Picture the scale of what is happening. A man who, twenty years earlier, was an orphan trader from a desert town with no army and no kingdom, is now dictating letters to the two superpowers of the planet: Heraclius in Rome, Chosroes in Persia, and to the Negus of Abyssinia, the Muqawqis of Egypt, and a dozen rulers besides. The scholars count more than twenty-five such letters. They were not sent all at once; they began around the truce of Hudaybiyyah and kept going until the end of his life ﷺ.
Each letter was a single short paragraph. Each one carried the same invitation. And within a single decade, every land he wrote to had entered the fold of Islam. Today is the chapter of the letters: who answered, who scoffed, and what it means that a man from Makkah decided the whole earth was his audience.
Aiming at the whole world
The timing tells you everything. The Prophet ﷺ waited until Hudaybiyyah had bought him peace on the Makkan front, and then he turned outward, all the way outward. Not to a rival tribe, not to a neighbouring town, but to the emperors who divided the known world between them.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi asks you to notice both who received a letter and who did not. The Prophet ﷺ wrote to Rome, to Persia, to Abyssinia, to Egypt, to the Arab princes on the borders. He did not write to China, or to the heart of Africa, though everyone knew those civilisations existed. There was simply no road of contact to them yet. So this was not a fantasy of a man overreaching; it was a deliberate, pragmatic announcement that the small community in Madinah was now a nation worthy of exchanging ambassadors with kings. The message of Islam was being declared, on purpose, global.
Read the letters and a discipline emerges. Each one opens with Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, then 'from Muhammad, the slave and messenger of Allah, to so and so.' Each names the ruler by his proudest title: the great one of Rome, the great one of Persia. Each states the whole religion in four or five plain sentences: there is one God, worship Him alone. And each is tailored to its reader, as you are about to see. This is the etiquette of a head of state, and he ﷺ used it precisely.
The Negus, who only needed a nudge
قُلْ يَا أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ تَعَالَوْا إِلَىٰ كَلِمَةٍ سَوَاءٍ بَيْنَنَا وَبَيْنَكُمْ أَلَّا نَعْبُدَ إِلَّا اللَّهَ وَلَا نُشْرِكَ بِهِ شَيْئًا وَلَا يَتَّخِذَ بَعْضُنَا بَعْضًا أَرْبَابًا مِّن دُونِ اللَّهِ ۚ فَإِن تَوَلَّوْا فَقُولُوا اشْهَدُوا بِأَنَّا مُسْلِمُونَ
“Say, "O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you - that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as lords instead of Allah." But if they turn away, then say, "Bear witness that we are Muslims [submitting to Him]."”
Surah Al Imran 3:64 Read 3:64 with tafsir
The first letter, and the one that truly landed, went to the Negus of Abyssinia, the just Christian king who had once sheltered the Muslims when Makkah hunted them. His title was Najashi; his name was Ashama. The Prophet ﷺ wrote to him about Isa, peace be upon him: that he is the messenger of Allah, His spirit, and the pure word given to Maryam. Then the same call that closed many of these letters: come to a word held in common between us, that we worship none but Allah. It is the verse of Al Imran, and you will meet it again in the letter to Rome.
Sheikh Yasir clears up a tangle here. People often assume the Negus accepted Islam years earlier, when Jafar gave his famous speech in the throne room. But if he had, why would the Prophet ﷺ be writing to invite him now? The likelier truth is that the Negus had long been sympathetic, open, leaning, and this letter was the gentle push that brought him in. And notice what is missing from his letter: the stern warning that closes the letters to Rome and Persia, that the sin of your people will be on you if you refuse. The Negus was spared that line. He did not need a threat. He needed an invitation.
He accepted. And the proof of how much that meant came at his death, in the ninth year. On the very morning the Negus passed away in Abyssinia, the Prophet ﷺ told his Companions in Madinah: your brother has died in Habasha, come, let us pray over him. And they prayed the funeral prayer for a man whose body lay a sea away. The Sheikh pauses on this as the single clearest case of the absent funeral prayer, salat al-ghaib, in the entire seerah, and the foundation of the soundest position in fiqh: that it is prayed for a believer when no one has prayed over him where he died.
Heraclius interrogates an enemy
The most famous of all these letters went to Caesar, the emperor of Rome, and it is preserved in both Bukhari and Muslim. The Caesar of that day was Heraclius, a warrior, a politician, and, unusually for an emperor, a serious student of Christian theology. Allah had already named his story in the Qur'an: the Romans had been crushed by the Persians, who took Damascus and even Jerusalem, and it looked like the end of Rome. Then, exactly as promised, Heraclius regrouped, counter-attacked, and by the year 628 had driven all the way to the Persian capital. All of it happened while the Prophet ﷺ was alive to see the prophecy come true.
