Urwah ibn Mas'ud: the Sahib Ya Sin of his People
historicalShaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:
The great story of the ninth year is the delegation of Thaqīf, the tribe of Ṭāʾif, the tribe that rejected him ﷺ, that the siege after Ḥunayn was fought against, and the one tribe left in the whole of the Ḥijāz still upon paganism. When he ﷺ withdrew from them he said: leave them, they will come to us. And they did. But one incident, which took place in the eighth year and was passed over then, explains why they were so frightened to come, and it belongs here.
❧Who Urwah was
During the siege one of their most respected leaders embraced Islam: ʿUrwah ibn Masʿūd al-Thaqafī. He is not a new name. He is the man of Ḥudaybiyyah, one of the senior noblemen of Thaqīf who happened to be in Makkah on business when the Prophet ﷺ camped there, and who, grieved at what he saw as a ruinous quarrel, asked Quraysh: do you not trust me? Am I not a son to you, a father to you, one of you? Let me go and make peace. Abū Sufyān and Ṣafwān ibn Umayyah and the great men of Quraysh let him go, and that a Thaqafī was allowed to represent Quraysh, before Suhayl ibn ʿAmr and before any of their own, shows what his standing was.
It was he who sat before the Prophet ﷺ and said: you have one of two outcomes, either you defeat your own people and wipe them out, and I know of no man who destroyed his own tribe and came out the victor; or they defeat you. And then he looked around the camp and said he saw no one there worth fighting, no lineage or nobility that he recognised, a hodgepodge, riff-raff thrown together, who would scatter at the first sight of the enemy because they had no banner to hold. In his mind the only possible banner was jāhiliyyah's: ʿaṣabiyyah, tribe. He could not see what was actually holding them together. That is what drew from Abū Bakr the crude and vulgar curse the shaykh has never translated and still will not.
That was also the occasion when ʿUrwah, following the Arab habit of stroking the beard of a peer as a familiarity, reached for the beard of the Prophet ﷺ, and his own nephew al-Mughīrah ibn Shuʿbah struck his hand away with the flat of his scabbard: keep your hand off the beard of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Who is that? he asked, since al-Mughīrah's turban hid his face; and the Prophet ﷺ said: do you not know your own nephew? To which ʿUrwah said: you treacherous one, we are still cleaning up the filth you left behind, meaning the blood-money mess of al-Mughīrah's pre-Islamic crime.
And it was ʿUrwah who went back to Quraysh and said the paragraph that is the height of eloquence: that he had been an envoy to Kisrā and to Qayṣar and to the Najāshī, the very fact that he had been to all three tells you what he was, and had never seen a people revere their leader as the Companions of Muḥammad ﷺ revere him. He never spat but they caught it; he never made wuḍūʾ but they nearly fought over the water; they sat around him as though birds were perched on their heads, and when he ordered a thing they raced each other to do it. That description is precious precisely because it comes from outside, the Companions never described themselves that way, and he was not a Muslim when he said it.
❧Two more places he appears
ʿUrwah is referenced in the Qurʾān, not by name but unmistakably: وَقَالُوا لَوْلَا نُزِّلَ هَٰذَا الْقُرْآنُ عَلَىٰ رَجُلٍ مِّنَ الْقَرْيَتَيْنِ عَظِيمٍ, why was this Qurʾān not sent down upon a great man of the two cities? The two cities are Makkah and Ṭāʾif, and the two great men are al-Walīd ibn al-Mughīrah, the father of Khālid, and ʿUrwah ibn Masʿūd. That is Quraysh's own estimate of him: if this honour were going anywhere, it should have gone to him. And Allah's answer: أَهُمْ يَقْسِمُونَ رَحْمَتَ رَبِّكَ, is it they who apportion the mercy of your Lord?
He appears again in the ḥadīth of al-Bukhārī and Muslim on the Isrāʾ, where the Prophet ﷺ describes the prophets he saw: Mūsā resembling a man of Shanūʾah, the Azd Shanūʾah, known for sharp aquiline features and a browner complexion; ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, whom ʿUrwah ibn Masʿūd resembles more than anyone; Ibrāhīm, whom your own companion resembles, meaning himself ﷺ; and Jibrīl, who resembles Diḥyah al-Kalbī, reckoned the most handsome man in Madinah. For the Companions this told them what ʿĪsā looked like by pointing at ʿUrwah; for us it runs the other way, we know ʿĪsā described as broad-shouldered and broad-browed with glistening hair as though he had just bathed, of lighter complexion, and so we know roughly what ʿUrwah looked like. And note in passing how absurd the European Jesus of the films is: ʿĪsā was of the Children of Isrāʾīl, a man of the Middle East, as everyone knows perfectly well.
❧The adhan on the roof
After Ḥunayn and the siege of Ṭāʾif, in Dhū al-Qaʿdah of the eighth year, as the Prophet ﷺ was on his way home, ʿUrwah slipped out of the city, caught up with him on the road, and embraced Islam before they had even reached Madinah. He ﷺ told him to come with them, in those days a convert from a hostile tribe was expected to emigrate, but ʿUrwah asked to go back to Ṭāʾif and call his people to Islam. Weeks after a siege. The Prophet ﷺ said: I fear they will kill you. ʿUrwah said: yā Rasūlallāh, they love me more than they love their own daughters, if they found me sleeping they would not even wake me. And that had been true, before Islam. So he was given leave to go.
He reached home around Maghrib, and his people, who knew nothing of what he had done, came out to greet him from his journey. That same night he told them: I have accepted Islam, and I invite you to it. They turned on him instantly, curses, every kind of laʿnah, and he was left distressed, and stayed. At Fajr he climbed onto the roof of his house, on the slope of the mountain, and gave the adhān. When he reached أَشْهَدُ أَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ اللَّهِ an arrow came out of the darkness and struck him.
His own people had killed him. Dying, he was asked by his family what should be done, vengeance, or blood money; they would find the man. He said: nothing. This is a gift Allah has given me and you will take no benefit from it; Allah has honoured me with martyrdom. Take no revenge and no money. And bury me with the martyrs of Ḥunayn, outside the family plot, in the graveyard of the Companions his own people had killed. Look at where his loyalty had moved to.
When the news reached the Prophet ﷺ he said the phrase everyone should know: this man was to his people as ṣāḥib Yā Sīn was to his, the man of Sūrat Yā Sīn, وَجَاءَ مِنْ أَقْصَى الْمَدِينَةِ رَجُلٌ يَسْعَىٰ قَالَ يَا قَوْمِ اتَّبِعُوا الْمُرْسَلِينَ * اتَّبِعُوا مَن لَّا يَسْأَلُكُمْ أَجْرًا وَهُم مُّهْتَدُونَ, who called his people to the messengers and was killed by them for it.
Two things follow. First, what they did was monstrous even by their own code: not merely a murder, but the murder of one of their own, and not any of their own but the most respected leader they had. Second, is it not remarkable that the Prophet ﷺ knew ʿUrwah's people better than ʿUrwah did? Partly because he is the Messenger of Allah ﷺ; but also because a man inside a situation is blinded by it, and cannot see it as a third party sees it. ʿUrwah was certain: they would never do this to me, I am who I am. And he was wrong.