From Hatred to Love, from Ambition to Ruin

The sand-worn travelers arrive at the outskirts of Madinah with clenched jaws and bitter hearts. They are delegates from a tribe whose name history has not preserved with prominence, led by a man called Abd al-Rahman ibn Aqil — and in their eyes, the man they have been sent to meet is the most despised person on the face of the earth. They do not want to be here. Their tribe has sent them because the political map of Arabia has shifted beneath their feet, and refusal to negotiate is no longer an option. They walk toward the Prophet’s mosque carrying the weight of resentment, the sting of forced submission, the quiet fury of men who believe their freedom is being stolen. And yet, when they leave Madinah days later, they will carry something else entirely: a love so fierce that Abd al-Rahman will remember it for the rest of his life, narrating to anyone who will listen that the most hated man became the most beloved — not through coercion, not through spectacle, but through an encounter with a character so luminous it rewrote everything they thought they knew.

This is the Year of Delegations in its final movement — a season of arrivals that ranged from the sincere to the scheming, from tribes hungry for knowledge to a false prophet hungry for power.

The Alchemy of Encounter

Abd al-Rahman ibn Aqil belongs to a category of Companion that rarely appears in the headlines of Islamic history. He is what scholars sometimes call a “one-hadith sahabi” — a man who met the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) once, during a single delegation visit, and whose entire legacy rests on a single narration. He did not fight at Badr. He did not witness Uhud or Hudaybiyyah. He came, he saw, and he was transformed.

His account is disarmingly honest. “When we asked permission to enter upon him,” he recalls, “there was no one in the world whom we despised more than the one we were forced to go see. But when we ended up leaving, there was no one in the world more beloved to us than the one we were departing from.”

The reversal is total. And what caused it was not a theological argument or a military threat — it was simply being in the Prophet’s presence, witnessing his character, experiencing his hospitality. The books of Seerah do not record the specific conversations or the precise gestures that melted this tribe’s hostility. What they record is the result: a complete inversion of the heart.

One of the younger members of the delegation, emboldened by this new warmth, blurted out a question that reveals how the Arabs understood power: “O Messenger of Allah, why don’t you ask your Lord to give you a kingdom like the kingdom of Sulayman?” It was the question of a people who measured greatness in thrones and territories. The Prophet laughed — a detail the narration preserves — and replied that perhaps their companion had been given something better than the kingdom of Sulayman.

Then he offered them a window into something far more profound:

“Allah has never sent any prophet except that He has given him one request. Some of those prophets asked for something of this world; some asked for punishment against their people. As for me, Allah has given me a request that I have kept between me and my Lord — it shall be my intercession for my Ummah on the Day of Judgment.”

The kingdom he claimed was not territorial. It was eschatological. While Sulayman had commanded the winds and the jinn, the Prophet reserved his singular divine gift for the moment when every soul would stand naked before its Creator, and his people would need someone to speak on their behalf. This was the “better kingdom” — not gold, not armies, but the promise that on the day when it matters most, he would be there.

Scholarly Note

Abd al-Rahman ibn Aqil’s narration is preserved in the secondary and tertiary works of Seerah rather than the primary hadith collections. His account is valued for its vivid emotional testimony about the transformative effect of the Prophet’s character on hostile delegations. The hadith about the Prophet’s reserved intercession (shafa’ah) is corroborated through multiple chains and is considered a foundational element of Islamic eschatology.

The Shadow from Yamama: Musaylama and the Banu Hanifa

If Abd al-Rahman’s tribe represents the best of what the delegations could produce — genuine transformation through encounter — then the delegation of the Banu Hanifa represents the most dangerous. For among their number walked a man whose ambition would cost tens of thousands of lives and nearly shatter the young Muslim state: Musaylama ibn Habib, whom history would remember as Musaylama al-Kadhdhab — Musaylama the Liar.

The Banu Hanifa were no minor tribe. Based in the Yamama region of north-central Arabia, they were among the largest and most powerful tribal confederations on the peninsula, comparable in size and influence to the Quraysh themselves. Their delegation arrived in Madinah with the pomp befitting such stature. The books of Seerah describe how Musaylama’s followers shielded him with elaborate cloths as he entered — a royal procession, banners and all, the kind of entrance designed to announce that this was no ordinary petitioner.

Musaylama’s proposition was breathtaking in its audacity. He demanded that the Prophet share prophethood with him — that they divide the matter between them, the way Musa had shared his mission with his brother Harun. If the Prophet would designate Musaylama as his successor and co-prophet, then Musaylama would follow. Otherwise, he would chart his own course.

