The Letters to the Kings

Some time after the Hijrah to Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ wrote a letter to the Najashi. The Najashi wrote back declaring, "I am a Muslim: I believe in you and all that you say. And if you command me, O Prophet of God, I will come to Madinah and serve you." The letter itself (as reported by Ibn al-Qayyim) opened, "From Muhammad ﷺ the Messenger of God to Negus, King of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Peace be upon him who follows true guidance..." and set out Islamic belief about Isa (Jesus): "I bear witness that Jesus, the son of Mary, is the spirit of God and His Word which He cast into Mary, the virgin, the good, the pure, so that she conceived Jesus. God created him from His spirit and His breathing as He created Adam by His Hand." It called the Najashi to Islam with "Aslim taslam (submit and you will get salvation)" and closed with the verse "O People of the Book! Let us come to common terms: that we will worship none but God, associate none with Him, nor take one another as lords instead of God" [Quran, 3:64]. This letter is not to be confused with Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA's dawah to the Najashi over a decade earlier during the first Hijrah to Abyssinia; by this point Ja'far had already left. Unlike the letters to Heraclius and Khosrow, this letter carried no warning that the Najashi would bear the sins of his people if he refused; the Prophet ﷺ apparently already knew he was close to Islam.

Placed here because: ~ Ep. 71 begins with the letter to the Najashi; the letters went out after Hudaybiyyah, c. 7 AH, and their order is not fixed.

After Hudaybiyyah, when the truce freed the Prophet ﷺ to look beyond Arabia, he wrote to the rulers of the world, and the most famous of the letters went to Caesar. The emperor was Heraclius, who reigned from 610 to 641 and whom Muslim and non-Muslim historians alike remember kindly: a scholar of Christianity who tried and failed to reconcile its two great factions with a theology of his own, and a soldier who had just won back everything the Persians had taken, as Surah al-Rum had foretold when Rome seemed finished. Dihyah al-Kalbi carried the letter to the governor of Busra, where the Quraysh went to trade, to be sent on; and it happened that Heraclius was in Jerusalem, so it reached him at once. Abu Sufyan was trading in Busra, still a pagan, when a crier summoned him and his companions to Jerusalem, and he found himself standing in the palace of the emperor. Heraclius asked, through an interpreter, which of them was nearest in blood to the man who claimed to be a prophet. Abu Sufyan was, and was seated in front, his companions behind him with orders to signal if he lied. He said afterwards that only the fear of being called a liar by his own people made him tell the truth. The questions came one after another. His family? Noble. Had anyone among them claimed this before him? No. Had any of his ancestors been a king? No. Did the nobles follow him or the poor? The poor. Were they growing or shrinking? Growing. Did any leave his religion in disgust once they had entered it? No. Had he ever been accused of lying before he began? No. Did he break his word? No, though there was a truce between them now and no one knew what he would do, the one thing, Abu Sufyan admitted later, he could find to say against him. Had they fought him? Yes, and sometimes he won and sometimes they did. What did he command? To worship God alone and abandon the gods of their fathers, to pray, to speak the truth, to be chaste, and to keep the ties of kinship. Then Heraclius explained his questions. Prophets come from noble families. Had another made the claim before, this man might be imitating him; had his fathers been kings, he might be after his inheritance. A man who does not lie about money does not lie about God. The poor follow the prophets first, the truth always gains followers, and faith that has entered a heart and mingled with it is not thrown off. Prophets do not betray. And what he commanded was what the prophets had commanded. If all this was true, he said, the man would soon rule the ground beneath his feet; he had known from his scriptures that someone was coming, but had not expected him from the Arabs; and could he reach him, he would wash his feet. Then he called for the letter and had it read: in the name of Allah, from Muhammad ﷺ the servant of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ to Heraclius the great one of the Romans; peace on whoever follows guidance; submit and you will be safe and Allah will give you a double reward, and if you turn away you carry the sin of the Arisiyin; and the verse of Ali Imran calling the People of the Book to a word held in common, that none be worshipped but Allah. There was uproar in the court and the Arabs were put out. Abu Sufyan said to his companions on the way out that the affair of Ibn Abi Kabsha, the Quraysh's sneer for the Prophet ﷺ, had grown so great that the king of the Romans feared him; and it was there, he said, in the palace of Caesar, that Islam first entered his heart, three years before he embraced it. Sahih al-Bukhari keeps a second story of Heraclius, told apart from the first. He woke one morning troubled by a dream in which the king of the circumcised had appeared; his courtiers told him that only the Jews were circumcised and that he need only bear down on them. Then Dihyah arrived with the Prophet ﷺ's letter and, on examination, was found to be circumcised, and the emperor understood whom the dream meant. He wrote to a learned friend, a bishop, who wrote back that this was indeed the one; and it is likely, though the sources do not say it, that it was this friend who supplied the three tests Heraclius later sent the Tanukhi to make. At last he gathered his senators and asked what they thought of his following Muhammad ﷺ, and when they bolted for the doors he told them he had only been testing their faith. He died a Christian, in the confusion of a coup, having lived to see Jerusalem taken by the people of his dream.

