaven; it is the constitution of empire.

Muhammad’s claim to be the “seal of the prophets” completed the logic of revelation. If Moses legislated and Jesus spiritualized, Muhammad institutionalized. In him, prophecy reached its bureaucratic perfection: law, faith, and army fused under one revelation. His revelation was totalitarian in scope precisely because it left no room for another. It proclaimed itself final, sealing history inside scripture. In that closure lay the death of inquiry.

The Qur’an’s authority depends entirely on the claim that it is uncreated and eternal. To question a single verse is to question God Himself. Such a structure is not meant to enlighten but to immobilize. It creates a world where interpretation becomes rebellion and where doubt is a crime. The philosopher invites contradiction; the prophet anathematizes it. What is declared perfect cannot evolve. What is sealed cannot breathe.

Yet the prophetic temperament has survived every secular age. Even in modern politics we repeat its structure: leaders who claim mandate instead of reason, movements that claim destiny instead of policy. The prophetic impulse is the ancestor of every total ideology. It sanctifies certainty and demands submission. It transforms skepticism—a virtue of free intellect—into sin.

Morally, prophecy corrupts because it substitutes command for conscience. The moral man acts from understanding; the prophetic man acts from fear. Muhammad’s followers fought wars believing they executed divine will, not human strategy. Once violence is sanctified, cruelty loses its name. History is replete with the consequences: the sword becomes a sacrament, conquest becomes conversion, and dissent becomes blasphemy.

Intellectually, prophecy is sterile. It begins with the declaration that all truth has already been revealed. From that premise no discovery can arise. The prophetic worldview has produced theologians, not scientists; apologists, not thinkers. Civilization progresses not through revelation but through refutation. The age of philosophy began only when Socrates chose questioning over oracle, when the Greek mind refused to be cowed by the priest’s thunder.

The tragedy of Islam’s prophetic finality is that it arrested a civilization once vibrant with reason. The early centuries of Islamic learning—mathematics, astronomy, medicine—flourished when Greek rationalism still whispered beneath the minarets. But orthodoxy soon strangled that voice. The gates of ijtihad, independent reasoning, were closed. Revelation had spoken; man had to be silent. From that moment, the civilization of inquiry turned into a civilization of memory.

Prophecy also infantilizes the believer. It demands faith in place of verification, obedience in place of judgment. A prophet claims to know what no one else can know; therefore his followers must accept without evidence. This reversal of epistemic dignity—where ignorance becomes piety—is the root of all religious servitude. To submit to prophecy is to surrender the very faculty that makes one human: the capacity to think.

The prophet’s charisma rests on the psychology of fear and hope—fear of damnation, hope of salvation. Both are instruments of control. In Muhammad’s system, the believer’s every act is weighed and recorded; paradise and hell are bureaucratic extensions of divine surveillance. This moral bookkeeping may have produced social order, but it annihilated spiritual autonomy. When God becomes the warden of the conscience, the conscience ceases to exist.

Prophecy pretends to liberate but always enslaves. It replaces external idols with internal ones. It forbids the making of images yet commands the imagination itself. Its language of mercy hides a machinery of submission. The prophet is not the messenger of freedom but the architect of obedience. His authority depends on the permanent helplessness of his audience.

The true enemy of prophecy has never been another religion but philosophy. Socrates, Buddha, and Spinoza stand as its natural antagonists. They sought enlightenment without revelation, morality without command, truth without God’s dictation. Their method was conversation, not decree. Where prophecy closes the book, philosophy opens it.

History proves that the prophetic model cannot coexist with genuine liberty. Wherever revelation reigns, heresy becomes treason and thought becomes sedition. The prophet’s world admits only believers and infidels, never thinkers. The greatest moral revolution, therefore, is not the coming of a new prophet but the end of prophecy itself—the moment when man ceases to outsource his conscience to the sky.

Prophecy promised knowledge but delivered dogma. It promised justice but delivered theocracy. It promised unity but delivered submission. The time has come to see it for what it was: not a channel of divine truth but a stage in human adolescence. Humanity’s maturity begins when we recognize that revelation is not a gift from God but a projection of man.

To outgrow prophecy is not to lose God but to reclaim reason. The divine, if it exists, does not speak through decrees but through discovery, not through chosen messengers but through universal curiosity. The prophets ended inquiry; philosophy must end the prophets.

CitationsQur’an 33:40 (“Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but the Messenger of God and the Seal of the Prophets”); Deuteronomy 18:15–22; Gospel of John 14:6; Isaiah 8:19–20; Plato, Apology 38a; Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 1; al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut al-Falāsifa; Averroes, Tahāfut al-Tahāfut; Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, ch. XIII.