The Battle of Tabuk is behind us, and the ground has shifted under the whole peninsula. With Makkah conquered, Quraysh subdued, Hunayn won, and the Romans having simply failed to show, there is no longer a flag for the rest of Arabia to gather under. So the tribes do the only thing left: they send delegations to Madinah. The ninth year of the Hijrah carries a name for this, am al-wufud, the year of delegations, and it is where Dr. Yasir Qadhi turns now.
The delegations were never all alike, and they did not all come in one year. Some tribes came willing, some came hesitant, some came pretending, some came only for a treaty, and one or two came to threaten. Over the next three days you will meet a handful of them, chosen out of more than a hundred the historians name. Today is the opening handful, and it begins on the far edge of Arabia, with a tribe that heard about Islam before a single Muslim ever reached them.
Why this year carries the name
First, a puzzle the Sheikh wants you to hold. If the ninth year is called the year of delegations, why do the books tell us delegations started arriving as early as the fifth year, around the time of the Trench, and kept coming until the very last month of the Prophet's ﷺ life? The answer is not that they began in the ninth year. It is that in the ninth year they reached their peak. After Makkah fell and Hunayn was won, the smaller tribes understood there was no rallying force left, no leadership to unite behind. Quraysh had been the only banner they would ever have stood under, and that banner was gone. So they came in a flood.
And a delegation, the Sheikh is careful to note, did not always mean a tribe embracing Islam. It meant a tribe sending two or three representatives to negotiate. Some of those negotiations ended in faith, some in a hesitant faith that took years, some in pure hypocrisy that fell apart the moment the Prophet ﷺ died, and some in nothing more than a peace treaty: we will not become Muslim, but we will not fight you either. In these early years that was still allowed; a pagan could yet live in Arabia. Only later, as the coming weeks will show, would that door close. There was even the delegation of threat: Musaylima the liar, who came at the head of his people from Yamama and offered to split the earth in half. Not every delegation was the same. Each one was its own story.
The tribe that heard before anyone came
Begin where the Sheikh begins, with one of the earliest delegations of all: the tribe of Abd al-Qais. They lived in the region the early sources call Bahrain, which back then meant not just the island but the whole eastern coast of Arabia, the land we now know as the eastern province, pressed right up against the Persian empire. Some of them were Christian, some pagan, and they sent two delegations: one in the fifth year, and another later in am al-wufud itself.
Here is what should stop you. In the fifth year of the Hijrah, a tribe sitting on the doorstep of Persia already knew the details of Islam, and no Muslim had come to them. No envoy of the Prophet ﷺ, no Companion, no preacher. The message had simply reached that far on its own, and they were interested enough to send a group of converts across the desert to Madinah. Abd al-Qais are remembered as the first tribe outside the Hijaz to accept Islam voluntarily, without an army at their gates, without ever being invaded. It is a thing they took pride in for generations.
One day, the Prophet ﷺ was giving the khutbah and told his Companions that a delegation was on its way, the best people of the east, and they would be the best because there were no Muslims at all further east than them. A day or two later Umar ibn al-Khattab was in the marketplace when the strangers arrived. He leapt up in joy, rushed to embrace them, and told them the good news of what the Prophet ﷺ had said about them.
The young man who took his time
The whole delegation rushed to the Prophet ﷺ. All of them except the youngest, a man remembered by his nickname, al-Ashajj, the one with the wound, for an old scar on his head. While the others hurried ahead in their excitement, brand new Muslims desperate to lay eyes on him ﷺ, al-Ashajj hung back. He washed himself, put on good clothes, perfumed himself, and only then came forward, composed, to meet the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.
The Prophet ﷺ looked at him and said that he had in him two qualities Allah and His Messenger love: hilm and anaah. Forbearance, and the patience that does not act in haste. A cool temper, and a mind that thinks before it moves. Al-Ashajj asked one of the most intelligent questions in the whole seerah: these two qualities, did I work to develop them in myself, or did Allah create me with them? And the Prophet ﷺ told him Allah had placed them in him by nature.
