The Hanifs, Seekers of the Religion of Ibrahim

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Not all of Arabia was lost to idols. History records exceptions, a handful called the Ḥunafāʾ (singular Ḥanīf), which means those who turn away, turning away from shirk and toward Allah upon the pure religion of Ibrāhīm. The Qurʾān itself calls that way مِلَّةَ إِبْرَاهِيمَ حَنِيفًا, and names Ibrāhīm a Ḥanīf in more than eight places, so the Arabs knew Ibrāhīm was a Ḥanīf.

❧Four who left the festival

Ibn Hishām preserves a beautiful account. Before the Prophet ﷺ was sent, Quraysh held a great festival for their idols outside Makkah and summoned the whole city to venerate and sacrifice to them. When everyone had gone, four men found themselves left behind, and realised they were all of one mind, too ashamed to speak of it before. They said to one another: "Our people are upon misguidance; they have left the religion of Ibrāhīm. Shall we circle a stone that can neither harm nor benefit? Let us seek the Ḥanīfiyyah of Ibrāhīm." And they scattered across the lands in search of the truth.

❧Where their roads led

Waraqah ibn Nawfal, cousin of Khadījah, chose Christianity, learned Hebrew and Aramaic and its scriptures, and grew old and blind; it was he who recognised the first revelation, calling Jibrīl the Nāmūs (ٱلنَّامُوس) whom Allah sent to Mūsā, and he died soon after, the first to affirm the message.

ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Jaḥsh embraced Islam and emigrated to Abyssinia, but there became an apostate and returned to Christianity, dying upon it; his widow Umm Salamah later became a wife of the Prophet ﷺ. And there is a benefit in his story worth stating: he apostatised in the land of the Najāshī, not a land ruled by the Sharīʿah, and no one touched a hair of his head. So the claim that Islam simply beheads whoever leaves it is answered plainly: in lands not governed by Islam the ruling does not apply, and even within them there are long conditions.

ʿUthmān ibn al-Ḥuwayrith went to Rome, rose in the service of Caesar as an interpreter, was given wealth and prestige, became a Christian and never returned.

The fourth was Zayd ibn ʿAmr ibn Nufayl, who accepted neither Judaism nor Christianity, and whose story is the most striking of all (told in full in its own account). The Prophet ﷺ met him as a youth, said he would be raised as a single Ummah by himself, and saw him in Paradise; his son Saʿīd ibn Zayd became one of the ten promised Paradise.

Most of what we know of them scatters this scene before the Prophet's ﷺ birth, or when he was a small child, for Waraqah was in his eighties when the Prophet ﷺ was forty. So those who were sincere were guided, even amid the darkness, before any prophet had come to them.