Himyar Asks About the Beginning of Creation

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

A number of delegations came for no other purpose than to learn, to memorise Qurʾān, to study fiqh, and to ask questions. And perhaps the most interesting question ever asked came from Ḥimyar, one of the tribes of Yemen. The ḥadīth is in al-Bukhārī and Muslim, narrated by ʿImrān ibn Ḥuṣayn, and it has generated a great deal of commentary in the books of theology, which we will reference without going down those tangents.

❧The good news the Tamimis would not take

ʿImrān was sitting in the masjid when a delegation arrived from Najd, in the north: Banū Tamīm, announcing their Islam. The Prophet ﷺ said: أَبْشِرُوا, receive glad tidings, O people of Tamīm, meaning the glad tidings of Paradise.

The northerners were reckoned crude and rough Bedouin; the Ḥijāz was the more cultivated part of Arabia, and most of the trouble, the Aḥzāb included, had come from up north. So when he said "good news," they took it to mean the only good news they could imagine, money. They said: قَدْ بَشَّرْتَنَا يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ فَأَعْطِنَا, you have given us good news, so give us something. And the Prophet ﷺ said nothing at all. That silence is itself his adab: when someone misunderstands and is crude with you, let it pass; you do not have to come down to that level.

As they waited, the Ḥimyarites arrived from the south, and they too announced their Islam. And he ﷺ said: O people of Ḥimyar, accept the glad tidings, since Banū Tamīm would not accept them. They said: we accept them, and we have come all the way from Yemen to ask you about this creation, and how Allah created it, and how it all began.

These are deep, philosophical minds for their time: of everything they might have asked, they asked the greatest question imaginable, tell us about the beginning.

❧"There was Allah"

And the answer: كَانَ اللَّهُ وَلَمْ يَكُنْ قَبْلَهُ شَيْءٌ, there was Allah, and there was nothing before Him, and then He created the heavens and the earth, وَكَانَ عَرْشُهُ عَلَى الْمَاءِ, His Throne being upon the water.

Pause there. The ḥadīth itself says He created the heavens and the earth while the Throne was upon the water, so there is a Throne, and there is water, before this world. This is one of the principal evidences of those scholars, Ibn Taymiyyah among them, who held that Allah has created creation other than this creation: what is around us is not all that He has made.

❧The camel

And then, ʿImrān says, as he sat listening, someone called out in the masjid: ʿImrān, your camel has bolted! He ran out, you tied your camel outside the masjid, and saw it fleeing into the desert, and chased it. He caught neither the camel nor the rest of the ḥadīth. How I wish now, he said, that I had let the camel go and stayed for the ḥadīth.

And how we wish it too, because the delegation went home to Yemen and never transmitted the remainder, they did not become scholars of ḥadīth, and ʿImrān, who did, was not there to hear the end of it. For a wisdom known to Allah.