The books of seerah list more than a hundred and ten delegations by name, and for most of them all we know is that they came. Over three days Dr. Yasir Qadhi has pulled out the ones worth lingering on, and on this third and final day he closes the arc with the strangest of them all: a delegation that did not come to submit, but to make a demand.
By the end you will have met the first man in Arab history ever to call himself a prophet, watched a miracle land in a far-off valley while two envoys stood confused in Madinah, and seen sixty Christians offered a curse so heavy they turned around and walked away from it. And running underneath all of it, one quiet astonishment: in a single year, the whole peninsula came.
The man who wanted half the prophethood
Begin with Banu Hanifa, a large Christian tribe out of Yamama in central Arabia, and their leader, an elderly man named Musaylima. In his younger years he had travelled to Jerusalem to study Christianity, learned the language of the Romans, taken on their customs, and come home to decades of mounting respect. By the time Islam reached him he was perhaps in his late sixties, venerated by an entire region, and his men carried him into the Masjid shielded behind fine cloths, a procession fit for a king. Power had done to him what power does: he had come to believe people owed him something.
So he did not come to accept anything. His condition, set before he had even declared himself, was this: name me your successor and make me a partner in your prophethood, the way Musa made Harun a partner, and I will follow you. Otherwise, no. He had the audacity to say it to the Prophet's ﷺ face. The Prophet ﷺ was holding a branch from a tree, the way a person idly holds something while he speaks, and he answered: by Allah, if you asked me for this stick I would not give it to you. You want command after me, and I would not hand you this worthless branch. Allah will deal with you and humiliate you.
Two bracelets of gold
The Sheikh draws out a detail that gives this its weight. The Prophet ﷺ told Musaylima: you are the one Allah warned me about. Years later, when Ibn Abbas was an old man, he asked Abu Hurayra what dream that was. Abu Hurayra answered with a hadith preserved in Bukhari: the Prophet ﷺ said that in his sleep he saw two bracelets of gold on his arms, and gold is forbidden for men to wear, and the wrongness of it disturbed him. He was inspired to blow on them, and at his breath they broke off and flew away. He understood them to be two liars who would rise after him.
Musaylima was one of the bracelets. He became the first of the false prophets, and the Prophet ﷺ had foretold them: after me you will see liars, and the worst of them will follow others before them. The Sheikh pauses on a fact easy to miss: before this Prophet ﷺ, the Arabs had never even heard of such a thing as a man claiming prophethood. When Heraclius interrogated Abu Sufyan, one of his questions was whether prophets were common among them, and the answer was no, never. It was the success of the truth that summoned all the copycats. Musaylima even tried to imitate the style of the Qur'an, and his attempts were so hollow that the Sheikh notes one passing Arab, not yet a Muslim, told him plainly: by Allah, I know you are a liar. He was killed years later in the wars of apostasy, and the man who struck him was Wahshi, the same hand that had once killed Hamza, taking up his javelin to atone for what he had done.
Allah's camel, sacrificed at Jurash
Not every delegation came in arrogance. One of the tribes of Azd, a great people of Yemen, accepted Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ put one of his companions in charge of them with orders to bring in a neighbouring pagan tribe, the people of Jurash. While that was unfolding, Jurash, not yet Muslim, sent two envoys of their own to Madinah to take the measure of the Prophet ﷺ and learn whether he would grant a truce.
On the very day the two envoys stood before him, far away their tribe was under attack, news they could not possibly have had. The Prophet ﷺ turned to them and asked which tribe they were from. From Jurash, they said. And he told them: Allah's camel is being sacrificed at Jurash as we speak. They did not understand. Abu Bakr and another companion leaned in: do you not see what he means? Your tribe is being overrun. Your only hope is to beg him to ask Allah to save them. So they begged, and the Prophet ﷺ raised his hands and prayed for the people of Jurash to be guided. The two went home bewildered, and worked out that at the exact hour they had been speaking with him, their tribe had indeed been overcome and was on the edge of slaughter, until the Muslim commander chose to forgive and spare them. The whole tribe took it as a miracle, and the delegation that came next came not to negotiate but to embrace Islam.
Faith is Yemeni
Many tribes now came simply to learn: to memorise the Qur'an, to study the religion, to ask their deepest questions. The most striking question of all came from the Banu al-Harith of Yemen, in a hadith in Bukhari and Muslim. While a harsh northern delegation, the Banu Tamim, had answered the Prophet's ﷺ good news by asking instead for money, the men of Yemen answered differently: we accept this good news, and we have come all this way to ask you about the very beginning. How did Allah create it all? How did everything begin? The Prophet ﷺ told them there was Allah and there was nothing before Him, and He created the heavens and the earth while His Throne was upon the water. The Sheikh lingers here only to note one thing the wording quietly teaches: this world is not the only creation. There was already a Throne, already water, before the heavens and the earth were made.
