Sahl ibn Hunayf

Sahl ibn Ḥunayf was an Anṣārī Companion of the Aws, a veteran of Badr and the later campaigns, known for his piety. He is remembered for a candid confession he made many years after al-Ḥudaybiyyah, during the tense standoff of Ṣiffīn in ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib's caliphate: trying to steady men on the edge of fighting fellow Muslims, he urged them to distrust their own opinions before the Qurʾān and Sunnah, and admitted that on "the day of Abū Jandal", his name for al-Ḥudaybiyyah, he had felt the treaty so wrong that, had he been able to reject the Prophet's ﷺ command and get away with it, he would have. His confession is preserved as one of the frankest testimonies that even the most devout Companions were shaken at al-Ḥudaybiyyah, and only later understood it as a victory.