ʿAlī conveys al-Barāʾah, and the four proclamations at Minā

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

This ninth-year Ḥajj was the one and only time in all of history that Muslims and idolaters performed Ḥajj side by side, the official delegations of the believers circling the House alongside pagan delegations come from the outlying regions, north and south and east and west, not yet all Muslim, and it was the last time the rites were done in the old way, for the Prophet ﷺ had not yet demonstrated the correct Ḥajj, so Abū Bakr led it as the people were accustomed.

❧"Are you a commander over me, or under me?"

ʿAlī overtook the caravan at Dhū al-Ḥulayfah, the mīqāt of Medina, riding the Prophet's ﷺ own camel, the recognised sign that a man carries the ruler's authority, as a chief would send his personal ring or staff or mount with a representative. Seeing it, Abū Bakr asked at once whether ʿAlī had come as commander over him, or whether he remained the commander and ʿAlī his lieutenant. ʿAlī answered plainly: "No, you are still the amīr, and I am the maʾmūr, the one under you; the Prophet ﷺ did not send me to take over, but to recite Sūrat al-Tawbah." Now this, of course, was destined to cause tension between two groups, for the Shīʿah read this incident, with Ghadīr Khumm foremost, as among their top two or three proofs that ʿAlī, not Abū Bakr, should have led the Ummah: the Prophet ﷺ, needing to be represented, said none should represent him but a family member, and chose ʿAlī.

❧Why the reading is mistaken

And the answer, as is so often the case, is easy once the context is understood, and al-Baghawī and other historians and mufassirūn give it: it was the known custom of pre-Islamic Arabia that when a chief made or broke a treaty, only a member of his own family could enact it on his behalf. The Prophet ﷺ was dealing with pagans still steeped in jāhiliyyah, where lineage was everything; so to leave them no excuse, no "we will not accept this from Abū Bakr; we must hear it from the Prophet ﷺ himself", he sent a kinsman to annul the very pacts he had made. Both Abū Bakr and ʿAlī travelled in the one caravan; ʿAlī literally told Abū Bakr, "you are the amīr and I am the maʾmūr." He was sent for a task, the breaking of the treaties, not as commander. And we honour ʿAlī fully, we are, the shaykh says (as in his Karbalāʾ lecture), the true Shīʿat ʿAlī, those who love and believe in him as he deserves, and we grant him every blessing and virtue with no stinginess, the son-in-law, the cousin, the Ahl al-Bayt, yet none of that means he was more entitled to the caliphate than the Prophet ﷺ himself was to be led. Two of the greatest Ṣaḥābah travelled together, and ʿAlī was not the amīr.

❧The four proclamations at Minā

So Abū Bakr performed the Ḥajj, and ʿAlī, with Abū Hurayrah also sent, proclaimed throughout Minā, after reciting the opening of al-Tawbah so all knew of the four months, four announcements: first, that none shall enter Jannah but a believing Muslim, and no disbeliever shall enter it; second, that none shall perform ṭawāf naked; third, that no idolater shall ever perform Ḥajj after this year; and fourth, that every treaty with the pagans now ran out in four months, save the honoured fixed-term pacts. The naked ṭawāf was stopped that very year; the idolaters were still present in the ninth-year Ḥajj, but were told it was their last, and the ban on pagan pilgrimage would take effect the next.

❧Salvific exclusivity, and the great u-turn

Why open with "no disbeliever enters Jannah"? Because this was the final daʿwah to peoples about to leave Arabia forever, and it names the one thing that matters: there is no path to Jannah but Islam. The principle is watered down today and hard for many of our youth to swallow, the shaykh has an academic lecture, "Salvific Exclusivity in Islam," on exactly this, yet it is only common sense: a religion worth following must be one that actually saves; if every path saves equally, why hold to any one? In this world the fiqh is لَكُمْ دِينُكُمْ وَلِيَ دِينِ, you to your way and I to mine, and no coercion; but in the Hereafter it cannot be that monotheism and polytheism and trinitarianism are all simultaneously true. And in this the Prophet ﷺ saw his life's work come to its summit: one of the most astonishing about-turns in human history, an entire civilisation abandoning three thousand years of idolatry in twenty, until there were no Arab pagans left at all. Islam still tolerated the Arab Jews and the Arab Christians among them, but of Arab idolaters there remained none, and that, because of these verses, is one of the miracles of Islam.