The letter reached him through the governor of Bosra, the Arab town south of Damascus where the Makkan caravans traded, and it found Heraclius in Jerusalem. What happened next is one of the great scenes of the seerah, and it is narrated, astonishingly, by an enemy: Abu Sufyan himself, who was trading in Syria and was suddenly summoned to the emperor's court. Heraclius wanted to test the man claiming prophethood, so he called for the Arab who was his closest relative. That was Abu Sufyan, and he was made to stand in front while his companions stood behind him, with this instruction given to them: if he lies, signal it. Abu Sufyan later admitted that the only thing stopping him from lying was the shame of being caught out by his own companions.
So the truth came out, one question at a time. Is he of noble family? Yes. Did anyone before him claim prophethood? No. Were his ancestors kings? No. Do the powerful follow him or the weak? The weak, and they keep increasing. Does anyone abandon his religion once they enter it? Never. Has he ever broken a promise? No, and we are in a treaty with him now whose end we cannot predict. Does he betray? No. What does he order? To worship Allah alone, to pray, to be truthful, to be chaste, to keep family ties.
How could a man honest about gold lie about God
Then Heraclius did something extraordinary: he read the answers back, and out of an enemy's reluctant testimony he reconstructed a prophet. Dr. Yasir Qadhi walks through his reasoning because it is a masterclass. Noble lineage, he said, is how the prophets always come. No one claimed prophethood before him, so this is no fashion he is copying. No kings in his line, so this is no scheme to win back a throne. The poor follow him first, and that too is the mark of every prophet, for the powerful have the most to lose from the truth. His followers grow and never leave, and that is faith, once it enters a heart it does not exit.
And then the line the Sheikh lingers on. Heraclius said: you tell me this man never lied to you about gold and silver. So how could a man who would not lie about money turn around and invent the greatest lie of all, a lie against God Himself? It does not add up. A pagan enemy, Abu Sufyan, is being handed the logic of belief by a Christian emperor in a Roman court.
Then Heraclius said it plainly: if what you say is true, this man will one day rule the very ground beneath my feet. I knew a prophet was coming, but I did not expect him from among you Arabs. And if I could reach him, I would wash his feet. Only now did he call for the letter to be opened: from Muhammad, the slave and messenger of Allah, to Heraclius, the great one of Rome. Accept Islam and you will be safe; accept Islam and Allah will give you your reward twice over; and if you turn away, the sin of the common people will be upon you. Then the verse of Al Imran again. The court erupted, and Abu Sufyan was rushed out, muttering to his companions that the matter of this man had grown so great that even the emperor of Rome now feared him. That, Abu Sufyan would later confess, was the first moment Islam ever entered his heart, though he would not embrace it openly until the conquest of Makkah, years later, and even then with some reluctance. The Sheikh notes, with no disrespect intended, that those who came late are not like those who came early.
The spy from Tanukh, and an emperor who counted the cost
There is a sequel that Bukhari does not tell but the Musnad of Imam Ahmad does, and Dr. Yasir Qadhi insists you need it to understand what follows. Heraclius wrote back, but really he sent a spy: a trusted Christian Arab from the tribe of Tanukh, carrying a letter as a cover. His true mission was to check three things. Does this prophet mention the letters he has sent to the kings? Does his speech somehow turn on the word 'night'? And is there a strange mark between his shoulders?
The man from Tanukh arrived, and the Prophet ﷺ, without opening the letter, told him: I sent my letter to Chosroes and he tore it, so Allah will tear his kingdom; and I sent my letter to Caesar and he preserved it, so Allah will preserve his kingdom. Check one. Then the letter's question was read aloud: if your Paradise is as vast as the heavens and the earth, then where is the Fire? And the Prophet ﷺ answered with a question of his own: where does the night go when the day comes? Check two, the word 'night' delivered exactly. The spy lingered for days trying to glimpse the man's back, and could not, until at his departure the Prophet ﷺ turned, lowered his garment, and showed him the seal of prophethood. Three checks, all confirmed.
Only then, in the second Bukhari scene, does Heraclius gather his senators behind closed doors and float the question: what if I were to follow this messenger? The room bolted for the doors in fury. So he laughed it off, told them he was only testing their loyalty, and stayed a Christian to his death. He had seen the truth, weighed it against his crown, and chosen the crown. And his own prediction came due faster than anyone imagined: within seven years of his standing in Jerusalem, Damascus, Syria and Palestine were gone, carved away by, as the Sheikh puts it, a band of Bedouins from the desert. He lived to watch the empire shrink exactly as he had foretold.
