Does our salat & salam benefit the Prophet ﷺ?

Question: Does the Prophet ﷺ benefit from our salat and salam upon him since the wording seems to indicate that we are praying for him to receive blessings, peace, the intercession (wasila), the preference (fadila), the rank (al-daraja al-rafi'a), and the station (al-maqam al-mahmud)?

This question was posed to Al-Sharif Abd al-Aziz al-Dabbagh, and he answered it as follows (paraphrased):

"This would be the case on the condition that we were completely separate from the Prophet ﷺ, but in reality our deen traces back to him as our original teacher. He is the foundation and we are the branches."

The branch can never have a virtue over the trunk. Nor the trunk over the roots, since the branches are from the trunk, which in turn emerged from the roots. 

The example Sidi Al-Dabbagh gave is the rain that falls onto an ocean. "We cannot say the rain benefitted the ocean because the rain water itself derived from the ocean [via evaporation]."

Hence, all of our good actions are reverberations of his actions ﷺ. All of our achievements are his achievements ﷺ. People ask how awliya can have karamaat which the Prophet ﷺ himself never had. The karamaat of all the awliya are in fact his karamaat ﷺ because they only arrived at wilaya through his teachings ﷺ.

Written by: Shadee Elmasry

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