Placed here because: ~ Ep. 71: "The second most famous letter is that to Caesar"; it reached Heraclius in Jerusalem, and the truce with the Quraysh was still in force.

The Prophet ﷺ sent Abdullah ibn Hudhafah al-Sahmi with a letter to the ruler of Bahrain, to be passed on to Khosrow (Kisra), Emperor of Persia, inviting him to Islam. Khosrow mocked the messenger and tore up the letter in front of him.

Placed here because: ~ Ep. 71 tells it after Caesar's; Khosrow tore the letter and died on 28 February 628, in 7 AH.

The Prophet ﷺ sent a letter to the Muqawqis of Egypt, Jurayj ibn Mina (identified with Cyrus of Alexandria, a Melkite Christian patriarch and the final Byzantine prefect of Egypt, appointed by Rome rather than an independent king). No authentic narration preserves the letter's exact text. The Muqawqis responded politely with a mini-fortune: about 1,000 mithqal (4.25 kg) of gold, fine garments, the mule/donkey Duldul, the servant Ma'boor, honey, and the two Coptic Christian sisters Maria and Sirin, but did not himself embrace Islam. Because the Prophet ﷺ could not keep two sisters at once, he gifted Sirin to the poet Hassan ibn Thabit (with whom she had a son, Abd al-Rahman) and kept Maria for himself.

Placed here because: ~ Ep. 71 tells it after Khosrow's; no date is given.

This is the second letter to pass between the Prophet ﷺ and Heraclius, and unlike the first it is not in al-Bukhari but in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, told by the Tanukhi himself, a Christian Arab of the tribe of Tanukh whose name no one recorded, to a young man of Hims who found him in his old age, nearly a hundred, and asked him about the letters. When the Prophet ﷺ was at Tabuk he sent Dihyah al-Kalbi to Heraclius again. The emperor, who had watched what this man had done since the first letter, locked himself in with his patriarchs and priests and put the invitation to them, and then, needing an Arabic speaker with a good memory, was brought the Tanukhi. He gave him a letter and three things to check: whether the Prophet ﷺ spoke of the letters he had sent to the kings, whether he answered a question in the letter with the word night, and whether he had a mark on his back. The Tanukhi found him sitting with his Companions by the well at Tabuk, walked up and handed him the letter. The Prophet ﷺ set it aside and asked where he was from, and invited him to Islam, the hanifiyyah, the religion of his father Ibrahim. The Tanukhi answered that he was an ambassador and would not change his people's religion while he carried their message; he would go home and think. The Prophet ﷺ laughed and recited that you do not guide whom you love, but Allah guides whom He wills; and then said that he had written to Kisra of Persia, who tore his letter, so Allah would tear his kingdom, to the Najashi, who tore it, so Allah would tear his, and to the Tanukhi's master, who had kept it safe, so that men would go on fearing his power as long as there was good in life. That was the first sign, and the envoy took an arrow from his quiver and scratched a mark on his parchment. He asked who read for the Prophet ﷺ, and Mu'awiyah was called and read Caesar's question: you invite me to a Garden as wide as the heavens and the earth, so where is the Fire? Subhan Allah, the Prophet ﷺ answered, where does the night go when the day comes? The second mark went on the parchment. Then the Prophet ﷺ said that the envoy had a right to a gift and there was nothing to give him on campaign; Uthman stood and presented a yellow robe, and an Ansari took him home for the night. He waited a day or two for a chance at the third sign and gave up, and went to take his leave. The Prophet ﷺ told him to wait, turned, let his shirt down from his shoulders and said: go and tell your master what you have seen. The Tanukhi described the Seal of Prophethood between his shoulder blades as like a large cupping mark. He went home with all three signs checked, and some say he later became a Muslim and some that he died a Christian. What Heraclius did with the answer is told in Bukhari's second story of him: he put the question to his senators and, when they recoiled, said he had only been testing them.

Placed here because: Ep. 91: "The Prophet ﷺ came to Tabuk, and he sent Dihyah al-Kalbi [with a letter] to Hiraqal ... this is the second letter to Heraclius."

Heraclius awoke troubled by a dream and an astrological omen that a leader of a circumcising people would arise and challenge him. His senators suggested it concerned only the Jews, but before he could act, Dihyah al-Kalbi arrived at his court with a message from the Prophet ﷺ and was found to be circumcised. Heraclius then wrote to a fellow scholar (most likely John IV). He later summoned his senators and asked what they thought of him embracing Muhammad ﷺ's faith; they reacted with fury, so he told them he was only testing their loyalty and remained upon his faith, dying some years later in the middle of a coup.

Placed here because: ~ Ep. 71: "the second story most likely takes place after the Tanukhi incident."