Abdur Rahman ibn Abi Aqil

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī ʿAqīl led a delegation his tribe had obliged him to bring, and left the only narration we have from him, one of the most candid sentences in the Sīrah. When we asked permission to enter, he said, there was no one on earth more hateful to us than the man we had been sent to see; and when we left, there was no one on earth more beloved to us than the man we were leaving.

It is the story of a tribe arriving in anger, made to give up its independence and its idols, treating him ﷺ as a conqueror, and of what a few days in his company did to that anger. In the same account one of their young men asked why he did not ask his Lord for a kingdom like Sulaymān's, and he ﷺ laughed and said that perhaps his companion had been given something better than the kingdom of Sulaymān: every prophet is given one request granted, and some asked for this world and some for punishment upon their people, but he had kept his back, between himself and his Lord, the intercession for his Ummah on the Day of Judgement.