The Praise of Yemen, and Mu'adh Sent as its Judge

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

So many of the aḥādīth about the delegations from Yemen are in praise of the Yemenis. In Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: the people of Yemen have come to you; they are the best of souls and the softest of hearts, أَرَقُّ أَفْئِدَةً. And the famous phrase: الْإِيمَانُ يَمَانٍ وَالْحِكْمَةُ يَمَانِيَةٌ, faith is Yemeni and wisdom is Yemeni.

❧"Bless us in our Sham and our Yemen"

And in al-Bukhārī: اللَّهُمَّ بَارِكْ لَنَا فِي شَامِنَا وَفِي يَمَنِنَا, O Allah, bless us in our Shām and in our Yemen. It is remarkable that when he said it, neither Shām nor Yemen was under Muslim control; and that he called them ours means these are the lands of the people of Islam.

A man said: and our Najd, O Messenger of Allah? He repeated the same duʿāʾ for Shām and Yemen. The man asked a second time, and he repeated it again. The third time, he pointed towards Najd and said: from there come the earthquakes and the tribulations, and from there the trials will come. The scholars differ over which Najd is meant, central Arabia, or, on the stronger view, the region up towards Iraq, which was also called Najd.

Shām, which includes Palestine and what we call Syria, is blessed in this too. And in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim there is another: that he ﷺ will stand over his Ḥawḍ on the Day of Judgement and beat with his staff to clear a space for the people of Yemen, so they will have the first access to his fountain. And note that Yemen here takes in the Anṣār, since the Aws and the Khazraj are Yemeni in origin; all praise of Yemen is praise of them too. Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah says the Yemenis were at the forefront of the fighting against the people of the Riddah, and opened many lands, and that Allah brought much good to the believers through them.

❧Why Yemen was different

Yemen was unlike the rest of Arabia in two ways. It was largely Christian, with a substantial Jewish population, Jews remained in Yemen in some of the largest concentrations anywhere until the creation of Israel in the twentieth century, and their descendants in Israel still speak Arabic and hold themselves the purer lineage. So there was little paganism there. And it was divided into small kingdoms rather than pure tribes, which gave it more stability and settled civilisation than the rest of the peninsula. Perhaps that is part of why the Yemenis, of all the Arabian regions, embraced Islam the most readily, nothing like it happened in central or northern Arabia.

❧Yassira wa la tu'assira

One of the principal kings of Yemen, of Ḥimyar, accepted Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ sent Muʿādh ibn Jabal, not as governor, since the king remained governor, but as his deputy and effectively as the qāḍī. He also sent Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī to another province, as Yemen came into Islam in great numbers. (This is a few months later than the delegations we are describing, after the Ḥajj of Abū Bakr, but it belongs with them.)

This is the famous farewell: Muʿādh riding, the Prophet ﷺ walking alongside and holding on, which is honour enough by itself. He told him: you are going to a people of the Book, so let the first thing you call them to be tawḥīd; if they obey, tell them of the prayer; if they obey, tell them of the zakāh. And at the end: yā Muʿādh, perhaps I shall not see you after this.

And the last advice of all: يَسِّرَا وَلَا تُعَسِّرَا، وَبَشِّرَا وَلَا تُنَفِّرَا, make things easy and do not make them hard; give good news and do not drive people away; bring people together and do not divide them. Look at the level of the people and give them what suits them. It is a sad thing how many shaykhs and scholars and callers make Islam difficult, saying things that are true, but without wisdom, without the right context, or to people not yet ready for them. Here is Muʿādh ibn Jabal, of all people, being told: make it easy, be gentle with them.