The Delegation of Thaqif and the Destruction of al-Lat

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

After the killing of ʿUrwah ibn Masʿūd, the people of Ṭāʾif were terrified. His blood was on their hands, their consciences were eating them, and now they had to go to Madinah. Ibn Isḥāq records a long back-and-forth in which each of them refuses to go, we need not confuse ourselves with the names, until they settled it out of cowardice: let all the leaders go together. So six or seven of the seniors came with their entourage, in Ramaḍān of the ninth year. They feared they would be called to account for the blood of their own kinsman.

❧The race to bring the news

When they reached Madinah, their relative al-Mughīrah ibn Shuʿbah, ʿUrwah's nephew, of Thaqīf, either was contacted by them or noticed them, and was overjoyed: his own tribe, coming in at last. They told him they would embrace Islam only on conditions, that they had come to negotiate; he was delighted anyway, and ran for the masjid. Abū Bakr met him on the way and asked what the matter was, and when he heard, said: I ask you by Allah, let me be the one to bring the Prophet ﷺ this good news. And al-Mughīrah gave up the honour to him.

See how eager the Companions were for his favour ﷺ: to be the one who brings a man joy is itself a prize, and they competed for it. Abū Bakr ran and announced that Thaqīf had come to accept Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ was overjoyed and had them brought in.

❧Every protocol ignored

Al-Mughīrah went back and coached them: this is how you greet him, you say al-salāmu ʿalaykum, you address him as yā Rasūlallāh. The Companions taught the delegations protocol as one briefs any visiting dignitary. Thaqīf ignored all of it. They greeted him with the greetings of jāhiliyyah, ʿimta ṣabāḥan, ʿimta masāʾan, and addressed him by his bare name, though Allah says لَّا تَجْعَلُوا دُعَاءَ الرَّسُولِ بَيْنَكُمْ كَدُعَاءِ بَعْضِكُم بَعْضًا. It was the height of disrespect, and it shows that īmān was not yet in their hearts.

And the Prophet ﷺ ignored every bit of it. That is his karam and his akhlāq, he never took anything personally. He treated them as honoured guests and ordered a guest tent pitched for them inside the masjid, when visitors would normally be housed elsewhere.

❧Ten days of haggling

The negotiations ran at least ten days. Khālid ibn Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ, a Qurashī and a distant cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, was made the emissary, in the manner of the Arabs, and perhaps of every age, the two principals do not meet until the terms have been settled lower down. He carried questions and answers between the tent and the Prophet ﷺ. And so convinced were they of their own guilt that they suspected poison in the food, and would not touch a meal until Khālid had eaten from it in front of them.

They opened by asking whether a treaty was possible at all, after everything. He ﷺ answered: yes, if you embrace Islam. Without Islam there is nothing to discuss; go back, and we will fight.

So the questions began, and notice their order. First: we have heard that ribā is forbidden, money before anything else. He recited them the verse, and when they said that all their wealth and all their profit was in ribā, he said: لَكُمْ رُءُوسُ أَمْوَالِكُمْ, you keep your principal. Then: what about zinā? We travel constantly, we are merchants, we need it. The answer came back that Allah has forbidden it, إِنَّهُ كَانَ فَاحِشَةً وَسَاءَ سَبِيلًا. And the third, you can guess it, khamr: Ṭāʾif was famous for its grapes and its wine, it is our culture, the climate is cold, make an exception. And back came يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِنَّمَا الْخَمْرُ وَالْمَيْسِرُ وَالْأَنصَابُ وَالْأَزْلَامُ رِجْسٌ مِّنْ عَمَلِ الشَّيْطَانِ فَاجْتَنِبُوهُ لَعَلَّكُمْ تُفْلِحُونَ.

They conferred, and one of them said: by Allah, we cannot go home and tell our people that ribā and zinā and khamr are all forbidden, they will never accept it from us. When there is no īmān in the heart it is very hard to see how such things could ever be given up. But another said: what is the alternative? By Allah, if we go back and he sends another army, we last less than a month. They were not being forced by the sword, no one was ever forced into Islam by the Prophet ﷺ, but the alternative to Islam was leaving everything and finding land elsewhere. And then, to console them, one of them said: after all, look at the people around him, did they not give up ribā and zinā and khamr? Look at them now; they are living fine. If they can do it, so can we.

That is a beautiful thing, and it is the psychology of having a good Ummah: the new convert looks around and sees that it can be done.

❧Al-Lat

Only then, having settled the stomach and the appetites first, which is how weak man thinks, did they get to the far bigger matter: our idol. Al-Lāt, the second most prestigious deity in all of Arabia and the pride of Ṭāʾif. He ﷺ said: it is to be destroyed. No question. So they asked for three years to acclimatise. No. Two. No. One. No. Twelve months, eleven, all the way down to a single month, and no. There is no compromise, least of all in tawḥīd.

Then they sent back word that they themselves could not destroy it, and to that he ﷺ agreed: you do not have to; we will take charge of it.

Then came the pillars, and they haggled over those too. We cannot bend our backs, the cold, and so on, so excuse us from ṣalāh. And the answer: لَا خَيْرَ فِي دِينٍ لَا صَلَاةَ فِيهِ, there is no good in a religion that has no prayer in it. There is no such thing as a religion without ṣalāh. Then: excuse us from wuḍūʾ, Ṭāʾif is bitterly cold, and that is true, and it was refused too.

❧Zakah and jihad: the fiqh question

Then they asked to be excused from zakāh and from jihād, and here the Prophet ﷺ said: you are excused. And when they had left a few days later he said: they shall give zakāh and they shall go out for jihād.

