Letters to the Thrones of the World
The ink is barely dry on the parchment. A man named Dihya al-Kalbi rides north through the desert with a sealed letter pressed against his chest, the wax still warm from the silver ring of a man in Medina — a ring inscribed, bottom to top, with three words: Muhammad, Rasul, Allah. Another messenger, Abdullah ibn Hudhafa, rides east toward Bahrain, carrying an identical summons wrapped for a different king. Still others fan out across the known world — south toward Yemen, west toward the Nile. It is the sixth or seventh year after the Hijrah, and something unprecedented is unfolding: a leader of a small city-state in the Arabian desert, a man who twenty years ago was a merchant with no army and no throne, is writing to the most powerful rulers on earth. Not to beg for alliance. Not to sue for peace. To call them, each of them, to submit to the one God.
The audacity is staggering. The consequences will reshape the world.
The Seal and the Letters
The idea of dispatching letters to foreign rulers appears to have crystallized in the months following the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, when the fragile peace with Quraysh gave the Muslim community in Medina its first sustained breathing room. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was no longer fighting for survival on multiple fronts. Hudaybiyyah, for all its apparent disappointments, had granted the nascent Islamic state something it had never possessed: legitimacy in the eyes of the Arabian political order. Quraysh had negotiated with Medina as an equal. The world was watching.
It was during this window that the Prophet learned a crucial detail of international protocol. The great empires — Rome, Persia, Abyssinia — did not accept correspondence from other heads of state unless the letter bore a wax seal, stamped with the sender’s unique insignia. This was the diplomatic language of the age, a mark of sovereignty and authenticity. Without it, a letter was just paper.
The Prophet’s response was immediate and pragmatic. He commissioned a silver ring engraved with his name and title, and from that point forward, every official letter was sealed in wax with this stamp before dispatch. The detail is small but revealing: here was a man rooted in divine revelation who saw no contradiction in adopting the administrative norms of civilizations far older and more powerful than his own. The ring was not an act of imitation but of participation — an announcement that the Islamic state was entering the arena of nations on their own terms.
Scholarly Note
The account of the Prophet commissioning his signet ring is reported in multiple hadith collections. The inscription — Muhammad Rasul Allah, with Allah’s name placed highest out of reverence — is well-attested. The ring was later passed to Abu Bakr, then Umar, then Uthman (may Allah be pleased with them all), who famously lost it in the well of Aris. Some scholars note that the precise timing of the ring’s creation is debated, but the consensus places it in connection with the dispatch of these diplomatic letters.
Each letter was brief — a single paragraph, direct and unadorned. Each opened with Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, identified the sender and recipient by name and title, and delivered the message of Islam in a handful of sentences: there is one God, worship Him alone, and accept the prophethood of Muhammad. But the letters were not identical. They were carefully tailored to their recipients — a fact that reveals a sophisticated awareness of audience, theology, and political reality.
The Najashi: A King Already Leaning
Of all the rulers who received these letters, the Najashi — the Negus of Abyssinia, whose personal name was Aschama — occupied a unique place. This was the king who, years earlier, had sheltered the first Muslim refugees when they fled Meccan persecution. He had listened to Ja’far ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him) recite Surah Maryam in his court and wept. He had refused Quraysh’s demand to extradite the Muslims, declaring that what they preached about Jesus aligned more closely with truth than the bishops around him were comfortable admitting.
The letter to the Najashi reflected this history. Unlike the letters to the Roman and Persian emperors, it contained no threat — no warning that the sins of his people would rest upon his shoulders if he refused. The omission was deliberate. Perhaps, as scholars have noted, the Prophet understood that the Najashi needed not a warning but an invitation, the final gentle push toward a door he had been standing before for years.