The Prophet’s response was devastating in its simplicity. He was sitting among the Companions, holding in his hand a small branch from a palm tree — the kind of thing a person holds absentmindedly, worth nothing. He looked at Musaylama and said:

“By Allah, if you asked me for this stick, I would not give it to you. Allah will deal with you and humiliate you. And I am certain that you are what Allah showed me.”

A stick. A twig worth less than a date. The Prophet would not share even that with a man demanding half the earth. The response was not merely a refusal — it was a calibration of worth. Musaylama’s grandiose claim was measured against the smallest, most insignificant object imaginable, and found to deserve less.

The Dream of the Two Gold Bracelets

The Prophet’s cryptic reference — “you are what Allah showed me” — puzzled even some of the Companions. Years later, Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), who had been barely twelve years old at the time, asked Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) what dream the Prophet had referenced.

Abu Hurayrah narrated what is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari: the Prophet once saw himself in a dream wearing two bracelets of gold. Gold jewelry being prohibited for Muslim men, the dream carried an immediate sense of wrongness — something alien and unwelcome attached to him. He was inspired within the dream to blow upon the bracelets, and when he did, they shattered and fell away.

The Prophet interpreted the two bracelets as two false prophets who would arise after him — men who would try to adorn themselves with the mantle of prophethood, pretending to be extensions of his mission, but who were in reality irritants to be blown away. The first bracelet, he said, represented a man from the tribe of Ans in Yemen — this was al-Aswad al-Ansi (also known as Abhala ibn Ka’b), who would briefly seize power in Yemen before being assassinated. The second bracelet was Musaylama from Yamama.

This prophetic dream, narrated through Abu Hurayrah in Sahih al-Bukhari, connects to the broader hadith in which the Prophet warned: “After my death you shall see thirty Dajjalun Kadhdhabun — thirty false prophets who are liars — and the worst of them will be al-Masih al-Dajjal.” Musaylama was the first of this predicted chain.

The Parody of Revelation

What made Musaylama uniquely dangerous was not merely his political ambition — it was his attempt to replicate the Quran itself. He was, to the best of historical knowledge, the first human being to not only declare himself a prophet but to attempt to produce scripture in imitation of the Quranic style. He had heard the Quran during his time in Madinah, absorbed its rhythms and rhetorical patterns, and then tried to manufacture his own.

The results were, by any literary standard, catastrophic.

He produced a “surah” imitating Surah al-Kawthar (108), which read: “Indeed, We have given you the jewels. So pray to your Lord and rise early. Indeed, the one who hates you — he is a disbeliever.” The structure mimicked al-Kawthar’s tripartite form, but the content collapsed into banality — the cosmic gift of al-Kawthar (“abundance”) replaced with “jewels,” the mysterious abtar (“cut off”) replaced with a flat declaration.

His most infamous composition was what became known as his “Surah of the Frog”: “O toad, daughter of two toads! Continue to purify what you purify. Neither do you make the water dirty, nor do you prevent the one who drinks from drinking. Your head is in the water and your tail is in the mud.” This was based on the folk belief that frogs purified water — a piece of pre-Islamic mythology dressed in pseudo-prophetic language.

He also attempted a “Surah of the Elephant,” imitating Surah al-Fil (105): “The elephant — what is the elephant? And what will make you know what the elephant is? It has an amazing tail and a long snout…” — and it went on, a zoological description masquerading as revelation.

The narrations record that a passing Arab, not even a Muslim, heard Musaylama recite his elephant surah and responded with devastating plainness: “By God, you know that I know you are a liar.” The man needed no theological training, no scholarly apparatus. The counterfeit was self-evident.

Scholarly Note

The attempted imitations of Musaylama are narrated by Ibn Ishaq, al-Tabari, and other early historians. Scholars have noted that these compositions serve as an unintentional proof of the Quran’s inimitability (i’jaz), since even a native Arabic speaker attempting deliberate imitation could produce nothing but what Arab literary critics recognized as absurd. The narrations about Musaylama’s compositions are transmitted through multiple early sources and are considered historically reliable, though exact wordings may vary between transmissions.

After returning to Yamama, Musaylama escalated. He wrote a letter to the Prophet that dripped with presumption: “From Musaylama, Messenger of God, to Muhammad, Messenger of God. Peace be upon you. Know that I have been placed in this matter alongside you. The Quraysh have half the matter and I have the other half — but the Quraysh are a people who transgress beyond bounds.”

The two messengers who delivered this letter were asked by the Prophet what they believed about Musaylama. They replied that they believed him to be a Messenger of God. The Prophet’s response established a principle that would echo through centuries of international law:

“Were it not for the fact that ambassadors are not executed or harmed, I would have had the two of you executed.”

The statement simultaneously condemned their apostasy as deserving of the most severe punishment and upheld the inviolability of diplomatic envoys — a principle the Prophet recognized as transcending any single religious law. Ambassadors, even those carrying blasphemous messages, were protected. This was not Islamic innovation but the recognition of a universal norm that served the mutual interest of all peoples.

