The Killing of ʿAmir ibn al-Adhbat and Surah al-Nisaʾ 94

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

One further incident belongs to these months, not to Dhāt al-Salāsil but to another small expedition, whose tribe and place the shaykh leaves unnamed because the benefit lies elsewhere. The Prophet ﷺ had sent a small party against a tribe threatening the Muslims. On the way they passed a man named ʿĀmir ibn al-Adhbaṭ al-Ashjaʿī, a secret Muslim whose people had not converted. Overjoyed to see them, he greeted them with as-salāmu ʿalaykum, the sign of a believer, and the Companions lowered their weapons and welcomed him.

But in the party was Muḥallim ibn Jaththāmah, who carried a private grudge against ʿĀmir from the days of jāhiliyyah, one of those petty quarrels of that age. Muḥallim rejected the man's Islām as a pretence, "he only says this to save himself", and single-handedly attacked and killed him, seizing his belongings as spoils. No one could see what was in his heart. Then Allāh revealed it, in Sūrat al-Nisāʾ, verse 94: يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِذَا ضَرَبْتُمْ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ فَتَبَيَّنُوا وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَنْ أَلْقَى إِلَيْكُمُ السَّلَامَ لَسْتَ مُؤْمِنًا تَبْتَغُونَ عَرَضَ الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا, "O you who believe, when you go forth in the way of Allāh, verify; and do not say to one who offers you peace, 'You are no believer,' seeking the fleeting goods of this world." The verse laid bare Muḥallim's true motive: not faith, but a vendetta and a wish for the man's property.

❧The Blood-Money and the Withheld Duʿāʾ

The killing set the two tribes at each other's throats, and the quarrel outlasted their conversion. After Ḥunayn both chieftains came before the Prophet ﷺ demanding justice for ʿĀmir's blood. To calm them he paid a diyah of a hundred camels himself, on the killer's behalf, since as leader he had dispatched the party. Then Muḥallim's people asked him to seek Allāh's forgiveness for their man, and in one of the very few such moments of his life, the Prophet ﷺ refused, for Allāh had told him what lay in Muḥallim's heart. It is related that within days Muḥallim died. When his people buried him, the next morning the earth had cast his body onto the surface, face down. They dug again; again it was cast out; and again. At last they laid him in a valley and heaped stones over him. Told of it, the Prophet ﷺ said something profound: the earth holds men worse than him, his was not the gravest crime, but Allāh meant to warn them through him, to show them the sanctity of a human life. You said lightly, "He is no Muslim," while Allāh knew your heart wanted only the vendetta and the money.