The Letter to the Najashi

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧A CHAPTER OF LETTERS

After Khaybar the sīrah turns to a segment early biographers typically group together: the Prophet's ﷺ letters to various rulers, sent at different times, scholars count more than twenty-five in total, from around al-Hudaybiyyah until his death. Rather than treat each as its own event, the early books gather them into a single chapter of lessons, and the shaykh follows that model.

❧NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH JAʿFAR'S DIALOGUE

The letter to the Najāshī, sent around this time, is distinct from Jaʿfar ibn Abī Ṭālib's dialogue with him over a decade earlier, perhaps sent after Jaʿfar and the Abyssinian Muslims had already departed for Khaybar. The letter summarized Islamic belief about ʿĪsā, that he is Allah's messenger, His word given to Maryam, and His rūḥ, called the Najāshī to Islam, and closed with the verse of Āl ʿImrān inviting the People of the Book to a common word: that none be worshipped but Allah alone.

❧THE MOST SUCCESSFUL LETTER

Of all the letters, this proved the most successful, the Najāshī accepted Islam personally, though there is some question of exactly when. Since the Prophet ﷺ still wrote to him after al-Hudaybiyyah, it appears he had long been sympathetic to Islam without having formally embraced it before this point. Notably, unlike the letters to Persia and Rome, this one carries no closing warning about bearing the sin of one's people, perhaps because the Prophet ﷺ sensed he needed only a small final push.

According to al-Ṭabarī, the Najāshī sent his own son Arhā ibn Ashamah with sixty delegates bearing gifts and news of his conversion, offering to come to Medina himself, but the ships carrying them were lost at sea, and the delegation never arrived. Two and a half years later, in 9 AH, on the very morning the Najāshī died in Abyssinia, the Prophet ﷺ announced the news to the companions and led the one funeral prayer in Islamic history performed in absentia (ṣalāt al-janāzah ʿalā al-ghāʾib), the basis for the fiqh position that such a prayer is offered when a believer dies where no one prayed over the body.