Tayy

Hatim al-Ta'i was the byword for generosity among the Arabs, and his son Adi, chief of Tayy after him, was a Christian with friends at the Roman court and none of his father's nerve. When he heard that the Muslims were conquering tribe after tribe he kept camels ready, and when his lookouts told him Ali was coming he abandoned his people and fled with his wife, children and wealth to the north, near Roman territory. Ali's expedition broke the idol of Tayy and brought back prisoners, and among them a woman demanded to see the Prophet ﷺ: she was the daughter of Hatim, and asked him to be generous to her as Allah would be generous to him. He freed her, gave her a camel and provision, and let her go where she liked. She found her brother in the north, rebuked him for running, and told him to go down to Muhammad ﷺ: either he was a prophet, in which case Adi should follow him, or he was a king, in which case Adi should win his favour. That she allowed the first possibility shows what she already thought. Adi told the story himself, to a student in Kufa, where he died at a hundred and twenty. No one on earth, he said, had been more hateful to him than the Prophet ﷺ; but he decided that if the man spoke the truth he would hear it from him, and if not it would do him no harm. He walked into Madinah at the end of the eighth year or the start of the ninth without protection and without fear, for who would harm the son of Hatim, and men who recognised him shouted his name and took him to the Prophet ﷺ. Adi, accept Islam and you will be safe. He had a religion already, he said, and a better one than the pagans'. The invitation was repeated and refused, and repeated again. Then the Prophet ﷺ said that he knew Adi's religion better than Adi did. Was he not the chief of his people? He was. Did he not take a quarter of their income? He did. And did he not know that his own religion forbade it? Adi said he was ashamed, and knew then that this was a prophet. The Prophet ﷺ took him by the hand and walked him to his house, and on the way an old woman with a small child stopped him about some need of hers, and he stood and talked with her until it was settled, with the chief of Tayy waiting beside him. This, Adi said to himself, is not a king. In the house there was one worn mat. The Prophet ﷺ spread it and told Adi to sit on it, and when Adi protested that there would be nothing left for his host, insisted, and sat on the ground. Then he asked: do you know of any god but Allah? No. Any mightier than Allah? No. The Jews, he said, had earned Allah's anger, and the Christians had gone astray. And then he named the thing that was holding Adi back: perhaps it was the state of the people around him, their poverty and their weakness, seen by a man who lived well among a great civilisation. Had he heard of al-Hirah? A woman would soon ride from al-Hirah to circle the Ka'bah alone, fearing nothing but Allah. The treasures of Kisra ibn Hormuz would be divided among them. Kisra ibn Hormuz? Adi asked. Kisra ibn Hormuz. And a day would come when a man would walk the streets of Madinah with alms in his hand and find no one to take them. Adi became a Muslim there in the house. When he told the story in later life he would say that he had seen two of the three with his own eyes: the woman rode safe, and he had been among those who opened the treasury of Kisra; as for the third, he knew it would come, and it came in the reign of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz. Later he asked the Prophet ﷺ whether his father, so generous to kin and stranger, would be rewarded, and was told that his father had wanted something and had got what he wanted.

On one of his later visits to the Prophet ﷺ after his conversion, Adi ibn Hatim RA asked whether his father Hatim al-Ta'i (famed for his generosity and kindness to his relatives and people despite dying outside Islam) would be rewarded for it in the Hereafter.