"No Compulsion in Religion": The Ansari Children Raised as Jews

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

A hadith preserved in Sunan Abī Dāwūd, narrated by Ibn ʿAbbās, records a pre-Islamic custom among the women of pre-Islamic Yathrib: a mother who had suffered repeated miscarriages might vow that if Allah blessed her with a surviving son, she would give him to be raised as a Jew. The custom reflected a real cultural asymmetry of the time, the pagan Arabs of Yathrib, without writing or the same depth of religious tradition, widely regarded the literate, scripture-possessing Jewish tribes as culturally and religiously superior, and a number of boys were given over on this basis, several of them to Banū al-Naḍīr specifically, likely reflecting existing ties between that tribe and the Khazraj.

By the time of the tribe's expulsion, these boys, raised entirely within the tribe, intermarried among them, and Jewish in every practical sense, were grown men. Their biological Anṣārī parents, who had since accepted Islam, wanted them to remain in Madinah rather than leave with the exiled tribe, and some sought to compel them to convert so the expulsion order would not apply to them.

Allah revealed in response the verse now among the most famous in the Qurʾān (al-Baqarah 2:256): "Lā ikrāha fī al-dīn, qad tabayyana al-rushdu min al-ghayy" (لَا إِكْرَاهَ فِي الدِّينِ ۖ قَدْ تَبَيَّنَ الرُّشْدُ مِنَ الْغَيِّ), there is no compulsion in religion; the right course has become clear from error. Dr. Qadhi emphasizes the verse's original context: it was revealed in favor of the Jewish young men, telling Muslim parents they had no right to force their own adult children back into Islam. A child raised according to a parent's guidance while a minor becomes independent as an adult, free to choose, even against the wishes of their own parents. This established, from the earliest period of Madinan legislation, a genuine freedom of religious conscience, though Dr. Qadhi is careful to distinguish this from the modern Western concept of religious liberty: pre-modern Islamic civilization tolerated a degree of religious pluralism unmatched by its contemporaries (in contrast, for instance, to the centuries of intra-Christian religious warfare in Europe that eventually produced modern secularism as a survival mechanism), while still maintaining that Islam alone was true, permitting other faiths as a matter of legal and civil right, without ever endorsing them as morally or theologically equivalent.