Zayd ibn ʿAmr, the Seeker of the Ḥanīfiyyah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Zayd ibn ʿAmr ibn Nufayl (زَيْدُ بْنُ عَمْرِو بْنِ نُفَيْل) has the most striking story of the four Ḥunafāʾ, and the Prophet ﷺ had several encounters with him. He accepted neither Judaism nor Christianity, for neither satisfied him; he told the rabbis and the priests alike, "This is not the religion of Ibrāhīm, and you know it." Returning to Makkah, once he had grown to be respected, he declared: "O people of Quraysh, by Allah, there is none among you upon the religion of Ibrāhīm but me", for all of them had forsaken it.

❧Rescuing the buried daughters

Asmāʾ bint Abī Bakr (أَسْمَاء بِنْت أَبِي بَكْر), the elder sister of ʿĀʾishah and some twenty years her senior, remembered as a young child seeing Zayd ibn ʿAmr lean his back against the Kaʿbah and rebuke the Quraysh for worshipping idols, for the meat they offered to them, and for burying their daughters alive. And how beautiful this is: when a man of Quraysh meant to kill his newborn girl, Zayd would say, "Give her to me. I will provide for her and raise her as my own." So he took in the girls condemned to death and reared them in his household, forbidding their killing, and he refused any share in his people's idolatry.

❧A kindred spirit

The Prophet ﷺ met Zayd while both were still young men, before the revelation, an inquisitive youth of perhaps seventeen or eighteen, and asked him, مَا شَأْنُكَ, "What is the matter between you and your people?" Zayd explained that he could not worship idols nor do as his people did; and the Prophet ﷺ found in him a kindred spirit, for the Prophet ﷺ himself never once bowed to an idol, never sacrificed to one, never did any of these things.

❧An Ummah unto himself

Zayd died about five years before the call to tawḥīd began. His son Saʿīd ibn Zayd (سَعِيدُ بْنُ زَيْدٍ), one of the ten given glad tidings of Paradise, once asked, "O Messenger of Allah, you knew my father and what he was upon; what will be his fate in the Hereafter?" The Prophet ﷺ answered that he would be raised on the Day of Resurrection as a single nation, an Ummah unto himself. And after the Night Journey the Prophet ﷺ told Saʿīd, "I entered Paradise, and I saw your father, and Allah had blessed him with two gardens." This is a trivia question worth knowing: which Ummah has no prophet? The Ummah of Zayd ibn ʿAmr ibn Nufayl, a one-man nation, who sought the truth alone in a land of idols, because his fiṭrah told him something was wrong.