The Death of Abdullah ibn Ubayy, the Leader of the Hypocrites
historicalShaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:
One incident remains before the story of Tabūk can be closed, and it happened after the army had already come home: within roughly a month of the return, the leader of the Munāfiqūn, ʿAbdullāh ibn Ubayy ibn Salūl, fell ill, and it became clear that he was dying. From his deathbed he sent for the Prophet ﷺ and asked him to come.
❧A whole life in review
Who was this man? Before Islam he was the seniormost politician left alive in Yathrib, not a king, they had no king, but the last of the elders, the others having been killed in the wars of Buʿāth or having fled in the year or two after the Prophet ﷺ arrived. By the time of his death he was an old man in his seventies. He did not accept Islam at ʿAqabah; he accepted it with the very last batch, after Badr, when paganism had been driven out of Madīnah and there was no third option left, رَغْمَ أَنْفِهِ, as the Arabs say, against his own will.
He showed his colours first at Uḥud, turning back with a third of the army, three hundred men, with the excuse that his advice had not been taken: you did not listen to me, so why should I fight with you? That posture, that he stood above the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, is kufr in and of itself. At al-Aḥzāb he did not conspire with the Yahūd, had he done so it would have been open treason and he would have been executed, but he went from Companion to Companion trying to frighten them: can you not see that all of mankind has gathered against you? He was himself terrified, and this is exactly what Allah records: الَّذِينَ قَالَ لَهُمُ النَّاسُ إِنَّ النَّاسَ قَدْ جَمَعُوا لَكُمْ فَاخْشَوْهُمْ, and the believers' response was فَزَادَهُمْ إِيمَانًا, it only increased them in faith. That is the nature of nifāq: the kufr is inside, not outside, always just short of the line that would have cost him his neck.
On the return from the campaign against Banū al-Muṣṭaliq came the sentence recorded in the sūrah that bears the hypocrites' name: يَقُولُونَ لَئِن رَّجَعْنَا إِلَى الْمَدِينَةِ لَيُخْرِجَنَّ الْأَعَزُّ مِنْهَا الْأَذَلَّ, by the honourable he meant himself, and by the lowly, astaghfirullāh, he meant the Prophet ﷺ. That mockery is blatant kufr. His own son, ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbdillāh, a genuine Muslim, barred him from re-entering the city until he sought pardon and the Prophet ﷺ explicitly permitted him in. And then, worst of all, if anything in that record can be called worst, he was the one who began the slander of ʿĀʾishah. Allah does not name him in Sūrat al-Nūr, but the reference is understood: وَالَّذِي تَوَلَّىٰ كِبْرَهُ مِنْهُمْ لَهُ عَذَابٌ عَظِيمٌ. Tawallā kibrahu has no clean English equivalent, the one who took charge of it, the ringleader, the most arrogant of them. No witnesses would testify against him, so he went unpunished in this world; Allah's answer was لَهُ عَذَابٌ عَظِيمٌ, leave him to Me. More than once ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb asked permission to execute him, and each time the Prophet ﷺ said, let him be, sometimes, Allah did not command me to open up the hearts of men; sometimes, let it not be said that Muḥammad kills his own followers. His pretence of Islam did less harm than his execution would have done.
❧The psychology of the hypocrite
Why would such a man, dying, want the Prophet ﷺ at his bedside at all? Why would he say to him: seek forgiveness for me? Because at one level the Munāfiq does know that Allah is his Creator, and at another level he is too arrogant to submit to Him, a resemblance to Iblīs. This is why the hypocrite is worse than the ordinary disbeliever: the ignorant kāfir does not know Islam at all, and may even be excused on the Day of Judgement, while the Munāfiq knows and refuses. إِنَّ الْمُنَافِقِينَ فِي الدَّرْكِ الْأَسْفَلِ مِنَ النَّارِ, the hypocrites are in the lowest depth of the Fire.
❧The visit, and the shirt
When the summons came, ʿUmar said: yā Rasūlallāh, will you visit him, when he is an enemy of Allah? The Prophet ﷺ did not defend the man. He did not say, no, he is not an enemy of Allah, he is a good fellow. He said instead: I hope that through him Allah will bring a thousand of his people into Islam, a thousand not meant literally, for Ibn Ubayy never had a thousand followers, but as an expression: by showing him kindness I hope to win the hearts of those who look up to him and whose faith is still weak. Islam does take the overall picture into account; you weigh maṣāliḥ against mafāsid and ask what is better for the Ummah as a whole. So he went.
