How should the report be understood that one cup of milk sufficed for all the companions?

As a sign from God. Nothing happens against God’s will, and what God wills is not against nature, because nature is His work. He can employ laws that were still unknown to the people of that time.

The report tells how the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) was given a cup of milk as a gift and shared it with the poorest people in Medina. Everyone drank their fill, and in the end there was still enough left for him. To many this sounds impossible, because it seems to go against the laws of nature.

Here a counter-question helps. Can anything in the universe happen against God’s will? Whoever believes in God says no. And what are the laws of nature? They do not exist independently of God. They are His work. So when God wills something, it becomes nature. A miracle is not a break with nature but a part of it.

There is a second thought as well. God can employ laws of nature that are still unknown to the people of a particular time. What seemed inexplicable then may in later ages turn out to be a law that people come to understand only gradually.

In the end there is a limit that we must honestly accept. The Holy Qur’an says again and again that nothing is like God. Human beings understand things by comparing them with what they already know. For God’s own nature there is no such comparison. How He makes much out of little, we do not know. But we know that He can, for our own existence too comes from His creative power.

It is also striking how the report ends. The Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) drank last, after everyone else had drunk their fill. The sign was not a spectacle. It was God’s answer to a sharing that left no one out.