The Tribe That Split: Thumama and the Complexity of Banu Hanifa

The story of Banu Hanifa cannot be reduced to Musaylama alone. The same tribe that produced Arabia’s most notorious false prophet also produced Thumama ibn Athal (may Allah be pleased with him), one of its most respected noblemen, whose conversion to Islam became a model of dignified transformation.

Thumama had been captured by the Muslims and brought to Madinah, where the Prophet ordered him tied to one of the pillars of the mosque. For three days, the Prophet visited him, and each day Thumama was asked what he had to say. Each day, Thumama responded with composed dignity: “I have three options. If you want to kill me, you have that right. If you want to free me, you will find me grateful. If you want to ransom me, ask what you will.”

On the third day, the Prophet ordered him released — unconditionally, with no demand for conversion or ransom. During those three days, tied to a pillar in the mosque, Thumama had witnessed Islam from the inside: the prayers, the Quran, the community’s conduct. When he was freed, he left Madinah, performed a ritual washing, returned, and declared his Islam. He then traveled to Mecca and imposed an economic embargo on the Quraysh, refusing to allow wheat and goods to pass through his territory until the Prophet gave permission.

The Banu Hanifa thus contained within itself both extremes — the sincere convert and the false prophet, the man who found God in captivity and the man who tried to manufacture godhood from ambition. After the Prophet’s death, Musaylama’s faction would draw a significant portion of the tribe into apostasy, making the Banu Hanifa the largest and most formidable of the Ridda tribes, posing the gravest military challenge to the caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (may Allah be pleased with him).

And in one of history’s most poetically fitting conclusions, it was Wahshi ibn Harb — the same man who had killed Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib at Uhud, and who had carried that guilt for years — who threw the javelin that killed Musaylama at the Battle of Yamama. The same weapon, the same arm, the same lethal precision — this time aimed at a man who had tried to steal the mantle of prophethood. Wahshi himself reportedly said he wanted to atone for what he had done, to balance the killing of the best of men with the killing of the worst.

Soft Hearts from the South: The Yemeni Delegations

If the delegation of Banu Hanifa represented the darkest possibility of the Year of Delegations, the Yemeni delegations represented its brightest. Tribe after tribe from Yemen arrived in Madinah — the Himyarites, the various clans of Azd, the people of the southern kingdoms — and the Prophet’s words about them glowed with a warmth found in few other hadith.

“The people of Yemen have come to you. They are the ones with the softest of hearts and the best of souls. Faith is Yemeni and wisdom is Yemeni.”

As recorded in Sahih Muslim, this praise carried layers of meaning. The Ansar of Madinah — the Aws and the Khazraj — were themselves of Yemeni origin, descendants of migrations from the south. Every word of praise for Yemen was therefore also praise for the community that had sheltered the Prophet and built the Islamic state from nothing. Ibn Taymiyyah later observed that the people of Yemen were at the forefront of fighting the wars of Ridda and were instrumental in the great conquests that followed.

The Prophet also made a supplication recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari:

“O Allah, bless us in our Sham and in our Yemen.”

When someone asked, “And what about our Najd?” the Prophet repeated his prayer for Sham and Yemen. When the question was pressed a second and third time, he pointed toward the Najd and said that from there would come the earthquakes, the trials, and the tribulations.

Scholarly Note

Scholars differ on which “Najd” is referenced in this hadith. The classical geographic term could refer to the central Arabian plateau (modern-day Riyadh region) or to the elevated lands to the northeast, encompassing parts of what is now Iraq. Many scholars, including Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, favored the interpretation that the reference was to the northeastern direction — toward Iraq — where many of the early civil wars and fitnahs would indeed originate. Others maintained it referred to central Arabia. The hadith is in Sahih al-Bukhari, and both interpretive traditions have scholarly support.

One Yemeni delegation — the Himyarites — arrived with a question so profound it has occupied theologians ever since. They came not to negotiate territory or pay tribute but to ask: How did it all begin? Tell us about the creation of everything. These were philosophical minds, people who wanted to understand the deepest structure of reality.

The Prophet began to answer, narrating as recorded in the hadith of Imran ibn Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) in Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim: “There was Allah, and there was nothing before Him. He created the heavens and the earth while His Throne was upon the water.”

But the narration breaks off in the most agonizing way possible. As the Prophet was speaking, someone called out to Imran that his camel had fled. Imran rushed out of the mosque to chase it. He neither caught the camel nor caught the rest of the hadith. “How I wish,” he said later, with a regret that echoes across fourteen centuries, “I had let the camel go and finished that hadith.”

