Before the lineage, before the birth, before the cave, the seerah pauses to look at the world he ﷺ was sent into. Not the politics of it, not yet, but the soul of it: what people believed, who they worshipped, and how lost they had become. Dr. Yasir Qadhi opens this night with a simple reason. We study black to understand white, night to understand day. Only when you have felt how dark the world was can you feel what a mercy it was that Allah lit it.
So walk back with us into the darkness on purpose. It is the only way to arrive at the Prophet ﷺ already grateful.
The Arabs had a prophet too
إِنَّا أَرْسَلْنَاكَ بِالْحَقِّ بَشِيرًا وَنَذِيرًا ۚ وَإِن مِّنْ أُمَّةٍ إِلَّا خَلَا فِيهَا نَذِيرٌ
“Indeed, We have sent you with the truth as a bringer of good tidings and a warner. And there was no nation but that there had passed within it a warner.”
Surah Fatir 35:24 Read 35:24 with tafsir
Every nation, Allah says, had its warner. The Arabs were no exception, and their prophet was Ibrahim, peace be upon him, together with his son Ismail. That is why the Qur'an keeps calling the way back to them the religion of your father Ibrahim. He was a man of pure tawhid, one God and no idol, and so was his son.
And Ibrahim left behind more than a creed. He sanctified Makkah as a sanctuary, a haram, where a hunted animal may not be chased and a leaf may not be torn. Ibn Abbas remembered that even the idol-worshippers honored it so completely that a man could meet the murderer of his father doing tawaf and not touch a hair on his head. Ibrahim instituted the sacred months, when all fighting must cease. He laid down the hajj itself: the tawaf, the running between Safa and Marwa, the sacrifice, the animals garlanded and led to Makkah so everyone would know they were dedicated to its poor. For thousands of years these rites stood.
Which sets up the question the whole night turns on. If the father of the Arabs was Ibrahim, and Ibrahim worshipped one God with no idol at all, then where on earth did the idols come from?
How one man changed a religion
Here Sheikh Yasir pauses on something orientalists love to say: that Islam simply borrowed its rites from the pagans, who already circled the Kaaba and ran between the hills. It is all a matter of where you stand, he answers. Is the glass half empty or half full? The non-Muslim sees a Prophet ﷺ adopting paganism and adding his own touches. We see the opposite: a Prophet ﷺ who did not invent these rites but resurrected the original worship of Ibrahim and washed the paganism back out of it. The rites were always Ibrahim's. It was the idols that were the intrusion.
And the intrusion has a name. In an authentic report in Sahih Muslim, the Prophet ﷺ said he saw a man named Amr ibn Luhayy dragging his own entrails through the Fire, the first man to change the religion of Ismail. By the Sheikh's reckoning Amr lived perhaps five centuries before the Prophet ﷺ, which means it took five hundred years of slow rot for idolatry to spread across all of Arabia. The story goes that Amr traveled north to Syria, met a powerful and ancient people worshipping idols, and asked them why. These, they told him, are our sources of power: we pray to them in drought and in war and they answer. So he asked for one to take home. They gave him an idol called Hubal, and Hubal became the first idol of Arabia and the chief idol of the Quraysh, planted in front of the Kaaba.
Then Sheikh Yasir slows down, because he wants you to ask the harder question: how could a single man overturn the faith of a whole people? He draws out three reasons, and warns that they are not safely buried in history. First, an inferiority complex: Amr was dazzled by a mighty civilization, its architecture and its undefeated armies, and assumed that a people so powerful must be right about everything too. They were not. A nation can lead the world in technology and be utterly lost in its theology and its morals. Second, credentials: Amr was no ordinary man but the respected chieftain of Khuzaah, the tribe then in charge of Makkah, a generous and victorious leader his people loved. When a man like that imports a belief, the people follow. And third, ignorance: two thousand years had passed since Ibrahim, the prophets were a distant memory, and a people who do not know their religion are easy to move. The Sheikh names these three plainly and says we face the very same three today, when our religion is pressed to reform itself to suit whoever happens to be powerful, eloquent, and credentialed in our own age.
When the stones became gods
وَقَالُوا لَا تَذَرُنَّ آلِهَتَكُمْ وَلَا تَذَرُنَّ وَدًّا وَلَا سُوَاعًا وَلَا يَغُوثَ وَيَعُوقَ وَنَسْرًا
“And said, 'Never leave your gods and never leave Wadd or Suwa or Yaghuth and Yauq and Nasr.'”
