Once Makkah fell and the Arabs understood which way the wind had turned, they came. From the fifth year onward, but mostly in the ninth, tribe after tribe sent its delegation to Madinah to enter Islam: so many of them, and so loosely dated, that even the early historians gathered them together under one heading and let the calendar blur. This is the year of delegations.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi walks us through three of them, and they could not be more different. A Yemeni chieftain who plugged his ears so he would not have to hear the Prophet ﷺ. A prince of royal blood, mourning a throne. And the one tribe in all of the Hijaz that had held out to the bitter end, finally coming to give up its idol. Three doors into Islam, and not one of them opens the same way.
The chieftain who stuffed his ears
Tufayl ibn Amr was the chieftain of Dos, a Yemeni tribe, and a poet, and a man used to weighing things for himself. He came to Makkah for umrah back when the Prophet ﷺ was still being hounded by the Quraysh, and the Quraysh met him warmly, as they would a leader, then leaned in with a warning: be careful, one of our own has become a magician, his speech splits fathers from sons and brothers from brothers, do not listen to a word of it. They said it so many times that Tufayl grew genuinely afraid. When he went to the Kaaba, he packed his ears with cotton so that not a syllable of this man would reach him.
But the Prophet ﷺ was standing in prayer, reciting, and cotton does not block everything. A few words got through, and Tufayl had never heard anything like them. So he reasoned with himself, the way an intelligent man does: you can tell truth from falsehood, so listen, and if it is good, take it, and if it is bad, leave it. He pulled the cotton out. He went to the Prophet ﷺ, told him plainly what the Quraysh had done, and asked to hear him. The Prophet ﷺ sat him down, taught him what Islam is, and recited to him. It is said it was only the last three short surahs, al-Ikhlas, al-Falaq, an-Nas, and Tufayl accepted Islam on the spot.
Then he asked for something that would echo for centuries: make du'a for me, and make du'a for my tribe. Three times the Prophet ﷺ raised his hands: O Allah, guide the tribe of Dos. Then he told Tufayl, go back to your people, and be gentle with them. Do not be harsh. Be gentle, and perhaps they will be guided.
Gentleness, and the man it brought
Tufayl went home and was gentle, and it worked the way the Prophet ﷺ said it would. The very day he returned, his father, his mother, and his wife entered Islam, one after another. He was beloved among his people, so the faith spread quietly through them until some eighty families of Dos had accepted Islam at his hands. When the Prophet ﷺ was still in Makkah, Tufayl even offered him a fortress in Yemen to flee to, and the offer was declined, because Allah had already chosen Madinah for him ﷺ and would give no permission to go elsewhere.
In the end Tufayl did not come merely as a delegate. He gave up the chieftainship, left his land and his standing, and emigrated to Madinah, and many of his people, their iman now strong, came with him. Stop on that for a moment: this was a man with lineage, land, and honor, not a man fleeing persecution, and he walked away from all of it for Madinah.
And here is the thread the whole story was waiting for. Among the people guided through Tufayl, in Yemen, was one man who would become one of the greatest legacies of this ummah: Abu Hurayrah. He emigrated with Tufayl's wave near the end, in the eighth year, and was with the Prophet ﷺ for barely two years, having given up marriage and earning a living to simply stay near him, sometimes asking a question he already knew the answer to, only so the conversation might carry him to a meal. From those two years came more than five thousand narrations, more than any companion, the preserver of the sunnah. And every reward Abu Hurayrah has earned, Tufayl has a share in, because Tufayl is the one who guided him. Sheikh Yasir keeps returning to this: never trivialize a single good deed. Most people have never even heard of Tufayl ibn Amr, and look what hangs on his name.
A prince told he would be given better
The second delegation came from royal blood. Wa'il ibn Hujr was of the small kingdoms of Yemen, his grandfather and great-grandfather among their kings. In the ninth year, before he even arrived, the Prophet ﷺ announced to the companions that one of the noblemen of Yemen, one of its princes, was coming, of his own free will, with no one having forced him, wanting only to enter Islam. Three days later Wa'il arrived, exactly as foretold, one of the quiet miracles of the Prophet ﷺ. And he honored him as he rarely honored anyone: he brought Wa'il up onto the minbar beside him, and spread out his own cloak for the young man to sit on, the Arab gesture of highest respect.
Wa'il complained of an old wound, that his family had taken his throne from him, the way royal families always seem to fight over a seat. And the Prophet ﷺ answered him with a single sentence that should reach every one of us: I will give you better than that. Better than a kingdom. Because the lowest person in Jannah, the Prophet ﷺ told us elsewhere, will be told to wish and wish and wish, and then be given everything he wished for and ten times the dunya beside it, more than any king who ever lived held even a tenth of. A claimant to a throne was told, plainly, do not grieve the crown, I have something better for you. So do we all, if we are faithful: something worth more than an entire kingdom.