Two reports come down about the shirt. One says the dying man himself asked the Prophet ﷺ for his shirt to be used as his kafan; the more authentic says that after his death it was his son ʿAbdullāh who asked. Both may have happened, the father asking while alive, the son asking for the actual garment afterwards; Allah knows best. What is beyond doubt is that the Prophet ﷺ gave one of his own shirts, and this is a plain instance of tabarruk, of seeking barakah through what belonged to him ﷺ.
❧Umar holds on to his garment
Then the son asked the Prophet ﷺ to lead the funeral prayer. The body was brought to the masjid, and as the Prophet ﷺ stood, ʿUmar took hold of his lower garment and said: yā Rasūlallāh, will you pray over him after he did such and such, and such and such?, reciting the whole curriculum vitae, and then: has Allah not forbidden you to pray for them? Is it not ḥarām to pray over the Munāfiqūn?
Look at what this shows. ʿUmar was comfortable enough with the Prophet ﷺ to remind him of a verse of the Qurʾān. This is not what people today call freedom of speech, that is a different concept, but it does show plainly that a leader may be politely challenged, and this leader was the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Compare that with rulers in our own age, under whom a hundredth of such criticism would mean you are not seen walking the street again.
The Prophet ﷺ answered: rather, Allah has given me a choice, and I have chosen to ask, خَيَّرَنِي رَبِّي. The verse is Sūrat al-Tawbah 80: اسْتَغْفِرْ لَهُمْ أَوْ لَا تَسْتَغْفِرْ لَهُمْ إِن تَسْتَغْفِرْ لَهُمْ سَبْعِينَ مَرَّةً فَلَن يَغْفِرَ اللَّهُ لَهُمْ. Allah had not said do not ask; He had said I will not forgive even if you ask seventy times. So the Prophet ﷺ said: if I knew that seventy-one times would bring them forgiveness, I would ask seventy-one times. That this verse was already revealed tells us that much of Sūrat al-Tawbah had come down by now.
He prayed over him, walked with them to the grave, and al-Ṭabarī even records that he ﷺ went down into the grave himself and helped to bury the man who had done nothing in his entire life but irritate him. There was no lost love between them; he did not like this man at all. But once he was dead, you do not want the Fire even for your worst enemy. And Ibn Ubayy died outwardly professing Islam, so his case is not the case of one like Abū Jahl, who knew Islam and openly rejected it. The mercy of the Prophet ﷺ was such that he wanted even this man to be forgiven if that were possible.
❧Never again
After this came Sūrat al-Tawbah 84, and remember that the numbering came later; the verse came down and the Prophet ﷺ placed it where it belonged, وَلَا تُصَلِّ عَلَىٰ أَحَدٍ مِّنْهُم مَّاتَ أَبَدًا وَلَا تَقُمْ عَلَىٰ قَبْرِهِ: never pray over any of them who dies, and never stand at his grave, إِنَّهُمْ كَفَرُوا بِاللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ. It was revealed precisely because he had stood at Ibn Ubayy's grave and made his usual long duʿāʾ for the deceased. The address is to the Prophet ﷺ, who had been told the names of the chief hypocrites of Madīnah by Jibrīl. It does not transfer to us: nifāq is by definition hidden, we know no one's hypocrisy for certain, and whoever is outwardly a Muslim we judge as a Muslim, pray the janāzah over, and bury in the Muslims' graveyard. And with this incident, all the events of Tabūk are concluded.
❧Could he have submitted to Allah but not to the Messenger?
Asked afterwards whether Ibn Ubayy might be said to have submitted to Allah while refusing the Prophet ﷺ, the shaykh answered that we cannot say that, there may be a grain of truth in the observation, but submission to the Messenger ﷺ is a necessary condition of submission to Allah: وَإِن تُطِيعُوهُ تَهْتَدُوا. In the order of coming to belief, Muḥammadun Rasūlullāh actually precedes Lā ilāha illā Allāh, for how would you know the second except through the first? And Allah swears by the Prophet's ﷺ own Lord that there is no faith without it: فَلَا وَرَبِّكَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ حَتَّىٰ يُحَكِّمُوكَ فِيمَا شَجَرَ بَيْنَهُمْ, until they make you the judge in everything that arises between them, find no resistance in themselves, and وَيُسَلِّمُوا تَسْلِيمًا, submit with a complete submission, the emphasis carried by the mafʿūl muṭlaq. Whoever rejects the Messenger has rejected the message and the One who sent it.