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My brothers and sisters, we were talking about the Seerah and how the solution to our predicaments of today lies in the Seerah, in the life of Rasulullah ﷺ. If you take the Meccan period, and of course the Medinan period also is practically the same in that context. It is a period; the whole life of Rasulullah from the time he received Wahi, till the time he passed away. Twenty-three years is a time of stress of different kinds, stress of different levels, ranging from literally threat to his life, to threat to his reputation, threat to his safety, safety of his family, and so on. But throughout that entire period, if you see his own personal behavior, his behavior—how he behaved with people, how he treated them, what he did with them—you see a constant treatment of fairness and mercy, treatment of grace, treatment of doing good to those who did evil to him. The difference is: doing good to somebody who is doing good to you is just a difference. If somebody treats you well, you treat them well; this is justice. If somebody treats you well and you treat them badly, then this is injustice. But somebody treats you badly, but you treat them well; this is Ihsan, this is grace, this is what Rasulullah demonstrated.
There are so many stories about this. We know that the Prophet Muhammad was a great scholar. We know so many of them. We have heard so many of them. We have repeated so many of them. The story of the woman who used to throw garbage in his path, the story of the woman who was leaving Makkah, decided to leave Makkah and he actually carried her things to the place of departure and then the conversation they had, and as a result of that she came back. She didn’t leave and go. So many stories are in the Seerah of how Rasulullah behaved with people who were antagonistic to him, people who were his enemies. To the extent, and even though he could have done it, throughout the Makkan period, even people like Abu Jahl and Abu Lahab, who physically did not have any respect for Rasulullah, and others who physically harmed him, who physically harmed and tortured his companions and so on. Rasulullah never told someone to go and kill them. He didn’t tell somebody, “Why don’t you kill Abu Jahl because he is doing all of this.” Abu Jahl well deserved to be killed because he had murdered Sumayya bint Khair. He died of an act; he couldn’t be killed. He was made the martyr by his family.
People should get the message from the Mu’izzets. The Mu’izzets going burned to death. One is to kill Salman and you take care of him. One is to do it himself. These are the kind of people that we were against. If you think about them the way good people should have been in the Good Times may have been. Through those thoughts, that is what Robbie says: well, by the Sahaba that they also did the same. And this is what turned the opinions of people, this is what changed the minds of people when it came to Islam, where people realized that this is something that can only happen when someone is following the revelation from Allah. This is not normal behavior, this is not something which people normally do, this is something which has to be special. And if someone is doing that, then this is a sign that something special is happening.
For example, there is an incident in the Seerah where the Sahaba had gone; there was a battalion which was sent out and they were sent to the Seerah to fight a particular tribe and they captured some of the soldiers. They had these captives and it was a two or three day journey back to Madinah. And during this time, the captives, the prisoners, the Sahaba, they fed them meat and bread. And the Sahaba themselves ate the meat and bread. The Sahaba told them that someone ate dry dates. He asked him if there were any with empty stomachs left. The Sahaba said that no, there were many who had empty stomachs left, but they ate dates. So the first time this happened, these people—you know—they were surprised. And the second time it happened, they asked. And they said, “What is this? This is very strange, because we are prisoners.” Business, right? You are giving us the better food and you are simply eating dates. What kind of thing is this? Dates, Khadur. So he said, why are you just eating dates? You know, you should be eating the meat and bread. They said, “No, this is what our Rasool has taught us.” Because Allah said, the sign of the believers is that they give food to the yatimah wa yaseera, the miskinan wa yatiman wa yaseera in Suratul Insan: that they give food, they feed the miskin, the poor, the orphan, and the prisoner. So, we feed you.
The famous incident. And then, as a result of this, these people became Muslim. I mean, they said, “This is it. This is the religion.” Then we want to be part of that. Similarly, one or another famous incident in the Seerah where one, on a patrol, in the Najd, there was a very powerful tribe in the Najd called the Banu Hanifa. So, on one patrol, the Sahaba captured somebody and brought him to Wadina. And when they got him there, they realized that this was the head of the tribe, Sumayba bin Uthal. So, he was the head of the tribe. And of course, at that time, he was not Muslim. So, they brought him to Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And Rasool Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam ordered him to be tied to one of the pillars of Masjid al-Nabawi. This is how they used to; there was no jail or something to keep captives. So, they brought him to Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And Rasool Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was confined in a masjid. Rasool Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam knew who the man was, and Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam ordered for food to be given to him from his house, from the house of the Rasool Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And that’s it. The man was there the whole day.
So, Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam asked him; he went to him and he asked him. He said, “Will you accept Islam?” He said, “No.” Then, he looked at him, he looked at him, and he said only in the eyes of the people. Then he said, “Ya Muhammad, if you release me, you will find that I am a grateful man and I will show my gratitude.” He said, “If you want blood money or ransom for me, name your price. Whatever you want, my tribe will pay.” And he said, “If you kill me, then you will find that I will be avenged.” So here is a man who is not intimidated. He is not begging for mercy or anything. And he said, “I will not accept Islam.” Straight forward. Nabi did not respond. He just listened to him.