The letter included an explanation of the Islamic understanding of Jesus — born of the Virgin Mary, a word from God, a spirit from Him — theology that would have resonated deeply with a Christian king already sympathetic to monotheistic purity. It also contained the verse from Surah Al-Imran:
“Say: O People of the Book, come to a common term between us and you — that we worship none but Allah, that we associate no partners with Him, and that none of us shall take others as lords besides Allah.” — Al-Imran (3:64)
The Najashi embraced Islam. According to al-Tabari, he went further: he dispatched his own son, Arha ibn Aschama, with a delegation of sixty envoys bearing gifts, tasked with traveling to Medina to formally convey his acceptance and to offer, remarkably, to come to Medina himself if the Prophet wished it.
They never arrived. The two boats carrying the delegation sank, and all sixty souls perished at sea.
The tragedy is recorded without elaboration in the sources — a single devastating sentence in al-Tabari that leaves the reader to absorb the weight of what was lost. Sixty men, carrying the formal allegiance of an African king to a Prophet in Arabia, swallowed by the waters between two continents. The diplomatic mission that might have bound Abyssinia and Medina in the Prophet’s own lifetime vanished beneath the waves.
But the Najashi’s Islam was known. And two and a half years later, in the ninth year of the Hijrah, on the very morning the Najashi died in distant Abyssinia, the Prophet announced to his Companions: “Your brother has died in Habasha. Let us go and pray the funeral prayer for him.” It was the only time in his life that the Prophet led salat al-gha’ib — the funeral prayer performed in the absence of the body.
Salat al-Gha'ib: The Funeral Prayer Without a Body
The Prophet’s decision to pray the funeral prayer for the Najashi in absentia became one of the most debated precedents in Islamic jurisprudence. The four major schools of thought differ on when, if ever, salat al-gha’ib should be performed. The strongest opinion, as many scholars have argued, is that it applies when a Muslim dies and no funeral prayer is performed for them at the place of death — as was the case with the Najashi, who died as a secret Muslim among a Christian court, with no community of believers to pray over him. The Shafi’i school permits it more broadly, while the Hanafi school restricts it significantly. The emotional core of the event, however, transcends legal debate: a Prophet in Medina, receiving knowledge from beyond the veil of the unseen, honoring a king across the sea who had honored the truth when it arrived at his court as a band of frightened refugees.
Heraclius: The Emperor Who Almost Believed
The letter to the Roman Emperor Heraclius is the most extensively documented of all the prophetic correspondences, preserved in extraordinary detail in Sahih al-Bukhari through the narration of Abu Sufyan (may Allah be pleased with him) — who, at the time of this encounter, was still a pagan and the Prophet’s most determined adversary.
The Prophet sent the letter with Dihya al-Kalbi to the governor of Busra — not the Iraqi city of Basra, which did not yet exist, but a small Arab town south of Damascus on the fringe of Roman territory, where Arab traders exchanged goods under Roman currency and Roman law. It was the endpoint of the famous Qurayshi trade routes, the destination of the rihlat al-shita’i wa al-sayf. By coincidence — or perhaps by providence — Heraclius was visiting Jerusalem at the time, and the letter reached him quickly.
Heraclius was no ordinary emperor. He reigned from 610 to 641 CE, and he was both a formidable military commander and a genuine scholar of Christian theology. He had engineered one of the most dramatic reversals in ancient military history: after the Sassanid Persians under Khusro Aparwiz had conquered Damascus, Jerusalem, and parts of Egypt — pushing the Roman Empire to the brink of extinction — Heraclius launched a brilliant counter-offensive that drove the Persians back to their capital of Ctesiphon by 628 CE. This was the very victory foretold in Surah al-Rum:
“Alif Lam Mim. The Romans have been defeated in a nearby land, but after their defeat they will triumph — within a few years.” — Al-Rum (30:1-4)
Heraclius was also a man preoccupied with Christian unity. He had attempted to forge a theological compromise between the Monophysites — who held that Christ had one nature — and the Diophysites — who held that he had two. His proposed middle path satisfied neither camp and eventually withered, but the very attempt revealed a ruler who understood doctrine, who cared about the nature of Jesus, and who might, under different circumstances, have recognized the Islamic message for what it was.