What happened here? Two readings. The first: he ﷺ said it knowing that once īmān entered their hearts they would do both of their own accord, in which case this is particular to him alone, since Allah had shown him the outcome, and no other leader may make such a condition. And their descendants did indeed become practising Muslims. The second reading is legal: that the political leader has the right to accept unsound conditions from new Muslims for a period, and to enforce the full law later. Is the incident theological or a legal precedent? The scholars differ. If it is a precedent, then in a hypothetical Islamic state a group might embrace Islam on a condition that contradicts Islam, and the leader might accept it, some scholars say yes, on the strength of this, because historically everyone who enters Islam ends up living it from the heart.

This does not translate directly into fiqh where we live, but practically it carries an enormous lesson. When a non-Muslim in the West shows interest in Islam and is saying or doing things that are not fully Islamic, be ultra-lenient. Emphasise what matters most and overlook the rest, do not justify the ḥarām, do not say the drugs are fine, but cut them a million times more slack than you would cut a Muslim, because the īmān is a glimmer and you want it to grow. Be harsh and enforce everything at once and you will simply drive the person away. Bring them in, let them come to the masjid, let them read the Qurʾān, and the rest will follow. And even if it does not, a Muslim with that sin is a million times better off than someone who never entered Islam at all.

There are ordinary cases of this. A married woman wants to convert and her husband does not, do you open with "then you must leave your husband," when she has three children? There is even an opinion that if the wife of a non-Muslim couple converts, the marriage stands, because she did not contract the nikāḥ as a Muslim and that is a different question from contracting one as a Muslim, which is unanimously not allowed for a Muslim woman. Whether or not one holds that opinion, this is not the moment to raise it. Or someone holds a theologically shaky view, that the story of Ādam and Ḥawwāʾ is a fable, say, because of evolution. Let him pray, let him come to know the sanctity of the Qurʾān, let him enter Islam, and come back to that later. Use wisdom.

❧Fifteen days, and a leader chosen

Ibn Isḥāq says they stayed fifteen days, and embraced Islam around the tenth. It was Ramaḍān, so they fasted with the Prophet ﷺ, and had their suḥūr and their ifṭār in the masjid, brought to them by Bilāl. On the first day, when the suḥūr came, they said: we cannot eat, the sun has already risen, and Bilāl said, I have just come from the Prophet ﷺ and he is eating now. And when ifṭār came they said: not yet, the sun has not set, and Bilāl said, I have come to you only after the Prophet ﷺ broke his fast. Meaning he ﷺ would delay the suḥūr and hasten the ifṭār; the fast is broken when the disc disappears, though the brightness is still in the sky. New Muslims being over-cautious on their first day.

The youngest of the party, ʿUthmān ibn Abī al-ʿĀṣ, had embraced Islam before the rest. While the seniors sat in the tent he spent his days outside it, with the Prophet ﷺ memorising the Qurʾān and with Abū Bakr learning how to pray. When they were about to leave, Abū Bakr suggested making him their leader, and the Prophet ﷺ agreed, the youngest set over them all, because he was the most eager for the Qurʾān and for Islam, and had learned some sūrahs and some fiqh in fifteen days.

❧Al-Mughirah's prank

The delegation went home and told their people there was no option: Islam was part of the terms. One can imagine how that was received. The Prophet ﷺ then sent al-Mughīrah ibn Shuʿbah and Abū Sufyān to destroy al-Lāt.

Some later works of Sīrah, not Ibn Isḥāq; al-Rawḍ al-Unuf and others, record something that amuses everyone who reads it. Al-Mughīrah, it seems, was a prankster. He asked Abū Sufyān whether he would like to see a joke played on them, and Abū Sufyān said, by all means. So with the whole town gathered and tense, the women weeping, the elders wailing, everyone certain that something terrible was about to happen to whoever touched the idol, he swung his axe at it, let out a great cry, and fell flat on his face. The tribe went wild with joy: did we not tell you! And while they were in full cry he jumped up and called them fools, cursed them, yā khubathāʾ, and told them he had done it precisely to show them how foolish they were. Whether that is quite the Islamic way of doing things, Allah knows best. Then he destroyed it in front of them, blow by blow.

The keeper of the idol, the man in charge of the sanctuary, grew furious and told him that when he reached the foundations the earth would swallow him. So he said: then I will not stop until I have taken it down to the ground. And he did, until nothing of al-Lāt was left.

The Prophet ﷺ sent word to ʿUthmān ibn Abī al-ʿĀṣ, now their leader, to build a masjid on the spot where al-Lāt had stood, and to this day there is a masjid where they used to worship her. As for the treasure of the sanctuary: every pagan temple accumulates wealth, as the great temples still do, because worshippers leave food, eaten, of course, by those who "care for" the idol, and money and gold and silver, until the place is a bank and a fortress. All of it was taken into the Bayt al-Māl and distributed by the Prophet ﷺ to the poor and the destitute.

A question was raised afterwards about that wealth, and about the food. Once the temple has come under the authority of Dār al-Islām its property passes to the Bayt al-Māl. But food that has been consecrated to an idol, where we have not taken the temple, is ḥarām for us to eat, وَمَا أُهِلَّ لِغَيْرِ اللَّهِ; it has been dedicated to other than Allah, and if we came across it we would give it to the animals. Anything slaughtered or offered to other than Allah is forbidden to us, and the Qurʾān is explicit about it.

So ended the paganism of Thaqīf. They came to Islam wholeheartedly in the end, exactly as the Prophet ﷺ had said they would, and in the end they gave the zakāh and they went out for jihād.