Sheikh Yasir lingers here, because any parent already knows the truth of it. You raise children the same way and one comes out quick to anger, another calm from the cradle. Some of who we are is shaped, and some is simply given. Al-Ashajj's answer was the answer of a believer: all praise to Allah, who created in me qualities He loves. A man who responds to himself like that, the Sheikh says, is a man you can already tell is going to go far.
Teach us something to take home
The delegation of Abd al-Qais had a problem. Between their land and Madinah lay the tribe of Mudar, still pagan, still hostile, and so they could only make the journey during the sacred months when fighting was forbidden across the land. That meant once they left, they would not be able to return for a year. So they asked the Prophet ﷺ for something they could hold onto and carry back to their people: teach us something that will take us to Jannah. An intelligent tribe, asking exactly the right question.
He ﷺ commanded them to have faith in Allah, and then asked if they knew what faith in Allah was. To bear witness that there is no god but Allah, to establish the prayer, to give zakat, and to fast Ramadan. He stopped there, with four pillars, not five. There was no Hajj yet to mention; this was still the fifth year. And because they were a people of cold lands who fermented their own drinks, they asked about what they could drink, and he ﷺ forbade them their intoxicants by name, listing the kinds they made one by one, showing how closely he knew the lives of a people he had never met. They went home with that, and Abd al-Qais are remembered as the first to build a masjid outside the Hijaz and the first to gather for Jumuah outside Madinah.
The blunt bedouin who made the Prophet ﷺ swear
لَهُ مُعَقِّبَاتٌ مِّن بَيْنِ يَدَيْهِ وَمِنْ خَلْفِهِ يَحْفَظُونَهُ مِنْ أَمْرِ اللَّهِ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يُغَيِّرُ مَا بِقَوْمٍ حَتَّىٰ يُغَيِّرُوا مَا بِأَنفُسِهِمْ ۗ وَإِذَا أَرَادَ اللَّهُ بِقَوْمٍ سُوءًا فَلَا مَرَدَّ لَهُ ۚ وَمَا لَهُم مِّن دُونِهِ مِن وَالٍ
“For him are successive [angels] before and behind him who protect him by the decree of Allah. Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. And when Allah intends for a people ill, there is no repelling it. And there is not for them besides Him any patron.”
Surah ar-Rad 13:11 Read 13:11 with tafsir
Some delegations came to negotiate a treaty rather than to believe, and one of those involved a tribe you already know without knowing it: Banu Sad ibn Bakr, a sub-tribe of the great Hawazin, and the tribe of Halima al-Sadiyya, the woman who nursed the Prophet ﷺ as an infant. Their envoy was an elder named Dimam ibn Thalaba, and he was a bedouin to the bone: hairy, gruff, rough, with two long braids hanging at the sides of his head the way the desert men wore them.
He rode his camel straight up to the door of the masjid, made it kneel right there, and barged in demanding, where is the son of Abd al-Muttalib? Notice, the Sheikh says, the wisdom in Allah choosing for His Prophet ﷺ the most honored lineage in Arabia: even an unlettered bedouin from a distant tribe knows the name Abd al-Muttalib and knows this is his grandson. Lineage opened the door before a word was spoken. The Prophet ﷺ answered that he was the one, and Dimam, with no softness at all, said, you are Muhammad? Then, I am going to be hard with you in my questions, so do not be angry with me. He had at least that much manners.
What followed was a strange, blunt interrogation. Who created the sky? Allah. Who created the earth? Allah. Who created the mountains? Then: I ask you by the One who created the heavens and the earth and the mountains, did Allah send you to us? And the Prophet ﷺ swore that yes, Allah had sent him. Did Allah command you to tell us to pray five times a day? Yes. To pay zakat? To fast? To make Hajj, now that the command had come? Yes, to each. Then Dimam swore by the One who sent him that he would do exactly this and not add to it or take from it by a hair, and just as abruptly as he had stormed in, he stormed back out. He shall enter Jannah if he is truthful, the Prophet ﷺ said, for this is the bare floor of the faith. And when Dimam reached home he tore down his people's idol and began to preach, and Ibn Ishaq records that no single envoy was ever a greater blessing to his community than he was: by him, his whole tribe came to Islam.