Surah Nuh 71:23 Read 71:23 with tafsir
The Qur'an traces idolatry on this earth back further still, to the people of Nuh and the five names they would not abandon: Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Yauq, and Nasr. Ibn Abbas explained how it began, in an age when there was only one settlement on the earth. These five were righteous men, and when they died their people carved images of them to remember their piety. Generation by generation the remembering curdled into worship, until the statue itself was the god. It is always a stepping stone, the Sheikh notes, and the very same five idols, unworshipped for ages, somehow surfaced again among the tribes of Arabia.
From Hubal at the Kaaba the idols multiplied in ways that should stop you cold. Caravans leaving Makkah would chip a stone from the Kaaba itself and carry it off to worship, as though the building blocks were holy. They are not, the Sheikh insists: it is the place that is sacred, not the marble or the cloth or the bricks, and the Kaaba has been rebuilt many times across the centuries. But the people forgot. One companion, Abu Raja al-Utaridi, remembered worshipping rocks before Islam, and how if they found a finer rock they would throw the first one away for it, and how in the open desert with no rock at all they would heap up sand, milk a goat over it to pack it firm, and circle that.
On Safa and Marwa themselves stood two idols, Isaf and Naila, which the people would touch as they passed. When Islam came the Muslims hesitated: how can we run between two hills that had idols on them? So Allah settled it.
Safa and Marwa belong to Allah
إِنَّ الصَّفَا وَالْمَرْوَةَ مِن شَعَائِرِ اللَّهِ ۖ فَمَنْ حَجَّ الْبَيْتَ أَوِ اعْتَمَرَ فَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْهِ أَن يَطَّوَّفَ بِهِمَا ۚ وَمَن تَطَوَّعَ خَيْرًا فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ شَاكِرٌ عَلِيمٌ
“Indeed, as-Safa and al-Marwah are among the symbols of Allah. So whoever makes hajj [pilgrimage] to the House or performs umrah - there is no blame upon him for walking between them. And whoever volunteers good - then indeed, Allah is Appreciative and Knowing.”
Surah al-Baqarah 2:158 Read 2:158 with tafsir
The two hills were sacred long before two idols were ever set on them, and they remained Allah's signs after the idols were gone. There is no blame, the ayah reassures, in walking between them: the paganism was the stain, never the rite, and Allah simply lifted the stain off and handed Ibrahim's worship back clean.
By the time the Prophet ﷺ conquered Makkah there were some three hundred and sixty idols around the Kaaba, most of them half-human and half-animal, the stuff of fairy tales given an altar. The Quraysh had also decided that the angels were the daughters of Allah and worshipped them as such. And yet, the Sheikh points out, there was no real creed underneath any of it. Idolatrous societies rarely have one: ask ten of them what they believe and you may get ten different answers, each man with his own gods and his own idea of what they can and cannot do. The one thing they agreed on was the excuse every idolater has ever used, that these idols only bring us closer to Allah.
The few who would not bow
It was not total. The books of sira preserve a handful of people called the hunafa, from a word that means to turn away: they turned away from shirk and toward Allah, groping back toward the pure way of Ibrahim with no prophet alive to guide them. Allah Himself calls Ibrahim a hanif again and again, and these few were searching for his religion by that name.
One was Quss ibn Saidah, an old man from a faraway tribe whom the Prophet ﷺ saw preaching against idolatry at the hajj when he ﷺ was still young. He was among the most eloquent of the Arabs, and decades later, when his tribe came to accept Islam, the Prophet ﷺ still remembered him on his red camel and loved his words: O people, listen and understand. Whoever lives will die, whoever dies is gone, and everything decreed will come to pass. Where are Thamud and Aad? Where are your fathers and your grandfathers? He was reaching, with no scripture in his hands, for the Day of Judgment and for a religion better than the one his people were on.
Ibn Hisham tells a quieter scene that Sheikh Yasir lingers over. The Quraysh held a great festival around their idols and the whole city went out to it, and four men found themselves hanging back, each too ashamed to take part. Realizing they were of one mind, they made a pact: let us stay friends, and let us go and search for the true religion of Ibrahim. Their paths scattered. One was Waraqa ibn Nawfal, the cousin of Khadijah, who studied the scriptures, learned Hebrew, and became a Christian. He is the blind old scholar Khadijah would later rush the Prophet ﷺ to after the first revelation, the man who recognized the angel at once as the same one who came to Musa and Isa, and who wished aloud that he were young enough to stand with him ﷺ when his people drove him out. He died soon after, the first believer in Makkah to pass away. Of the four, the transcript's telling leaves some of the names indistinct, and faithful to the rule of this series we will not guess at what it garbles; what matters is the search itself.