There is a tail to this story that Sheikh Yasir cannot resist. The Prophet ﷺ gave Wa'il authority over a district of Yemen and sent a young escort with him, barely eighteen, named Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan. On the road Wa'il rode his camel while Muawiyah walked, and the young man asked to ride with him. Not befitting, said Wa'il, that someone like you rides with kings, still wearing his old pride like a second skin. At least lend me your sandals, the stones are burning, Muawiyah said. Not befitting that the king's sandals touch your feet, came the reply. Take shade from the shadow of my camel. Forty-some years later Muawiyah was the ruler, the first king of this ummah, and Wa'il came to him as a petitioner, and reminded him of that day, and needed his favor. Be careful, Sheikh Yasir says, who you are stingy with, because you never know how the one beneath you today will stand tomorrow.
Urwah, who was killed for calling his people
وَجَاءَ مِنْ أَقْصَى الْمَدِينَةِ رَجُلٌ يَسْعَىٰ قَالَ يَا قَوْمِ اتَّبِعُوا الْمُرْسَلِينَ
“And there came from the farthest end of the city a man, running. He said, "O my people, follow the messengers.”
Surah Ya-Sin 36:20 Read 36:20 with tafsir
Now the great story of the day, and it begins with the one tribe that had refused to bend. Thaqif, the people of Ta'if: the tribe Hunayn was fought against, the tribe that had once driven the Prophet ﷺ from their streets, the last holdouts of paganism in the whole province. When he ﷺ had finally left them under siege, he said, let them be, they will come to us. And eventually they realized he was right, and that they had no road left but Madinah. But something made them terrified to take it.
The thing that frightened them was Urwah ibn Masud, one of their most respected leaders. You may already know him: he is the envoy Quraysh sent to the Prophet ﷺ at Hudaybiyyah, the one who reported back, in the height of eloquence, that he had visited the courts of Caesar and Khosrow and the Negus and never seen a people revere a leader as the companions revered Muhammad ﷺ, that they would not let his ablution water fall to the ground, that they sat around him with their heads lowered as if birds were perched upon them. A man of that standing, describing what he saw as a non-believer, amazed in spite of himself. He is even alluded to in the Qur'an, as one of the two great men of the two great cities the Quraysh thought more deserving of revelation than the Prophet ﷺ.
After the siege of Ta'if, Urwah caught up with the Prophet ﷺ on the road back and entered Islam. The Prophet ﷺ warned him: I fear your people will kill you. They love me more than their own daughters, Urwah said, they would not even wake me if they found me sleeping. He went home, climbed to his roof at dawn, and called the adhan, and an arrow came out of the dark and struck him. His own people killed him. As he lay dying, his family asked about blood money, about revenge. Nothing, he said. This is a gift Allah has honored me with, He chose me as a martyr. Bury me with the martyrs of Hunayn, outside the family graves, with the companions we ourselves had killed. And when the news reached the Prophet ﷺ, he said that this man was to his people like the man of Ya-Sin to his: the one who came running to his city calling them to follow the messengers, and was killed by them for it.
Ten days of bargaining
وَقَالُوا لَوْلَا نُزِّلَ هَٰذَا الْقُرْآنُ عَلَىٰ رَجُلٍ مِّنَ الْقَرْيَتَيْنِ عَظِيمٍ
“And they said, "Why was this Qur'an not sent down upon a great man from [one of] the two cities?"”
Surah az-Zukhruf 43:31 Read 43:31 with tafsir
أَهُمْ يَقْسِمُونَ رَحْمَتَ رَبِّكَ ۚ نَحْنُ قَسَمْنَا بَيْنَهُم مَّعِيشَتَهُمْ فِي الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا ۚ وَرَفَعْنَا بَعْضَهُمْ فَوْقَ بَعْضٍ دَرَجَاتٍ لِّيَتَّخِذَ بَعْضُهُم بَعْضًا سُخْرِيًّا ۗ وَرَحْمَتُ رَبِّكَ خَيْرٌ مِّمَّا يَجْمَعُونَ
“Do they distribute the mercy of your Lord? It is We who have apportioned among them their livelihood in the life of this world and have raised some of them above others in degrees [of rank] that they may make use of one another for service. But the mercy of your Lord is better than whatever they accumulate.”
Surah az-Zukhruf 43:32 Read 43:32 with tafsir
So Thaqif came, in Ramadan of the ninth year, but as cowards rather than as believers. Their leaders had each pushed the journey onto the next man, each afraid they might be called to account for the blood of Urwah, until six or seven of the seniors finally went together. They were so eaten by guilt that they would not touch a meal until their Quraysh go-between, Khalid ibn Saeed, ate from it first, certain they were about to be poisoned. They ignored every protocol they had been taught, greeting the Prophet ﷺ with the salutation of the days of ignorance and addressing him by his bare name, all of it the height of disrespect. He ﷺ overlooked every bit of it, never taking it personally, and ordered a guest tent pitched for them inside his own masjid.