The dates that would not run out
Among these delegations sits a quiet miracle. The tribe of Muzaynah came, four hundred strong, the whole tribe at once to embrace Islam. They studied with the Prophet ﷺ, and when it was time for them to make the long journey home he ﷺ told Umar ibn al-Khattab to give them the provisions they would need for the road. Four hundred men, weeks of travel.
Umar said, O Messenger of Allah, I have only a single sack of dates at home, that will never be enough. The Prophet ﷺ simply told him again: go and provide for them. And Umar said, I will do it. He went back to his house, put his trust in the command, and found his store-room filled with dates to the ceiling, heaped like a kneeling camel filling the room. He called the four hundred and every one of them filled his sack, and the last man to leave looked back and saw the pile sitting exactly as high as when they had started taking from it. Not every delegation ended in wonder, but this one did.
The tribe that came boasting
يَمُنُّونَ عَلَيْكَ أَنْ أَسْلَمُوا ۖ قُل لَّا تَمُنُّوا عَلَيَّ إِسْلَامَكُم ۖ بَلِ اللَّهُ يَمُنُّ عَلَيْكُمْ أَنْ هَدَاكُمْ لِلْإِيمَانِ إِن كُنتُمْ صَادِقِينَ
“They consider it a favor to you that they have accepted Islam. Say, "Do not consider your Islam a favor to me. Rather, Allah has conferred favor upon you that He has guided you to the faith, if you should be truthful."”
Surah al-Hujurat 49:17 Read 49:17 with tafsir
Then came a delegation of ten men from Banu Asad ibn Khuzayma, and they came loudly. We have given you our testimony, they announced in the masjid, and we are Muslims, and you should know that we came to you without you ever sending anyone for us, and we accepted Islam without you ever having to fight us. We are not like the other Arabs. We traveled to you through the darkness and the cold. On and on they bragged about the favor they imagined they had done him ﷺ.
And Allah answered them directly, in an ayah Sheikh Yasir ties to this very tribe. They were Muslims, yes, their faith was real if thin, but they had the order of things upside down. They thought they had done the Prophet ﷺ a favor. Allah corrected them: the favor runs the other way. If you are truthful in your faith, then be grateful that Allah chose you for it. No one does Islam a kindness by entering it; Islam is the kindness done to them.
The delegation that came to kill him ﷺ
هُوَ الَّذِي يُرِيكُمُ الْبَرْقَ خَوْفًا وَطَمَعًا وَيُنشِئُ السَّحَابَ الثِّقَالَ
“It is He who shows you lightning, [causing] fear and aspiration, and generates the heavy clouds.”
Surah ar-Rad 13:12 Read 13:12 with tafsir
The darkest delegation belonged to Banu Amir ibn Sasaa, the tribe behind the massacre at the well of Maouna. One of its chiefs, Amir ibn al-Tufayl, came to Madinah among the delegates with no intention of believing at all. He had come to murder the Prophet ﷺ. He told his man Arbad: I will keep him busy with questions, and when I give you the signal, draw your blade and strike. Most likely, the Sheikh judges, a poisoned blade, the way such things were done.
Amir kept pressing the Prophet ﷺ for a private audience, and the Prophet ﷺ kept refusing him until he would accept Islam. Three times Amir gave Arbad the secret signal to strike. Three times Arbad did nothing. When it was clearly hopeless, Amir threw down his arrogance in the open: take the towns and leave me the open country, or make me your heir after you, or it is war, a thousand stallions and a thousand mares against you. The Prophet ﷺ refused all of it, and as the man left he ﷺ prayed: O Allah, suffice me against Amir ibn al-Tufayl, and guide his people. A prayer against the one man, and a mercy for the tribe behind him.
Outside, Amir rounded on Arbad: you are the strongest warrior I have, why did you fail me? And Arbad answered that every time the signal came, he could see no one but Amir himself. He could not see the Prophet ﷺ at all. Did you want me to cut you down? Allah had simply hidden His Messenger ﷺ from the assassin's eyes, the way the seerah has shown before. As for Amir, he died that same journey of a sudden spreading sickness, fleeing into the night so he would not be found in a shameful place. And Arbad met an end stranger still.