The Himyarite delegation returned to Yemen and did not become hadith scholars. Imran, the Ansari who was present, lost the thread. And so one of the most tantalizing cosmological teachings of the Prophet remains forever incomplete — for a wisdom known only to Allah.

The Miracle at Jurash and the Power of Du’a

Among the smaller but remarkable incidents was the story of the tribe of Jurash. The Prophet had dispatched Surad ibn Abdullah al-Azdi, a Muslim commander from the tribe of Azd, to confront a neighboring pagan tribe. Meanwhile, two envoys from that very tribe were traveling to Madinah to gauge the Prophet’s willingness for a truce — unaware that a military engagement was already underway.

When these two envoys arrived and identified themselves, the Prophet said something they could not understand: “Verily, Allah’s sacrifice is being made at Jurash as we speak.” Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and Uthman ibn Affan (may Allah be pleased with them both) turned to the bewildered envoys and explained: the Prophet was telling them their tribe was being overrun at that very moment. Their only hope was to beg him to pray for their people’s safety.

They did. The Prophet made du’a for the guidance of the people of Jurash. And when the envoys returned home, they discovered that on the exact day and hour of their conversation in Madinah, the tribe of Azd had indeed overcome Jurash — but at the last moment, decided to show mercy. There was no massacre. When the people of Jurash learned what had transpired, the entire tribe took it as a miracle and embraced Islam, sending a new delegation — this time not to negotiate, but to bear witness.

The Essence of the Mission

Among the many delegates who came simply to learn, one stands out for the ordinariness of his question and the extraordinary depth of the Prophet’s answer. Muawiyah ibn Hayda, a Yemeni delegate and another “one-hadith sahabi,” asked a question about the body: what must be covered, what may be shown? The Prophet’s answer established the basic jurisprudence of awrah — and when Muawiyah pressed further, asking whether one must cover even when completely alone, the Prophet replied:

“Allah has more right that you be shy of Him.”

This single sentence — that modesty is not merely social but cosmic, not about who is watching but about Who is always present — emerged from a conversation with a man who saw the Prophet once in his entire life. The delegate carried it home, and it became one of the standard hadith of Islamic jurisprudence.

Another delegate, al-Hakam ibn Hazan of the Banu Kulfa, came with a group of nine tribesmen for one reason only: to receive the Prophet’s du’a. They stayed a few days, prayed one Jumu’ah behind the Prophet, and al-Hakam remembered a single phrase from the khutbah — a phrase corroborated in Sahih al-Bukhari through other chains:

“O people, do what you can, and know that you will never be able to do everything you have been commanded to do. But rather, aim true and come close.”

Saddidu wa qaribu. Aim for the target even if you cannot hit the bullseye. Do ninety percent and trust that Allah may forgive the ten. Do not let the impossibility of perfection become an excuse for abandoning the effort entirely. This was the Prophet’s parting wisdom to a group of men who had traveled weeks across the desert for a few days in his company — and it remains, perhaps, the most psychologically liberating principle in all of Islamic spirituality.

A Peninsula Transformed

Taken together, the Year of Delegations represents something unprecedented in the history of the Arabian Peninsula. For the first time in recorded memory, the entire region was being consolidated under a single political and spiritual authority. Tribes from Yemen in the south, Najd in the north, Oman in the east, and the Hijaz at the center — all were arriving, negotiating, converting, or establishing treaties. The verse of the Quran captured it with devastating economy:

“When the victory of Allah has come and the conquest, and you see the people entering into the religion of Allah in multitudes…” — Al-Nasr (110:1-2)

This was not uniformity of faith. The delegations revealed a full spectrum of human response: the hypocrites who would apostatize the moment the Prophet died, the pagans who came only for political treaties, the sincere seekers who traveled weeks to ask a single theological question, the scholars-in-training who memorized fiqh to carry home, the warriors of faith who wanted nothing but a du’a. Even in the Prophet’s own lifetime, the Muslim community was never a monolith. It was always a spectrum — and the Prophet navigated every shade of it with the same essential character that turned Abd al-Rahman ibn Aqil’s hatred into love.

The delegations also established precedents that would outlast the century: diplomatic immunity for envoys, hospitality for non-Muslim guests in the mosque, the permissibility of interfaith dialogue that could be firm without becoming violent, and the principle that the masjid itself could serve as a space of encounter for people of all backgrounds.

As the ninth year of the Hijrah draws to a close and the final delegations return to their homelands, the Arabian Peninsula stands on the threshold of a new era. The Prophet has not yet performed his own Hajj since the conquest of Mecca — that momentous journey still lies ahead, along with a farewell that neither he nor his Companions yet fully understand is coming. But first, there are personal chapters yet to unfold: the story of a Coptic woman named Mariyah, a son named Ibrahim, and the quiet griefs that even prophets must bear.