When the letter arrived, Heraclius did not open it immediately. Instead, he summoned Abu Sufyan, who happened to be trading in the region. What followed was one of the most remarkable interrogations in recorded history.
Heraclius arranged Abu Sufyan’s trading companions behind him, out of his line of sight, and instructed them: if Abu Sufyan lies, signal me. It was a brilliantly simple mechanism — Abu Sufyan’s own enemies would keep him honest, because any of them could earn the emperor’s favor by exposing a lie. Abu Sufyan later admitted: “Had I not been afraid that my companions would accuse me of lying, I would not have spoken the truth.”
The questions came one by one. What is his lineage? Noble. Has anyone before him claimed prophethood among you? No. Were his ancestors kings? No. Do the rich follow him or the poor? The poor. Are his followers increasing or decreasing? Increasing. Does anyone leave his religion after entering it? No. Have you ever known him to lie? No. Does he break his promises? No. What does he command? To worship God alone, to pray, to speak the truth, to maintain family ties.
Heraclius then interpreted each answer with the precision of a man who had studied the pattern of prophets. Noble lineage — all prophets come from noble families. No predecessor — this is not a fad. No royal ancestry — this is not a political grab for power. The poor follow him first — this is always the sign of truth. His followers never leave — true faith, once it enters the heart, does not depart. He has never lied about money — how then would he lie about God?
Then the emperor said words that echo across the centuries: “If what you have said is true, he will very soon occupy this very space under my feet.”
Abu Sufyan, the lifelong enemy of Islam, walked out of that palace shaken. As he later recalled: “That was when, for the first time in my heart, I realized that this matter would eventually prevail.”
Scholarly Note
The interrogation of Abu Sufyan by Heraclius is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari (7, 2941) and is considered one of the most rigorously authenticated accounts in the entire Seerah. Abu Sufyan’s conversion did not occur until the Conquest of Mecca, approximately two years after this encounter. His admission that Islam “entered his heart” in Heraclius’s palace is significant — it suggests a gradual internal transformation that preceded his formal acceptance of the faith. The Qur’an itself distinguishes between those who converted before and after the Conquest, noting that the earlier converts hold a higher rank (Al-Hadid 57:10).
But the story did not end there. According to a narration in Musnad Ahmad, Heraclius later sent a spy of his own — an Arab from the Christian tribe of Tanukh — to Medina with a letter containing a theological question and three secret tests. The first test: does the Prophet mention his letters to foreign kings in conversation? The second: does he reference “the night” in his response? The third: does he bear a mark on his back?
The Tanukhi arrived, delivered the letter, and watched. The Prophet mentioned that he had sent a letter to Kisra, who had torn it up — “so Allah will tear his kingdom” — and to Caesar, who had preserved it — “so Allah will preserve his kingdom.” Check one.
The letter contained a clever theological riddle: if Paradise is as vast as the heavens and the earth, where is Hell? The Prophet’s response was immediate and devastating in its elegance:
“Subhanallah — where does the night go when the day comes?”
Check two. And when the Tanukhi prepared to leave without seeing the third sign, the Prophet turned, lowered his garment, and revealed the Seal of Prophethood between his shoulders. Check three.
The Tanukhi returned to Heraclius with all three confirmations. Bukhari then records the final act: Heraclius gathered his senators, locked the doors, and proposed that he embrace this new faith. The room erupted. The senators bolted for the exits like wild animals, Bukhari’s narrator says. Heraclius quickly retreated, claiming he had merely been testing their loyalty.
He died upon his old faith. But he lived long enough to see the Prophet’s prediction fulfilled — Muslim armies conquered Damascus, Jerusalem, and Palestine within years of that conversation. The space under his feet passed to others.
Khusro: The King Who Tore the Letter
If Heraclius represents the tragedy of a man who recognized truth but lacked the courage to embrace it, Khusro Aparwiz of Persia represents something starker: the catastrophe of arrogance meeting prophecy head-on.
