Dealing With People by Their Level: The Lineage Cry and the Bedouins' Grasping

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Over and over the Prophet ﷺ dealt with people according to their backgrounds, personalities, and levels, a master of the human psyche, as any true leader must be.

❧The lineage war-cry

When the new Meccan converts fled at Ḥunayn, he used a rallying cry he had never used before or since: أَنَا النَّبِيُّ لَا كَذِب، أَنَا ابْنُ عَبْدِ الْمُطَّلِب, "I am the Prophet, no lie; I am the son of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib." Pride in lineage (al-fakhr bil-ansāb) is one of the four matters of Jāhiliyyah he foretold would linger in his Ummah, and can even swell into kufr through kibr. So he was not boasting of his nasab, it was simply true that he was the grandson of their legendary chieftain, but reaching precisely those raw Qurashī converts with the one memory that would steady them: your leader is no stranger, he is the grandson of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib. This is mastery of human psychology.

❧The grasping Bedouins

He dealt with the Bedouins differently again. Where the Qurashī chieftains received fortunes, the Bedouins who came begging got only tokens, until the whole ten-million estimate was gone in a single day, not one coin kept for himself or for the elite of Muhājirūn and Anṣār. Still they crowded him, "Money! money!", pressing him back into thorny desert shrubs until his cloak was torn from his shoulders. He ﷺ said: "Give me back my cloak, for by Allāh, had I coins as many as these thorns I would have shared them all among you, and you would not have found me a miser."

"Give people their stations." So the religion teaches common sense: you treat a dignitary as befits him and a rude Bedouin as befits him, the naive notion that everyone must be treated identically is false. ʿĀʾishah reports, in the first ḥadīth of the Muqaddimah of Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: أَمَرَنَا رَسُولُ اللَّهِ ﷺ أَنْ نُنَزِّلَ النَّاسَ مَنَازِلَهُمْ, "The Messenger ﷺ commanded us to give people their proper stations."