Mālik ibn ʿAwf Reinstated, and 'No King Would Do This'

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

After Hawāzin embraced Islam and their families were restored, the Prophet ﷺ asked after their leader, Mālik ibn ʿAwf al-Naṣrī, the same young commander who had insisted, against the elders, on driving the women and children onto the battlefield, and who had instigated and led the whole attack. He had escaped into Ṭāʾif. So the Prophet ﷺ sent word: if Mālik came as a Muslim, he would have his family and property returned and a hundred camels besides.

❧A no-brainer, and a reinstatement

Having lost his tribe, his family, his wealth, everything, Mālik had no life left to cling to; he came, accepted Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ reinstated him as chieftain of the very tribe he had led into war. It was not the first time: the same had happened with Banū Ḥārithah, whose chief (father-in-law of the Prophet's ﷺ wife Maymūnah) went home as their leader after conversion. And it teaches a rule of governance, appoint local leaders, not outsiders: people follow one of their own ranks, whose lineage they know, and who already knows how to rule them. Mālik composed verses declaring that the Prophet ﷺ truly was a prophet, for he had kept his promise and been generous when he need not have been.

"No king would do this." This is what wealth given freely does. When al-Aqraʿ ibn Ḥābis, another chieftain enriched at Ḥunayn, returned to his people, he said: "By Allāh, this man is a Nabī, for no king would do what he has done. I have just come from a man who has no concern for poverty at all." What man does not care about poverty? Only a Messenger of that rank. Such open-handed generosity, millions given away, not a coin kept, is what drew the hearts of the Arab chieftains to Islam.