Quss ibn Sāʿidah at ʿUkāẓ

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Quss ibn Sāʿidah (قُسُّ بْنُ سَاعِدَةَ) was not of Quraysh but of the tribe of Banū Iyād (بَنُو إِيَاد), who dwelt far off, in the region of present-day Oman and Bahrain. He was a very old man, some accounts say eighty or ninety, others exaggerate to a hundred or more, when the Prophet ﷺ, then a young man in his twenties, saw and heard him at the fair of ʿUkāẓ; for Quss would come to Makkah for the Ḥajj, and the Ḥajj gathered the Arabs from every land.

❧The most eloquent of preachers

He preached against idolatry, and was among the most eloquent of the Arabs. His rhymed prose (sajʿ), which is not quite poetry but a manner of speech, was said by some to be the nearest of all Arab speech to the language of the Qurʾān, a sign of how close he stood to the fiṭrah, the pure natural disposition. Among his sayings:

يَا أَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ ٱسْمَعُوا وَعُوا، وَإِذَا سَمِعْتُمْ فَٱنْتَفِعُوا. إِنَّ مَنْ عَاشَ مَاتَ، وَمَنْ مَاتَ فَاتَ، وَكُلُّ مَا هُوَ آتٍ آتٍ.

"O people, listen and understand; and when you hear, then benefit. For whoever lives shall die, and whoever dies is gone, and everything that is to come will surely come."

And, pointing plainly to a reckoning that no prophet had yet taught him:

يَا مَعْشَرَ إِيَاد، أَيْنَ ثَمُودُ وَعَاد؟ وَأَيْنَ ٱلْآبَاءُ وَٱلْأَجْدَاد؟ وَأَيْنَ ٱلْمَعْرُوفُ ٱلَّذِي لَمْ يُشْكَر؟ وَٱلظُّلْمُ ٱلَّذِي لَمْ يُنْكَر؟ أَقْسَمَ قُسٌّ بِٱللَّهِ إِنَّ لِلَّهِ لَدِينًا أَرْضَىٰ مِن دِينِكُمْ هَٰذَا.

"O people of Iyād, where are Thamūd and ʿĀd? Where are the fathers and the forefathers? And where is the good that was never repaid, and the wrong that was never punished? Quss swears by Allah: there is, with Allah, a religion more pleasing than this religion of yours." He knew it not, for the Prophet ﷺ had not yet been sent, but his fiṭrah told him there must be more.

❧Remembered forty years on

Many years later, in the ninth year of the Hijrah, a delegation of Banū Iyād came to accept Islam. The Prophet ﷺ asked after Quss, and was told he had died some four decades before. The Prophet ﷺ said, "I remember him at the fair of ʿUkāẓ upon a red camel, speaking words I have not forgotten. Can any of you recall them for me?" So they recited his words back to him, and the Prophet ﷺ was pleased, for in Quss there remained a trace of the tawḥīd of Ibrāhīm.