Chosroes tears the letter
الم غُلِبَتِ الرُّومُ فِي أَدْنَى الْأَرْضِ وَهُم مِّن بَعْدِ غَلَبِهِمْ سَيَغْلِبُونَ فِي بِضْعِ سِنِينَ ۗ لِلَّهِ الْأَمْرُ مِن قَبْلُ وَمِن بَعْدُ ۚ وَيَوْمَئِذٍ يَفْرَحُ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ بِنَصْرِ اللَّهِ ۚ يَنصُرُ مَن يَشَاءُ ۖ وَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الرَّحِيمُ
“Alif, Lam, Meem. The Byzantines have been defeated In the nearest land. But they, after their defeat, will overcome Within three to nine years. To Allah belongs the command [i.e., decree] before and after. And that day the believers will rejoice In the victory of Allah. He gives victory to whom He wills, and He is the Exalted in Might, the Merciful.”
Surah ar-Rum 30:1-5 Read 30:1 with tafsir
Rome preserved the letter. Persia did the opposite. The emperor was Chosroes, known in our cultures as Parvez, the last of the great Sasanian kings, painted by Muslim and non-Muslim historians alike as cruel and given to excess. The Prophet ﷺ sent his letter through the governor of Bahrain: from Muhammad the messenger of Allah to Chosroes, the great one of Persia. Peace upon whoever follows the guidance. Accept Islam and be safe; and if you refuse, the sin of the Magians is on you. There was no verse of Al Imran in this one, because Chosroes was no person of the Book.
The emperor was insulted that a desert preacher would address him as an equal. He scoffed, and he tore the letter to pieces in front of the messenger's face. When word reached Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ said: he has torn my letter; may Allah tear his kingdom to shreds. And so it went. Chosroes ordered a governor in Yemen to fetch this man from Madinah by force, as if two men could drag back the Prophet ﷺ whom all of Quraysh had failed to stop. But before the order could move, his own son staged a coup, imprisoned him, and starved him to death over days in a dungeon. When the spies stood before the Prophet ﷺ, he told them to go back to their master: my Lord has killed his lord, Chosroes, this very day. They returned to find it had happened exactly so.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi stops on the dates here, and the point is sharp. Western records fix the death of Chosroes to late February of 628, and it lands precisely on the month the seerah places that conversation. You cannot, he argues, fabricate that kind of seam, a prediction in Madinah matching an emperor's death in Persia to the season. Within nine years the entire Sasanian empire, the very civilisation that had nearly erased Rome, imploded so completely that the fires of Zoroaster went cold in the land of Zoroaster, and Persia became Muslim. The governor in Yemen and his two envoys embraced Islam, and so did much of their region.
Egypt, and a verse for the rest
إِنَّ الْأَرْضَ لِلَّهِ يُورِثُهَا مَن يَشَاءُ مِنْ عِبَادِهِ
“Indeed, the earth belongs to Allah. He causes to inherit it whom He wills of His servants.”
Surah al-A'raf 7:128 Read 7:128 with tafsir
The next batch of letters went out across the map. To the Muqawqis, the ruler of Egypt, whose true text we do not soundly have, but whose reply we do: he was polite, declined the faith, and sent gifts, among them the mule Duldul and Mariyah, who would become the mother of the Prophet's ﷺ son Ibrahim. Of him the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have said that the man had safeguarded his kingdom for a time by his courtesy, but Allah would not let that kingdom endure. Letters went to the rulers of Oman, who accepted, and to many Arab chiefs besides; the scholars list more than twenty.
One of those letters went to the tribe of Banu Hanifa, and to a man among them named Musaylimah, who would later make himself infamous. Banu Hanifa sent back a bargain: we will accept Islam if you share your power with us. The Prophet ﷺ answered with the Qur'an, the words Allah gave to Musa before him: the earth belongs to Allah; He gives it as an inheritance to whom He wills among His servants. The kingdom of God is not a seat to be split in a negotiation. You know, as the Sheikh reminds you, what became of Musaylimah after that.
And here Dr. Yasir Qadhi offers the reading that is most his own. Each letter to Rome and Persia warned the ruler that he would carry the sin of his people, and to the Caesar the burden was named with a word that has puzzled scholars for centuries: al-Arisiyyin, not an Arabic word at all. He follows the great Indian scholar Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi: that it means the followers of Arius, the early theologian whose teaching about Isa, peace be upon him, ran closer to the truth of Islam than any other Christian sect, condemned and nearly erased at the Council of Nicaea three centuries before. If so, the Prophet ﷺ, in a desert where no one had heard of these Christian disputes, was telling Heraclius: there is a people among you primed to believe; block the message from reaching them, and their loss is on your account. The Sheikh finds this the strongest reading, and a quiet proof of how far this man's ﷺ awareness reached beyond his sands.