The narrator of that hadith, Imran ibn Husayn, then heard someone shout that his camel had fled, and he ran after it, and lost both the camel and the rest of the hadith. How he wished afterward that he had let the camel go. It is part of why the people of Yemen drew such love from the Prophet ﷺ. The people of Yemen have come to you, he said, with the softest of hearts and the best of souls. Faith is Yemeni, and wisdom is Yemeni. And: O Allah, bless us in our Sham and in our Yemen, said at a time when neither land was yet under Muslim rule, calling them ours before they were.
Make it easy, do not make it hard
A few months on, after Abu Bakr's Hajj, one of the kings of Yemen accepted Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ sent Muadh ibn Jabal to be his judge and deputy. He walked beside Muadh as Muadh rode, an honour in itself, giving him counsel for the road: you are going to a people of the Book, so call them first to the testimony of faith, and if they answer, then to prayer, and if they answer, then to charity. And near the end, gently, it is possible you will not see me after this year. It was, without either of them naming it, a farewell.
His last piece of advice to Muadh is one the Sheikh asks you to take personally. Make things easy and do not make them hard. Give people glad tidings and do not drive them away. Bring hearts together and do not split them. People are at different levels: meet them where they are, fill the gaps, draw them closer, and never turn them off the path with a truth spoken at the wrong moment to the wrong person. If Muadh, of all people, was sent with that instruction, the Sheikh asks, who are we to be harsh in the name of the religion?
The Christians of Najran
إِنَّ مَثَلَ عِيسَىٰ عِندَ اللَّهِ كَمَثَلِ آدَمَ ۖ خَلَقَهُ مِن تُرَابٍ ثُمَّ قَالَ لَهُ كُن فَيَكُونُ
“Indeed, the example of Jesus to Allah is like that of Adam. He created him from dust; then He said to him, "Be," and he was.”
Surah Al Imran 3:59 Read 3:59 with tafsir
Now the long one, and the most instructive. The Prophet ﷺ had written to Najran, a Christian province with close ties to Rome, addressing them in the name of the God of Ibrahim and Ishaq and Yaqub, and giving them three choices: accept Islam, pay the jizya, or stand and fight. They debated among themselves. Some said openly that a prophet had been foretold among the descendants of Ishmael, and perhaps this was him. So they sent a delegation of sixty, one of the largest ever, to judge for themselves.
They arrived dressed unlike any Arabs the companions had seen, and when the time for their own prayer came, the companions moved to stop them, and the Prophet ﷺ let them pray, turning to the east, in the Masjid itself. Then the dialogue ran for days. At the end of the first long day they put their hardest question: if you agree Isa was born of a virgin, then who was his father? The Prophet ﷺ did not answer from himself. He said: wait, and let Allah answer you. The next day came the opening of Surah Al Imran, and in it the answer that needs no father at all: the case of Isa before Allah is like the case of Adam, made from dust by a word, Be.
The curse no one would risk
فَمَنْ حَاجَّكَ فِيهِ مِن بَعْدِ مَا جَاءَكَ مِنَ الْعِلْمِ فَقُلْ تَعَالَوْا نَدْعُ أَبْنَاءَنَا وَأَبْنَاءَكُمْ وَنِسَاءَنَا وَنِسَاءَكُمْ وَأَنفُسَنَا وَأَنفُسَكُمْ ثُمَّ نَبْتَهِلْ فَنَجْعَل لَّعْنَتَ اللَّهِ عَلَى الْكَاذِبِينَ
“Then whoever argues with you about it after [this] knowledge has come to you - say, "Come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves, then supplicate earnestly [together] and invoke the curse of Allah upon the liars [among us]."”
Surah Al Imran 3:61 Read 3:61 with tafsir
When the arguing still would not end, Allah gave the final move, the mutual curse. If you are so certain you are upon the truth, then bring your children and your women and yourselves, and we will bring ours, and together we will invoke the curse of Allah upon whichever party is lying about Him. Both cannot be right: either Isa is the son of God or he is not. The Prophet ﷺ readied his own family, and the next morning the Christians of Najran withdrew. Among themselves they had reasoned that if he truly is a prophet and we do this, we will be wiped from the face of the earth. So they declined the curse and accepted a measured jizya instead, a fixed amount of cloth and silver each year, for as long as it suited both sides, and the Prophet ﷺ never bound a treaty forever.
The Sheikh draws the lessons gently, the way the day asks. The mutual curse is a last resort, never how you begin, and almost always a threat rather than a thing enacted. A senior figure among them privately admitted on the road home that this was the foretold prophet, and when his younger brother asked why then he had not believed, the man confessed it was for the honour and the wealth Rome had given them, and the younger brother was so shaken he left his people and became a Muslim. And note where Christians were allowed to pray: inside the holiest Masjid in Madinah, facing their own wall. The Prophet ﷺ tolerated the people of the Book and never forced them. He did not tolerate idol-worship, but a non-Muslim guest he honoured, fed, and housed, and let worship in his own house of worship, which is the true height of what the Sheikh calls realistic pluralism: clear about one truth, gentle with every soul.