Abdullah ibn Ubayy's Son, and the Principle of Maslahah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧THE SON'S REQUEST

As news of the "al-aʿazzu minhā al-adhall" incident spread through Madinah ahead of the returning army, ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbdillāh ibn Ubayy, the sincerely believing son of the hypocrite leader, went out to meet the Prophet (ﷺ) before he entered the city. Still shaped by the tribal loyalties of Jāhiliyyah despite his faith, he explained that he could not bear to see another man walking the streets of Madinah having killed his father, he would be compelled, by that same code, to kill that man in turn, thereby murdering a fellow Muslim and earning Jahannam for himself over a father whose guilt he already accepted. His proposed solution: let the Prophet (ﷺ) command him personally to carry out the execution, so the responsibility fell on no one else and ended with him alone.

The Prophet (ﷺ) refused outright: "Lā, bal aḥsin ṣuḥbatahu", no, rather your duty is to be good to him, and promised the son that his father would be treated gently for as long as he lived among them. Relieved but still furious, ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbdillāh personally stood at the gates of Madinah and refused to let his own father enter the city until the Prophet (ﷺ) explicitly authorized it.

When ʿAbdullāh ibn Ubayy eventually died, still in the Prophet's (ﷺ) lifetime, it was this same son, moved now by ordinary filial mercy, who asked the Prophet (ﷺ) for his own cloak to serve as his father's burial shroud, hoping it might be a means of Allah's forgiveness. The Prophet (ﷺ) not only gave his own garment but personally attended the burial and prayed over him, before Q 9:84 was later revealed prohibiting the funeral prayer or any request for forgiveness on behalf of any of the hypocrites who died as such. ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbdillāh himself was later martyred in the Wars of Riddah during Abū Bakr's caliphate.

❧THE PRINCIPLE OF MASLAHAH

Some time later, the Prophet (ﷺ) turned to ʿUmar, who had asked to execute ʿAbdullāh ibn Ubayy on the spot, and pointed out the outcome: many of Ibn Ubayy's own former followers, exposed to the clear Qurʾānic condemnation of his hypocrisy in Sūrah al-Munāfiqūn, had since become sincere believers, the same people who, had the Prophet (ﷺ) executed their leader that day on ʿUmar's request, would likely have remained hypocrites out of resentment, but who would now be the first to carry out such an order themselves. ʿUmar conceded: "I know that the opinion of the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) always carries more blessing than my own."

Dr. Qadhi identifies this episode as one of the foundational precedents in Islamic legal theory for the principle of maṣlaḥah (public welfare) as a source of law, the Prophet (ﷺ) weighed the reputational cost of executing his own reported son-in-law-by-marriage ("I do not want it said that Muḥammad kills his own companions") against the offense itself, and judged the cost too high. He notes a crucial qualification, agreed upon by all four Sunni schools: maṣlaḥah operates only in the silence of an explicit text, it is never used to override or set aside a clear ruling of the Qurʾān or Sunnah. In this case there was no explicit textual command requiring the execution of a hypocrite whose statement, while confirmed by revelation, had not been established through the normal channels of testimony at the time the decision was made, leaving room for the Prophet (ﷺ) to weigh the wider welfare of the Ummah in how to respond.