Then the haggling began, and it ran more than ten days, because they had come to negotiate, not to submit. Their first worry was their stomachs and their wealth, in that telling order. What about interest, they asked, all our profit is in riba? Allah has forbidden it, came the answer, you keep your principal and nothing more. What about fornication, we are travelling merchants? Forbidden. What about wine, our land is famous for its grapes and our winters are cold, surely an exception? No exception. One of them said they could never go home and tell their people that riba and zina and wine were all gone at once. But another asked the only real question: what is the alternative? An army within the month. And someone steadied them with the most beautiful argument of all: look at the people around the Prophet ﷺ, they used to live as we do, and they gave it up and are living fine, so if they can, we can. That is the quiet power of a good ummah, that a new convert sees it can be done because he watches it being done.
Only after their appetites were settled did they remember the thing that should have come first: their idol, al-Lat, second in prestige in all of Arabia only to Hubal. Could they keep her three years? No. Two? No. One? A month? Down they bargained, month by month, and the answer never changed: she must come down. Then they asked to be excused from the prayer, and the Prophet ﷺ said there is no good in a religion that has no prayer in it. From wudu, because of the cold; no. This is the same impulse the Qur'an answered when the Quraysh sneered that revelation should have gone to one of the great men of the two great cities: do they distribute the mercy of your Lord? Standing was the hardest of all for proud men to give: bowing their backs felt like surrender, and surrender was exactly what it was.
The condition that was no condition
Then came the request Sheikh Yasir lingers on, because the scholars still turn it over. Excuse us from zakat and from jihad, they said. And the Prophet ﷺ answered: you are excused from zakat and from jihad. But once they had left, days later, he said of them: they shall give zakat, and they shall go for jihad.
What happened there? One reading is that this was special to him ﷺ alone: knowing by revelation that iman would soon fill their hearts and they would do both willingly, he simply let the condition stand, a prophecy more than a permission, and no leader after him could ever grant the like. Another reading takes it as a precedent: that a leader may accept a flawed condition from a brand-new Muslim for a time, then enforce the full deen once the heart has settled, because in the end everyone who truly enters Islam comes to live it from within. Both readings agree on the destination.
And here Sheikh Yasir turns it to us, gently and at length. When someone comes to Islam still carrying things that are not yet Islamic, be ultra-lenient, far more than you would ever be with a settled Muslim. Do not justify the haram, but cut a million times more slack, because iman at the start is only a glimmer, and harshness puts it out. Bring the person into the masjid, near the Qur'an, let the faith grow, and the rest follows, and even if it does not, a Muslim with that one sin is better off than a soul that never came in at all. Faith first, perfection later: that is the wisdom hiding inside a delegation's stubborn bargaining.
The idol comes down
They stayed fifteen days, and around the tenth they entered Islam, and because it was Ramadan they fasted alongside the Prophet ﷺ and broke fast in his masjid, Bilal bringing them their suhur and their iftar. New and over-careful, they hesitated to eat at suhur, sure the dawn had broken, until Bilal told them he had just left the Prophet ﷺ eating; and they hesitated to break the fast at sunset, sure the light was still up, until Bilal told them the Prophet ﷺ had already broken his. The youngest among them, Uthman ibn Abi al-As, had quietly become the most eager of all, slipping out of the elders' tent to sit with the Prophet ﷺ memorizing Qur'an and with Abu Bakr learning how to pray. So when they were leaving, Abu Bakr suggested he be made their leader, and the Prophet ﷺ agreed: the youngest, raised over the seniors, because he loved the Qur'an most.
Al-Lat still had to fall, and the Prophet ﷺ sent Abu Sufyan and Thaqif's own nephew, al-Mughirah ibn Shu'bah, to bring her down. The later books carry a story Sheikh Yasir clearly enjoys: al-Mughirah, something of a prankster, asked Abu Sufyan if he could play a joke on the watching crowd. As the whole tribe stood tense, women weeping, the elders wailing over their goddess, he swung his axe, cried out, and fell flat on his face. The tribe erupted with joy: see, did we not warn you, the goddess struck him down. Then he jumped up: you fools, and got back to work, hewing her down blow by blow while the keeper of the idol swore the earth would swallow him the moment he reached her base, until there was nothing left of al-Lat at all.
On the spot where she had stood, the Prophet ﷺ ordered Uthman, now their leader, to build a masjid, and it stands there to this day. The temple's hoard of donated gold and silver, as every pagan shrine becomes a vault over time, was gathered and given to the poor and the debtors. And so the proudest holdout in the Hijaz came in, and in time gave the zakat and went for the jihad exactly as the Prophet ﷺ had said they would, and the long story of Thaqif's paganism was over.