So one day passed. And this whole day, this man is seeing whatever is happening in Masjid-e-Nabawi-e-Sharif. And he is getting food from the house of Rasulullah. The second day, Nabi asked him the same question. He said, “Have you changed your mind? Are you willing to accept Islam?” He said, “No.” And he said the same thing. He said, “If you kill me, I will be avenged. If you release me, you will find that I am grateful. And if you want ransom, you name the price, we will give you.” The third day, the same thing happened. So Rasulullah said, “I am not begging for mercy.” I have folder aira bumla. Technologies traprise. Zahir ul-Nissan said, “This is not important. He fl loneliness. This is beyond him. Business should run. He was asking up, talking about it. Remembrance ability.” Because so many times he did everything. Like you used to say, “I am hungry,” and I am participating in… As you know, my son-in-law will die in a day or two. That is because I just knew fish in the ocean. In Madinah, there was a well there; he went and made a ghusl, he took a bath, then he came back to the masjid, and he said, he came to the Prophet, and he said, and I bear witness that there is no one worthy of worship except Allah, and I bear witness that you are the Rasul of Allah.
So Alhamdulillah, so this man now became Muslim. So Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said to him, “What is the story? When I asked you, ‘Will you become Muslim’ and so on, you did not, now you became Muslim.” He said, “I knew that what you are, what you have brought is the truth.” He said, “But I did not want to become Muslim where people will say I became Muslim because I was afraid of death or because I was your prisoner or something.” He said, “I want to become Muslim on my own terms, when I am free. I could have gone away, I did not go.” Then he said, “I was on my way, when your people captured me,” he said, “I was on my way to make Umrah.” So what is your Hukum now to me? Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, “Go and make Umrah, and when you go there, make Talbiyah, and he taught him Talbiyah.” He taught him Talbiyah. He said, “How to make Talbiyah?” He said, “Make this Talbiyah.” So Tumama bin Uthal, Radhi Allah Anhu, was the first person to make Talbiyah while making Tawaf around the Ka’bah. First person. Before anybody else. He was the first person. Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught him. He did that.
Then what he did was, there was this tension between Makkah and Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So Tumama bin Uthal said to the people of Makkah: he said, so when he first made Talbiyah, they realized that he has become Muslim. So some people came to attack him. But others stopped them. They said, “Do you know who this man is?” He said, “This man is the head of Banu Hanifa, and they are the most powerful tribe in the Najd. And they are. They sit on our route to all the supplies, especially the food that we get in Makkah. Banu Hanifa is on that route. If they stop that, we starve. So don’t touch this man.” So they left him. So when he finishes Umrah, he said to them, “I am stopping your food. Because you are hostile to Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.” And he stopped them. He cut off their supplies. So then they sent a petition to Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. They said, “Please help us because this man is, you know, yours. Now he is your, your disciple. He is your, he is a Muslim. So he has stopped our supplies. So have mercy on us.”
And so Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam then told him, let them get their supplies. Right. Now, point I’m making is that here is a situation where we find how Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and the Sahaba behaved when they were in Makkah, when they were subjugated, and how they still behaved even when they were in Medina; they were no longer subjugated. It was their state or their place where they had the authority. Still, the behavior with respect to others—the grace and the kindness and the mercy and justice—with which they behaved, this is what turned the hearts and minds of people toward Islam. So that’s why this, this whole period, for example, between Sulayh-e-Uzaybiyyah and Fatimah-e-Akkah, just two years, more people came to Islam in this period than they came in the 13 or 15 years before Sulayh-e-Uzaybiyyah. Because people, thanks to the treaty, there was free movement. There was free movement of people between the Muslim land and the non-Muslim lands. And people were so impressed with what the Muslims were doing, how they were living, that they came to Islam. There was no, there were no battles fought or there was no force. People came to Islam because they saw the beauty of Islam. They saw the beauty of Islam in the lives of ordinary people.
This is the thing that I always say, and this is not only my saying, but this is also the statement made by one of the greatest scholars of Hadith, where he said that people came to Islam because for the first time, they were able to see the life of an ordinary Muslim. So you’re talking about the carpenters and the bakers and the shepherds and whoever, right? They’re not talking about being impressed by Rasulullah himself. That goes without saying, but not everybody was had access to him. Not everybody saw his life, but people saw other ordinary people who they were dealing with. And they said that this life of this ordinary person was so impressive that people actually came to Islam. Just think about it. Changing a religion is not a small thing. We don’t even change our minds about which sports team we support or which football or cricket team we support and so on. Which political party. We don’t change our minds even about small things like this. Imagine changing your mind and your heart about which God you worship. It’s not a small thing. It’s a very big thing. People did that. And Alhamdulillah, by the grace of Allah, to this day, people are doing it. So there is this beauty, intrinsic and inherent beauty in Islam, but it is up to us to express it and to show it in our lives. People don’t come to Islam because of lectures. They don’t come to Islam because somebody gives a big khutbah or some bayan or something. They come to Islam because they experience Islam. They actually see and taste and feel Islam. And that is up to us. Because who else will show Islam other than Muslims? So we ask Allahﷻ to make us among those who will be demonstrators of Islam by practicing Islam ourselves. So that we benefit and thanks to us, others also benefit. May Allah bless you.