Struck down by the sky
وَيُسَبِّحُ الرَّعْدُ بِحَمْدِهِ وَالْمَلَائِكَةُ مِنْ خِيفَتِهِ وَيُرْسِلُ الصَّوَاعِقَ فَيُصِيبُ بِهَا مَن يَشَاءُ وَهُمْ يُجَادِلُونَ فِي اللَّهِ وَهُوَ شَدِيدُ الْمِحَالِ
“And the thunder exalts [Allah] with praise of Him, and the angels [as well] from fear of Him, and He sends thunderbolts and strikes therewith whom He wills while they dispute about Allah; and He is severe in assault.”
Surah ar-Rad 13:13 Read 13:13 with tafsir
Arbad made it home, where his people asked where he had been. He told them he had just come from the man who claimed to be a prophet, and then he said something vile about Allah, words the Sheikh will not repeat: an open insult to his Lord. The next day Arbad walked out among his community on his camel, and lightning came down from the sky and consumed him and his camel where they stood, the two of them turned to ash in front of everyone.
Sheikh Yasir reads this as the meaning of these verses in Surah ar-Rad. The thunder itself praises Allah, the angels tremble in His praise, and He sends down the thunderbolts to strike whom He wills, even as such men stand there arguing about Him. Arbad argued about Allah, insulted Him, and was struck out of the very sky he had mocked. Allah is severe in His assault, and a man who came to kill His Messenger ﷺ found that out the hard way.
Tamim al-Dari and the creature on the island
One last delegation, and a famous one. Tamim al-Dari was a Christian from a tribe in the north who came to Madinah and embraced Islam, and he carried a story that the Prophet ﷺ found so striking he gathered the people in the masjid to hear it, beaming, telling them this was no lecture, only the tale of Tamim, because what Tamim had seen confirmed what he ﷺ had long been warning them about the Dajjal.
Tamim told of sailing with thirty men, lost a month at sea until they washed up at evening on a strange island. There they met a beast so covered in hair you could not tell its front from its back, and it called itself al-Jassasah and sent them on to a monastery. Inside they found an enormous man bound in iron, his hands chained to his neck, his legs shackled. He questioned them about the date palms of Baysan, the lake of Tabariyya, the spring of Zughar, and about the unlettered prophet who had appeared in Arabia: had the Arabs fought him, had he prevailed. When they said yes, the chained giant told them it would be better for them to obey him, and then named himself: I am the Dajjal, and soon I will be permitted to come out and travel the earth, entering every town in forty nights, except Makkah and Madinah, for at every road into those two an angel with a drawn sword will turn me back. The Prophet ﷺ struck his pulpit and said this was Tayba, this was Madinah; had he not told them the Dajjal would never enter it?
Now the Sheikh does something honest with you, because this hadith is reported in Sahih Muslim and yet it sits uneasily. He keeps the report exactly as it is, but he also keeps the unease, his own and that of scholars before him. His teacher, Sheikh Ibn al-Uthaymeen, used to say that something in his heart told him this hadith was troubled, while warning, correctly, that you never reject a hadith merely because your heart dislikes it, only because it conflicts with stronger evidence. And here, the Sheikh explains, there does seem to be conflict. Other authentic reports, in Bukhari and Muslim both, have the Prophet ﷺ say that not a soul alive that night would remain after a hundred years, with no exception made; they describe the Dajjal as a short man, not a giant, and born to a couple in the future, not already chained on some island; they dwell on his blind eye and the word kufr written between his eyes, none of which appears in Tamim's account. The story of Ibn Sayyad, whom Umar swore to his death was the Dajjal, makes little sense if the Dajjal were known to be locked away across the sea. A small number of scholars, among them Rashid Rida and Ibn al-Uthaymeen, have therefore flagged the report as problematic, not by personal taste but against the wider weight of the texts.
The Sheikh leaves it where a careful believer must. If the Prophet ﷺ truly said it, then it is true and we accept it without hesitation; the only question is whether it was truly said, and on that there is a real question mark. What is not in doubt, he reminds you, is that the Dajjal will never enter Makkah or Madinah, for that is reported by at least six Companions through many other chains. The one report wobbles; the protection of the two sacred cities does not.