The expedition of Usāmah ibn Zayd

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

After the Farewell Ḥajj the Prophet ﷺ returned to Medina in Dhū al-Ḥijjah of the tenth year, and this was his final journey, he never left the city again until he passed away. He stayed through Muḥarram, and then, toward the very end of Ṣafar, he resolved to send an expedition against the Romans, the Byzantine Empire, and in particular Shām and Palestine. He called for a force to be gathered, senior Companions among them, including Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, announced that they should ready their arms, and, though he himself would not go, appointed to lead them a youth of seventeen or eighteen: Usāmah ibn Zayd.

❧The son of the beloved Zayd

This is the son of that Zayd he had once adopted, before Islam abolished adoption, the same Zayd of whom the Ṣaḥābah said that, had he still been alive the day the Prophet ﷺ died, none would have thought to look past him to lead after him. After his divorce from Zaynab, Zayd had married Umm Ayman, and who was Umm Ayman? She was the servant of Āminah, who had cared for the Prophet ﷺ as an infant, and one of the very few still alive who had known his mother and father, ʿAbdullāh and Āminah; a mother-figure to him, who would outlive him by a few years. Their son Usāmah was born and raised in the very house of the Prophet ﷺ, so beloved that the people gave him a title, ḥibbu Rasūlillāh, "the beloved of the Messenger of Allāh." Zayd himself had become a martyr at the Battle of Muʾtah, killed by the Romans, and now his son was seventeen or eighteen.

❧The murmuring over his youth

When the Prophet ﷺ set Usāmah over an army that held the most senior Companions, rumours spread and people began to mutter: why put this boy in charge of us? They faulted that he was not Qurashī, that his father had been a mawlā, a freed slave, and though Islam came to abolish exactly this, the Prophet ﷺ had said that four things of jāhiliyyah would linger in his Ummah until the Day of Judgment, the first of them racism. It was talked of openly in the city, and some raised a genuine objection: he is too young, only seventeen or eighteen. So the Prophet ﷺ gathered them and rebuked them: "if you fault his leadership, you faulted the leadership of his father before him, and by Allāh, his father was worthy of it, and paved the way for us," reminding them of Zayd's command and the road toward Tabūk that Zayd had opened; "and by Allāh, this one is worthy of leadership too, and he is among the most beloved of people to me after his father." It was a wise choice on many counts: Usāmah's own father had been killed by the Romans, so who better to send against them, and in one report he ﷺ told Usāmah to march to the very place his father had fallen, though Usāmah was bound beyond Muʾtah, into Syria itself.

❧The symbolism

Usāmah left on the last day of Ṣafar; but a day or two out of the city a messenger came running, sent by the anxious people, not by the Prophet ﷺ, saying he had fallen ill, and to wait. The army camped outside Medina for some days, and Usāmah came back and visited the Prophet ﷺ on the very day of his death; and after his death, the first decision the Ṣaḥābah faced was what to do with this army, and eventually it marched, and became the first Muslim force to defeat the Roman Empire, opening the way to the conquest of Syria and Palestine. There is no doubt, the shaykh says, that Allāh chose to take His Prophet ﷺ just after this decision, and the symbolism is unmistakable: Islam was never to halt at the borders of Arabia. It is not an Arabian phenomenon but a global one, and he was pointing the Ummah toward the holiest land after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem, and laying the foundation for every conquest to come, of the Sassanids, of Egypt and North Africa all the way to Spain: go forth, and carry the light of Islam and the reach of Dār al-Islām to these peoples. For now the expedition was halted, and the Prophet ﷺ fell sick.