The Christians of Najran and the Mubahalah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The last incident, and one of the most interesting: the delegation of the Christians of Najrān, a famous province of Arabia to this day, then almost entirely Christian and closely tied to the Roman emperor.

❧The letter and the council

The Prophet ﷺ had written to them some months earlier, addressing them in the name of the God of Ibrāhīm, Isḥāq and Yaʿqūb, calling them to worship Allah, and setting out three options: accept, which is better for you; or pay the jizyah; or else fighting.

They held a council. One said: we know a prophet has been foretold among the children of Ismāʿīl, how do we know this is not the one? And this is worth noting: they were expecting a prophet, as many other reports show, and there are clear indications in the Old Testament to this day of a prophet to come from the children of Ishmael, and the people of Najrān are testifying to it. Another said: and even if he is not a prophet but a king, we need to know his strength before we choose between the three. So they agreed on the one course everyone could accept, send a delegation to Madinah and judge for themselves.

Ibn Isḥāq says sixty men came, which makes it one of the largest delegations ever; the usual delegation was two men, or five, or ten. Of the sixty, twenty-four were of their nobility, three were bishops of some rank, and one was a patriarch. Part of the purpose was to impress by sheer number, and part to see the situation for themselves.

❧Christians praying in the masjid

When they came in, the Companions said they had never seen a delegation like it, the dress, the manners, the customs all different; these were not the pagans of Arabia but a people with a civilisation modelled on Rome. They arrived at the time of ʿAṣr, and it was the hour of their own prayer, so they asked leave to pray. The Companions wanted to refuse them. The Prophet ﷺ let them pray.

So they turned east, as the Christians of old did, and as the Syriac churches still do, which in the masjid meant facing one of the side walls, neither the qiblah nor away from it. And they prayed their prayer in the masjid of the Prophet ﷺ. That is a very significant thing.

❧Who is the father of Jesus?

Then the discussions began, over perhaps three days, maybe four; not more than that from the reports. On the first day they asked a great deal about ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, and eventually put the question: if you agree with us that ʿĪsā was born of a virgin, then who is his father? And he ﷺ said: I have no answer for you now; wait, and Allah will answer you.

The next day Allah revealed the first sixty verses of Sūrat Āl ʿImrān. Much of that sūrah had come down at Uḥud, the middle of it, but the opening belongs to the ninth year. In it: إِنَّ مَثَلَ عِيسَىٰ عِندَ اللَّهِ كَمَثَلِ آدَمَ خَلَقَهُ مِن تُرَابٍ ثُمَّ قَالَ لَهُ كُن فَيَكُونُ, the likeness of ʿĪsā with Allah is the likeness of Ādam: He created him from dust, then said to him "Be," and he was. You ask about the father of Jesus? What about Ādam? ʿĪsā needs no father; Allah has only to say kun.

They were also arguing over whether Ibrāhīm was a Christian or a Jew, they said a Christian, and some had said a Jew, and Allah revealed in the same sūrah: مَا كَانَ إِبْرَاهِيمُ يَهُودِيًّا وَلَا نَصْرَانِيًّا وَلَٰكِن كَانَ حَنِيفًا مُّسْلِمًا وَمَا كَانَ مِنَ الْمُشْرِكِينَ.

❧The verse of mutual invocation

And in the same sūrah is the verse of the mubāhalah, the mutual invocation of the curse: فَمَنْ حَاجَّكَ فِيهِ مِن بَعْدِ مَا جَاءَكَ مِنَ الْعِلْمِ فَقُلْ تَعَالَوْا نَدْعُ أَبْنَاءَنَا وَأَبْنَاءَكُمْ وَنِسَاءَنَا وَنِسَاءَكُمْ وَأَنفُسَنَا وَأَنفُسَكُمْ ثُمَّ نَبْتَهِلْ فَنَجْعَل لَّعْنَتَ اللَّهِ عَلَى الْكَاذِبِينَ.

So at the end of the second day of argument he ﷺ said, in effect: enough. If you still hold that you are upon the truth, there is a simple solution. Call your children and we will call ours; your women and ours; bring yourselves and we bring ourselves, and then we invoke the curse of Allah upon whichever party is lying about Him. Both cannot be right: either Jesus is the divine son of God or he is not.

This shows that mubāhalah is permitted on rare occasions. It is not the norm and not how daʿwah begins, it is how it may end, once legitimate argument has been exhausted. And note why the children and the women are called first and oneself last: it is far more painful to see Allah's curse fall on them than on yourself.

The next day the Prophet ﷺ had his family ready, his daughter, and Ḥasan and Ḥusayn and the rest: this is the Ahl al-Bayt. The Shīʿah make a great deal of this, and there is nothing to dispute in it: yes, that is his Ahl al-Bayt, and who would deny it? It simply does not follow that ʿAlī was thereby entitled to the caliphate; do not mix apples and oranges.

But in the meantime the Christians had talked among themselves and concluded: if he is a prophet and we do this, we shall be wiped off the face of the earth. So they came back and said: we decline the mubāhalah, and we accept the jizyah. We will not leave our religion, and we will pay whatever is asked.

❧The treaty, and what came after

He ﷺ set them a reasonable jizyah: so much cloth a year and so much silver, Najrān imported cloth from both Persia and Rome, and cloth was a commodity the Arabs did not manufacture; leather and hides were what they exported. And the terms ran "for as long as Allah wills": he never made a treaty in perpetuity, always with a clause allowing it to be rescinded. Some fifteen years later ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb told them the Muslims no longer needed their money and sent them on to Roman territory, wanting the peninsula to be purely Muslim, which is why to this day there is no indigenous non-Muslim population in Arabia.

They also asked for a judge to settle their internal disputes, since they held the Muslims to be honest people, so he ﷺ sent Abū ʿUbaydah ʿĀmir ibn al-Jarrāḥ to Najrān for a time to arbitrate among them.

❧The patriarch's confession

Al-Bayhaqī in Dalāʾil al-Nubuwwah records what happened on the road home. A younger brother of the patriarch said something derogatory about the Prophet ﷺ, and the patriarch told him: do not curse him. Why not? Because he is the prophet, the one who was foretold. And the brother said: then why did you not accept him? We only follow you because we thought he was not.

The patriarch answered: would you have us give up all the honour and wealth and standing the Emperor has given us? How could we do that? And the young man was so shocked that he left his people, came to Madinah, and became a Muslim.

So the seniors among them recognised him, and the rest simply followed their seniors, which shows how much the elite matter. The bulk of mankind follows the people it looks up to, and that is why the Prophet ﷺ concentrated on reaching the higher rank: wherever a chieftain or a nobleman converted, the rest came far more easily. That is the way of Allah in His creation.