The Tree of al-Ridwan, and Umar Cutting It Down

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The ground of the pledge was scattered with shrubs and trees, and later Companions could not agree which one the Prophet ﷺ had sat beneath. Jābir ibn ʿAbdullāh, a young man at the time who lived into blind old age, once said that had he his sight he could show the very tree, but Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī also records that when the Companions returned the next year they could not settle which tree it was, no two agreeing, exactly as anyone revisiting a wooded plain a year on would find every tree looking alike.

Within a decade of the Prophet's ﷺ death, Bedouins and new converts began venerating a tree they supposed to be the one, building a mosque at it and rubbing their backs against it for blessings. When a successor (tābiʿī) reported this to Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab, whose own father had taken the pledge, Saʿīd retorted that if the Companions themselves could not identify the tree, these people certainly could not know better. And, with an authentic chain in the Muṣannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzāq, when word reached ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb that the tree was being venerated, he ordered it cut down, not because it was even the right tree, but to end the practice.

Dr. Qadhi draws out the enduring lesson: the tension between emotional, superstitious devotion and knowledge-based Islam is old and unresolved. If a single generation would rub their backs on a misidentified tree while ʿUmar still lived, what would centuries do, and an idol, he notes, is nothing but a holy place, person, or saint magnified over time. He points to shrines and graves across the Muslim world where some merely make duʿāʾ to Allah (permissible) while others prostrate, circumambulate, and call on the dead for aid, all beginning from the notion that a place or person is sacred. Yet no tree, however mentioned in the Qurʾān, was ever to be venerated; only Makkah, Madinah, and Jerusalem carry sacred status. The relics of the Prophet ﷺ himself, such as the water of his wuḍūʾ, which the Companions did seek out, were an exception he permitted, but the ground he sat on was not. We visit sites of early Islam, Dr. Qadhi concludes, for history and reflection (ʿibrah), not for blessing (tabarruk), standing in awe at the Cave of Ḥirāʾ where "Iqraʾ" descended, without imagining its rocks holy or carrying them away.