The Benefits of the Year of Delegations, and Three Fabrications

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Before the benefits, a word on some stories that should be named only in order to be dismissed. We do not usually spend time on fabricated and weak narrations, but we do when they are used to embarrass Muslims or circulated by unorthodox groups, and some of the secondary and tertiary works of Sīrah, never Ibn Isḥāq or the well-known books, carry bizarre delegation stories.

❧Three that never happened

One obscure late work has it that the great-grandson of Iblīs came with a delegation to accept Islam and repent. It is not true. Al-Mustadrak of al-Ḥākim, a famous ḥadīth collection, but one carrying a great deal of weak and fabricated material, has the prophet Ilyās arriving as a delegate, a table descending from heaven, the two of them dining together, and Ilyās then ascending back to where he came from. And al-Ṭabarānī's al-Muʿjam al-Awsaṭ, a book compiled precisely to gather the strangest and most obscure narrations, not the most authentic, along with al-Kāmil of Ibn ʿAdī, which exists to document weak ḥadīth, carry a long and strange report of a stranger who came to the masjid and made a beautifully polished duʿāʾ, اللَّهُمَّ أَعِنِّي عَلَىٰ مَا يُنْجِينِي مِمَّا خَوَّفْتَنِي, whereupon the Prophet ﷺ smiled and added a line of his own, and there is a back-and-forth, and the stranger turns out to be al-Khiḍr. The language alone marks it as a Ṣūfī fabrication.

It is worth pausing on the absurdity of quoting a book like al-Kāmil as though quoting al-Bukhārī: the author's entire purpose was to warn you about those narrations, and someone cites him as his source. No Ilyās, no Khiḍr, no offspring of Iblīs, none of them came.

❧What the delegations show

First, how fast Islam spread through the tribes in the ninth year: delegations from the north out of Najd, from the south out of Yemen, from Najrān above it, from Oman in the east, وَرَأَيْتَ النَّاسَ يَدْخُلُونَ فِي دِينِ اللَّهِ أَفْوَاجًا. A year without military campaigns, in which small independent tribes each concluded that they could not stay as they were: either embrace Islam or make a treaty and pay jizyah. And with that the state was consolidated, the first time in human history that the whole Arabian Peninsula came under a single political power. The fruits of patience are always sweet, and Allah fulfilled His promise to His Messenger ﷺ.

Second, that even in his ﷺ own time people were of very different levels of faith. We have a naïve assumption that everyone then was a walking Jibrīl on earth, an Abū Bakr or an ʿUmar. No. In these accounts we see hypocrites; we see pagans, since paganism is still permitted right up to this point and will be forbidden within months; we see Muslims of weak faith boasting يَمُنُّونَ عَلَيْكَ أَنْ أَسْلَمُوا; we see men of the strongest faith who travelled only to be prayed for; and we see men who came to study fiqh and theology.

Third, and this deserves thought, many of us assume Islam is so plainly true that we need only open our mouths and people will accept it. That may be so, and yet human nature is stubborn. Here is the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ himself in dialogue with the Christians of Najrān, men sitting in front of him and seeing him, and many of them sincerely believing their Christianity was right and going home unconvinced. Adopting a new religion is never a small thing, even when the religion is true. If they were not convinced by him, do you expect to do better in your daʿwah? There will always be people who do not see, صُمٌّ بُكْمٌ عُمْيٌ فَهُمْ لَا يَرْجِعُونَ, and that is between them and Allah. The truth is clear, but clear to those who are willing to see it; a man who covers his own eyes will not be moved even by the Prophet ﷺ standing before him.

❧The masjid, and the guests in it

Fourth, the masjid may be used to host non-Muslims. Where did Thaqīf stay? In a tent pitched inside the masjid. And it may be used, occasionally, for their worship: here are Christians praying in the holiest masjid of Madinah, facing a side wall, with the Companions wanting to stop them and the Prophet ﷺ saying let them pray. No doubt what they said in that prayer is not what we hold to be valid. One does not build them a permanent prayer niche, but if they are your guests and your delegates, let them pray by their wall and be done. It is astonishing how ultra-strict some people have become about this, when throughout the Sīrah non-Muslims are walking in and out of the masjid.

That is the true spirit of Islam in tolerating other religions, and it is honest pluralism rather than the sentimental kind. To say everyone is equally right is nonsensical, because each group holds something the others deny: when Christians say the only way to the Father is through Christ, they cannot coherently tell other faiths that what they believe is fine, and most of them do not. We say the same: there is one way to Allah, and it is Islam. And what follows from that? Not compulsion. They keep their religion and we keep ours, and we dialogue, firmly, even to the point of invoking Allah's curse, but we do not lay hands on one another. Najrān refused in the end, and what was done to them? Nothing. Go home; you have your treaty and your religion. No civilisation in the world was this tolerant until so-called secularism after modernity, which solved the problem by rejecting religion altogether; Europe was ferociously intolerant even of its own.

Fifth, that hosting the delegations was the community's responsibility: he ﷺ took charge of feeding them, and the books mention specific houses used to lodge them, pagans, Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, all looked after. Guests are treated with karam and dignity whether or not they are Muslim.

Sixth, that non-Muslims may enter Makkah and Madinah temporarily, a point of fiqh disagreement, but this is the majority and the correct position. What is forbidden is their residing there. Coming for a period, for a benefit to the community, is not forbidden: to be given daʿwah, as here, or for something technical, as when the Prophet's ﷺ masjid was being expanded in the mid-nineties and there were German engineers inside it, the shaykh saw them himself, because the technology (those umbrellas) was theirs and the technicians had to inspect their own work. Nothing is wrong with that; they come, they do what they came for, and then they leave.

The evidence for the residence rule is his ﷺ instruction on his deathbed, in al-Bukhārī and Muslim: أَخْرِجُوا الْيَهُودَ وَالنَّصَارَىٰ مِنْ جَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِ. Most scholars have understood it of those living there permanently, not visitors, and the Companions did allow temporary entry. Consider who killed ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb: Abū Luʾluʾah, and what was he doing there? Working. A hired servant.

❧On the mubahalah, and on their God

Two closing points from the questions. The mubāhalah is not encouraged among Muslims and is not something to play with; it is a last resort where a genuine need arises, and historically it has been used more as a threat between two parties than actually enacted, though it has been enacted, famously in writing in the Qādiyānī case against Mirzā Ghulām Aḥmad and his followers. There can be a maṣlaḥah in it, as there was here, but generally we keep away from it.

And were the Najrānīs allowed to pray in the masjid because they were Ahl al-Kitāb? Yes. We tolerate from the People of the Book what we do not tolerate from paganism, see Thaqīf, who were not granted a single day's delay over al-Lāt. And the God of the Christians and Jews is our God, even though their conception of Him differs: وَإِلَٰهُنَا وَإِلَٰهُكُمْ وَاحِدٌ. Whoever says otherwise is not reading the Qurʾān. They believe their God is the God of Ibrāhīm and of Mūsā, the Abrahamic God is our God, however different their conception, and the Qurʾān tolerates the presence of Jews and Christians in the Islamic state, with no compulsion upon them at all.