Am al-Wufud: the Year of Delegations

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

With Tabūk behind us, five lessons and, with the Ḥajj break, some two months of them, we are in the middle of the ninth year of the Hijrah, and there is not much of this series left. The ninth year is called عَامُ الْوُفُودِ, the Year of Delegations, and it is customary to discuss the delegations at exactly this point.

❧They did not begin in the ninth year

The delegations did not start after Tabūk. They began around al-Aḥzāb, in the fifth year, and continued to the last month of the Prophet's ﷺ life. Ibn Isḥāq, Ibn Hishām, the Ṭabaqāt of Ibn Saʿd and the Maghāzī of al-Wāqidī all record a great many of them; Ibn Kathīr tried to gather them, and in our own time the Indian scholar Abū Turāb al-Ẓāhirī, who died about a decade ago, wrote a 250-page encyclopedia of the delegations that visited the Prophet ﷺ, which is the standard reference. They are lumped together here because pausing for each one as it fell would have been endlessly repetitive.

The second problem is that most of them are barely known, a detail or two apiece, and no standard book of Sīrah lists them all, because it would simply be tedious: the delegation of this tribe, the delegation of that tribe, of tribes we have never heard of and that mean nothing to us now. So Sīrah lectures, this one included, glance over the bulk of them. What follows over this lesson and the next is roughly ten percent of them, ten or fifteen illustrative cases, chosen to show what kinds of delegation came and what came of them. One could list a hundred and twenty tribal names; what would be gained?

❧What a delegation was

A tribe sends two or three representatives to negotiate with the Prophet ﷺ. Negotiation, not necessarily conversion. Some came willingly to accept Islam; some hesitated and accepted it later; some were hypocrites who pretended, and we know it because those tribes left Islam the moment he ﷺ died; some said openly that they would not become Muslim but wanted a treaty of non-aggression; and at the far extreme were delegations of threat, Musaylimah al-Kadhdhāb himself came to Madinah as head of his tribe's delegation from al-Yamāmah, and it was he who proposed that half the earth be his and half the Prophet's ﷺ.

❧Why the ninth year

Because that is when the frequency peaked, and the reason is political. Makkah was the capital of the peninsula and Quraysh its first tribe; with Makkah conquered, Ḥunayn won and Tabūk returned from unvanquished, the Romans never appeared, Ghaṭafān never appeared, and when the other side does not show up, you have won by default, there was no longer any force the smaller tribes could rally behind. They had only ever united under Quraysh, and that had failed even at al-Aḥzāb. So each tribe had to choose: embrace Islam willingly or unwillingly, sue for a treaty, or declare open war as Musaylimah did.

Note also that at this stage one was still permitted to remain a pagan in Arabia; in the sixth, seventh and eighth years a treaty on those terms was possible. It is after this year, with the revelation of Sūrat al-Tawbah, Sūrat al-Barāʾah, that the announcement comes: four months, and then the pagans may not remain in the sacred vicinity. Historically, all the Arabs embraced Islam and paganism disappeared from the peninsula.