Zayd, an ummah of one
The most striking of them was Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, a cousin of Umar ibn al-Khattab. He went to the Jewish rabbis and the Christian priests and was unimpressed by both, telling them plainly: this is not the religion of Ibrahim, and you know it. So he came back to Makkah and stood among the Quraysh and said there was no one left on the religion of Ibrahim in the whole city but him. Asma bint Abi Bakr, then only a child, remembered seeing him lean against the Kaaba rebuking his people for their idols and for burying their daughters alive. When any Qurayshi meant to kill a baby girl, Zayd would say: give her to me, I will raise her. And he did.
The Prophet ﷺ, himself a young man who had never once bowed to an idol, met Zayd and found a kindred spirit. Zayd died about five years before the revelation came, never reaching it. His son Saad ibn Zayd, one of the ten promised Jannah, later asked the Prophet ﷺ about his father's fate. And the answer is one of the most beautiful things in the night: he will be raised, on the Day of Judgment, as a single nation all by himself. An ummah of one man, with no prophet, saved by the sincerity of a heart that knew the idols were a lie. After the Night Journey the Prophet ﷺ told Saad that he had entered Jannah and seen his father there, blessed with not one garden but two.
There is your first comfort of the night. Even buried in the dark, a sincere heart is never abandoned by Allah.
The world outside Arabia
Beyond the peninsula the picture was no brighter. Persia and its empire followed Zoroastrianism, tending a perpetual fire and dividing the world between a god of light and a god of darkness, which from the eyes of tawhid is simply another paganism. Rome was Christian, but a Christianity already remade by human hands. Within a generation or two of Isa, peace be upon him, his followers had split. There were those who held to what he actually taught, that he was a servant and messenger of Allah sent to the Children of Israel, bound to the Law. And there was a newer theology, traced to a man who had never walked with him, that lifted Isa toward divinity, set aside the Law, and seeded the idea of a trinity.
For three centuries it was argued, until a Roman emperor converted and a council was gathered to fix one official version, the Sheikh recounts, and the version chosen carried more than a little of the old paganism into it. From that point the original believers were hunted and scattered, their books burned, and the faith that conquered Rome was the remade one. Two hundred and fifty years before the Prophet ﷺ was born, true monotheist Christianity had all but vanished from the empire.
Almost. The seerah keeps two witnesses to how little was left. One is Salman al-Farisi, in an authentic report he tells himself: the son of a Persian fire-keeper who heard a monk pray, abandoned the fire, and went from teacher to teacher across the Christian world. Each one, as he died, would send him to another who still held the old, undiluted way, until the last told him there was almost no one left on it, but that the awaited prophet was about to come, in a land of date palms, bearing a seal between his shoulders, who would accept a gift but never charity. Salman was kidnapped and sold into slavery on the road and ended up enslaved in the very town that would become Madinah, and there, after years of toil, he tested the three signs on the Prophet ﷺ himself and wept. The other witness is the emperor Heraclius, who in Sahih al-Bukhari interrogates Abu Sufyan, recognizes from his own hidden scriptures that this is the foretold prophet, and confesses it, then will not give up his throne to follow him, and dies on his old faith. Two men who saw the truth; one heart that surrendered and one that could not.
A despised world, and the light it was given
أَيَحْسَبُ الْإِنسَانُ أَن يُتْرَكَ سُدًى
“Does man think that he will be left neglected?”
Surah al-Qiyamah 75:36 Read 75:36 with tafsir
Into all of this the Prophet ﷺ was sent. In a report in Sahih Muslim he describes what Allah saw when He looked upon the earth in those days: He despised them all, their idolatry and their ignorance, except for a remnant of the People of the Book, the very teachers Salman had been chasing across the world. That is the darkness, and that is why we call it jahiliyyah. And because of him ﷺ, the Prophet promised, there will never be a jahiliyyah like it again. He is the light, the Sheikh closes, and the mercy to the worlds, sent so that the night could finally break.
Hold three things the night leaves you with, because they are not only about the seventh century. First, guidance comes from Allah alone. For centuries no philosopher, no genius, no civilization could reason its way back to the truth; the world stayed lost until revelation came down. We are not free to bend the Qur'an and the Sunnah to the taste of an age. Second, most people follow the crowd. The Quraysh knew in their hearts that the idols were not the religion of Ibrahim, and worshipped them anyway because everyone did. And third, the gift hidden in Salman's whole life: whoever is truly sincere will be guided. It did not matter that he was raised tending a fire in Persia, surrounded by everything false. A pure heart that wants the truth will be led to it, even from the bottom of the dark. Man was never created to be left neglected.