Khusro ruled the Sassanid Empire from 590 to 628 CE. He was the last of the great Sassanid kings — a man whose armies had conquered Damascus and Jerusalem, whose forces had penetrated Egypt, whose empire stretched from Mesopotamia to the borders of India. He maintained a harem of three thousand concubines. He was feared for his cruelty and envied for his power.
The Prophet sent his letter through the governor of Bahrain — at that time a region far larger than the modern island — via the messenger Abdullah ibn Hudhafa. The letter was direct: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. From Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, to Khusro, emperor of the Persians. It called him to Islam with the same phrase used for Caesar: Aslim tuslim — accept Islam, and you will be safe. But where the letter to Caesar warned of the sins of the Arisiyyin, the letter to Khusro warned of the sins of the Majus — the Zoroastrians — because Khusro was not of the People of the Book, and the Quranic verse from Al-Imran addressed to Christians and Jews was not included.
Khusro’s response was volcanic. He scoffed at the letter, mocked the messenger, and tore the parchment to pieces before the envoy’s face.
When news of this reached Medina, the Prophet said, as recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari:
“He has torn my letter. Allah will tear his kingdom — every tearing.”
The prophecy was fulfilled with terrifying precision. Khusro, already weakened by Heraclius’s counter-offensive, fled his own capital of Ctesiphon. His son Yazdajard staged a coup, imprisoned his father, and starved him to death over five days in a dungeon. Western sources date Khusro’s death to approximately the 27th or 28th of February, 628 CE — corresponding, in the Islamic calendar, to Jumada al-Ula of the seventh year of Hijrah.
But the story’s most dramatic chapter played out in Yemen, far from Ctesiphon. Khusro, before his death, had sent orders to his governor in the region — a man named Badan — to dispatch spies to Medina, investigate this self-proclaimed prophet, and if possible, bring him back in chains. The arrogance of the command is breathtaking: two men were to travel to Medina and physically abduct the leader of a state that had just fought Quraysh to a standstill.
Badan chose two trusted emissaries — Baba Weyh and Khur Khasra — and sent them north with a letter that was merely a pretext for intelligence gathering. They arrived in Medina terrified, knowing they were spies in enemy territory. The Prophet received them, glanced at the letter, and told them to return the next day.
The next morning, he did not even open the letter. Instead, he delivered a message that must have drained the blood from their faces: “Go back to your lord and tell him that my Lord has killed his lord.” He informed them that Khusro was dead, murdered by his own son, and that the Sassanid Empire’s days were numbered.
The two emissaries rode back to Yemen in shock. By the time they reached Badan, the news had arrived through other channels as well — Khusro Aparwiz was indeed dead, exactly as the Prophet had said, on the very night he had said it.
Badan converted to Islam. The two emissaries converted. And large communities across the eastern and southern reaches of Yemen followed. The Prophet subsequently sent Badan a letter outlining the rules of governance: those who accepted Islam were part of the believing community; those who remained Zoroastrian would pay the jizya and live in peace.
Scholarly Note
The account of Badan’s conversion and the subsequent administrative letter is preserved in a treatise on taxation by the early Islamic author Abu Ubaid al-Qasim ibn Sallam (d. 224 AH), who recorded it in his work Kitab al-Amwal. The story is not found in the major hadith collections but is accepted by Seerah scholars as historically reliable. The jizya ruling sent to Badan is significant in Islamic jurisprudence: the Hanafi school and later Maliki scholars use it as evidence that jizya can be levied on non-Ahl al-Kitab populations (such as Zoroastrians), while the Shafi’i and earlier Maliki positions restrict jizya to the People of the Book.
The Muqawqis and Others
Beyond the three great powers, the Prophet dispatched letters to other rulers as well. The governor of Egypt — known by the title Muqawqis, whose personal name was Jurayj ibn Mina — received a letter carried by Hatib ibn Abi Balta’ah. No authentic narration preserves the letter’s exact text, but the Muqawqis responded with courtesy: he sent back fine cloth, honey, a mule named Duldul that would become the Prophet’s personal mount, a servant named Ma’bur, and two Coptic sisters — Maria and Sirin. Maria would become the mother of the Prophet’s son Ibrahim.
