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Bismillāh ar-Raḥmān ar-Raḥīm, Alhamdulillāhi Rabbil ‘Alāmīn, wa salātu wa salāmu ‘alā ash-sharafi l-‘Abbīyī wa mursalin, Muḥammadur Rasūlullāh ﷺ, wa sahibihi wa salām, tasliman kathīran kathīrā. Wa ma’ādhu, my brothers and sisters,
we are in Ethiopia, returning to India today InshaAllāh. And I was thinking to myself that this is the land of the first Hijrah.
Rasūlullāh ﷺ sent his Ṣaḥābah from Makkah for them to a place where he knew that they would be safe and where they would form and create a Muslim community as an insurance against the potential annihilation of the Muslims in Makkah.
Now Rasūlullāh ﷺ himself didn’t go. And then obviously, if that had been the Qadr of Allāh that the Muslims were to be annihilated in Makkah, this would of course include Rasūlullāh ﷺ, and then what use would have been a community anywhere in the world. But Allāh Subḥānahu wa Ta’ālā masha’Allah, Rasūlullāh ﷺ, in this case, as we are seeing, is taking every step, every precaution that is necessary. It is necessary to be taken, even though some of them can be argued against.
But this is a lesson for us to say that if we are in situations like this, then preservation of human life, preservation of the community takes precedence over everything else, and you do whatever you can to preserve. Okay. So, Rasūlullāh ﷺ is saying that if you do a little bit of research on this, it’s a very interesting thing.
They didn’t come to Addis Ababa, which is where I am now. They came to the northern Ethiopian highlands and Eritrea in the seventh century, when Rasūlullāh ﷺ lived there. So, Rasūlullāh ﷺ lived among us. The kingdom of Aksum, ruled by the Negus, An-Najashī, Asham ibn Abjar.
This was his name. Negus or An-Najashī was what the king was called; the emperor was called, like we had in the Hyderabad state, the Nizam of Hyderabad. Now, each Nizam obviously had his own name. But he was called the Nizam. So, this was the—take for example, the Egyptian Pharaohs. You had Pharaoh this, Pharaoh that; each one had his own name. But they were addressed as the Pharaoh, which was what the kings were called. So here it was, the Negus. The capital city of the kingdom of Aksum was Aksum.
And this was the capital city of the kingdom of Aksum. And this is the Nizam. This capital city, Aksum. The capital city, Aksum, is approximately a thousand kilometers north-northwest of Addis Ababa. It’s around 620 miles. They say that you, if you want to go there, you take a flight.
You can drive as well, but you take a flight which takes around an hour and then you drive from that airport for about 60 kilometers or so. The king was called Aksum. The kingdom of Aksu-Mongol, the Aksumite Empire, was a kingdom in the Horn of Africa and South Arabia. Horn of Africa and South Arabia from classical antiquity to the middle ages, based in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, and it was a big kingdom; it’s a very big empire.
It spanned present-day Djibouti, Sudan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. All this comprised the Aksumite Empire.
Emerging from the earlier Lim civilization, the kingdom was founded in the first century. So, first century is usually when we—you have the Greeks who ruled in Europe, and first century is when the Romans were just coming to power. The city of Aksum served as the kingdom’s capital, and it was a seventh-century center of all activity of civilization and so on, for this part of the world. The kingdom and its parts of the kingdom obviously, as I said, it comprised modern-day Saudi Arabia as well. So part of this reached into Eritrea and parts of the Red Sea coast. That is how the Arabs used to trade with them.
The capital Aksum, it is situated in the north. How? It is located in the north: high northern mountains of Tigray.
Najash Ahmadin Masjid also called Najashi Ahmad Deen.
There is a Masjid now built where next to the graveyard where he is buried. It’s an Islamic historic religious site and it’s called the Najashi Mosque, and it is in Najash in the Tigray region of Dada, Ethiopia. In the
Islamic tradition, the mosque and its associated cemetery are linked to Asham ibn Abjar, the Christian ruler of the Aksumite Kingdom who is remembered for granting asylum to the first Muslim immigrants from Makkah during the Hijrah to Abyssinia in the first half of the 7th century CE.
We know the story of how Rasūlullāh sent them, and they went. Al-Jafar ibn Abi Talib, the elder brother of ‘Alī ibn Abi Talib ﷺ, Radhi Allāhu Anwa-hu—
Radhi Allāhu Anwa-hu, the two brothers, not Abu Talib. He was their leader, and they went there; they lived there, and Najash gave them shelter. And then when they were sort of settling down, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, who was at that time not yet asleep, was sent by the Quraysh to ask the Najashī to return these people to the Quraysh. So that’s because ‘Amr ibn al-‘As was a personal friend of Najashī.
So he went, and he said to the Najashī: “These people that you have given shelter to, these people are against you. They are against Christians. And these people are people who abuse ‘Isa and his mother.”
Sayyida Maryam. So therefore, don’t give them shelter. Hand them back to us. They are our slaves, and we will take them back. So the Najashī was a very wise and a very just ruler. So instead of just believing ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, even though ‘Amr ibn al-‘As was his friend… So the story goes that he went there. Najashī asked him, “What have you brought for me?” And he had taken some—you know, the Arabs used to do some, make some leather handicrafts and so on. So he gave all that to the Najashī as his tribute. And then he made his demand.
So Najashī, instead of just listening, you know—
believing him—he called for the Muslims. And he says, “This is what is being said about you. What do you say?” So Jafar ibn Abi Talib ﷺ said: “We are not his slaves. We are not the slaves of the Quraysh. We are Quraysh. We are free people.” And he said, “What do we say”
about Maryam Alayhiṣ-Salām and ‘Isa Alayhiṣ-Salām? He said, “I will tell you what the Qur’ān says. This is what Allāh says. And this is what we have been taught by our Nabi Sallallahu Alayhi Wa Sallam.” And he recited the āyāt of Surah Maryam. And Najashī was so impressed that he literally wept. And he picked up a little tiny, small twig. And he said, “The difference between what you believe and what we believe is not more than this.” And as we know, he became Muslim. He died Muslim, InshaAllāh. Nabi Sallallahu Alayhi Wa Sallam prayed Sa’dat al-Ruqaybah for him. And he is buried in this place in Aqsa. We ask Allāh to stand firm for Islam and to stand firm, Alhamdulillah, for the truth and not to buckle to any pressures or alternatives. We ask Allāh to be pleased with us and never to be displeased. Wa Sallallahu Alayhi Wa Sallam. Al-Fātiḥah.
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