The Benefits of the Letters to the Kings

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧A GLOBAL AMBITION

Most of these letters produced no immediate political result, only the Najāshī's personal conversion had real impact, and even that did not extend to his people. Yet within a single decade of the Prophet's ﷺ writing them, every land he addressed had become part of the Muslim world, a remarkable pattern showing the intention behind them: to make Islam's message global, and to establish the young Muslim state as a civilization worthy of ambassadorial exchange with Rome, Persia, and Abyssinia alike. Notably, the Prophet ﷺ wrote only to powers with whom the Arabs already had contact, Rome, Persia, Abyssinia, not to more distant civilizations like China or the depths of Africa, a pragmatic focus on existing relationships.

❧THEOLOGICAL WEIGHT IN THE OUTCOMES

The shaykh draws out a pattern in how the Prophet ﷺ read each ruler's response as theologically meaningful: tearing the letter meant a torn kingdom for Khusrau; honoring it meant a preserved kingdom for the polite Muqawqis and for Caesar. Even Heraclius's own spy was instructed to note whether the Prophet ﷺ referenced the fate of the letters sent to other kings.

❧FORM: BRIEF, ADDRESSED, TAILORED

Each letter is a single short paragraph, opening with the basmalah and the sender-to-recipient formula that remains standard diplomatic etiquette today, and distilling Islam's message into four or five sentences. Yet each is tailored to its recipient: the Najāshī and Caesar, both People of the Book, received the verse of Āl ʿImrān and, in the Najāshī's case, a summary of Islamic Christology; Khusrau, not a scriptuary, received neither. Titles of rank were used for each ruler. And when told that royal letters required a wax seal to certify authenticity, the Prophet ﷺ had a signet ring made for the purpose, evidence, the shaykh notes, that adopting the diplomatic norms of surrounding cultures carries no inherent conflict with Islam.

❧A FIQH POINT ON JIZYAH

The letter regarding the Zoroastrians of the Oman region, instructing that jizyah be collected from them, settles a fiqh dispute: two of the four Sunni madhāhib hold jizyah may only be taken from People of the Book, while the Ḥanafīs and later Mālikīs (out of practical necessity, ruling as they did over Central Asia and India) hold it may be taken from any non-Muslim group. Since the Majūs are not People of the Book, yet were still to pay jizyah, the more permissive position appears the stronger one.

❧THE MYSTERY OF "AL-ARISIYYUN"

The term al-Arīsiyyūn in the letter to Caesar puzzled classical commentators, since it is not native Arabic; most guessed it meant simply "the peasantry." The modern Indian scholar Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Nadwī proposed instead that it refers to the followers of Arius, the fourth-century theologian condemned as a heretic at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) for teaching that Christ was not co-eternal with God, a position markedly closer to the Islamic view of ʿĪsā than mainstream Trinitarian Christianity, and so persecuted that Arius's own writings survive only through his opponents. This reading fits better than "peasants": the same warning, bearing the sin of a specific group if the message is refused, echoes the letter to Khusrau's warning about the Majūs, suggesting the Prophet ﷺ meant a specific doctrinal community, not simply commoners. The shaykh notes that the medieval Christian scholar Peter the Venerable, the first to translate the Qur'an into Latin, around 1150 CE, himself described Muḥammad ﷺ as a successor to Arius, an outside echo of the same connection.

❧A CLOSING CAUTION

Finally, the shaykh notes that no artifact from the Prophet's ﷺ letters, clothing, or possessions has physically survived fourteen centuries, the parchment-and-leather images circulated as "the Prophet's ﷺ letters" are not authentic; what has been preserved is the content, transmitted through the written and oral tradition, not the physical documents themselves.