The Prophet remarked that the Muqawqis had “protected his kingdom through his politeness,” but that his kingdom would not last. And indeed, the Muqawqis became the last Byzantine prefect of Egypt before Amr ibn al-As conquered it for Islam.
Letters also went to the rulers of Oman, whose leaders embraced Islam, and to various tribal chiefs across Arabia. Scholars have catalogued over twenty such letters. One went to Musaylimah of the Banu Hanifa, who responded with the demand that power be shared — “half the earth for you, half for me.” The Prophet’s reply was unequivocal: “The earth belongs to Allah, and He gives it to whomever He pleases.”
The Word 'Arisiyyin' and the Ghost of Arius
One of the most intriguing puzzles in the prophetic letters is the word Arisiyyin, used in the letter to Heraclius to describe those whose sins the emperor would bear if he rejected Islam. Classical commentators struggled with the term — it is not Arabic — and most interpreted it as meaning “peasants” or “common folk.” However, the Indian scholar Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Nadwi proposed a compelling alternative: Arisiyyin means “the followers of Arius.” Arius (d. 336 CE) was a Christian theologian whose teachings — that Jesus was created, that there was a time when he did not exist, that he was subordinate to God the Father — were declared heretical at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. The Arian heresy was brutally suppressed; Arius’s writings were burned, and his followers were persecuted across the Roman Empire. Yet his theology, of all early Christian theologies, was arguably the closest to the Islamic understanding of Jesus. If al-Nadwi’s reading is correct, the Prophet’s letter carried a profound subtext: it addressed Heraclius not merely as a political leader but as the heir of a Christian tradition that had once known a more monotheistic understanding of Christ — and had violently suppressed it. The letter, in this reading, was calling him back to what his own civilization had lost.
The Global Horizon
Step back from the individual stories and a larger pattern emerges. Within the span of a few months, a man in a mud-brick city in the Hejaz sent personal letters to the rulers of the two superpowers of the ancient world, to the king of Africa’s most powerful Christian kingdom, to the governor of Egypt, and to tribal leaders from Oman to the northern Hejaz. Not one of these letters begged for recognition. Every one of them issued a call — and, for the emperors, a warning.
The immediate political impact was modest. Najashi alone fully accepted. Heraclius wavered and retreated. Khusro raged and died. The Muqawqis sent gifts and kept his distance. But the letters accomplished something that transcended their immediate reception: they declared the Islamic message universal. This was not a tribal religion for the Arabs of the Hejaz. This was a summons to all of humanity, carried on parchment sealed with silver, addressed to the most powerful men alive.
And the Prophet’s words about each ruler’s response carried an almost eerie predictive weight. Khusro tore the letter, and his empire was torn apart within a decade — so completely that Zoroastrianism virtually vanished from the lands of its birth. Heraclius preserved the letter, and the Byzantine Empire endured for another eight centuries, diminished but alive. The Muqawqis was polite, and he lived out his days in peace — the last of his line, but unharmed.
Within ten years of these letters being sent, every land to which they were addressed had come under Muslim governance. Every single one. The man who sealed those letters with a silver ring in Medina had written not just to the present but to the future — and the future answered.
As the ink dried on these letters and the messengers returned with their varied reports — of kings who wept, kings who raged, kings who sent gifts, and sixty men lost beneath the sea — the calendar turned toward the month of Dhul Qa’dah of the seventh year. A year had passed since Hudaybiyyah, and the terms of the treaty now entitled the Muslims to return to Mecca for the pilgrimage they had been denied. The Prophet began preparations for what would be known as Umrat al-Qada — the Compensatory Umrah — a journey back to the city of his birth, not as a conqueror but as a pilgrim, walking unarmed into the heart of enemy territory with two thousand believers at his back and the words of God on his lips.