The Companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ

“They apostatised after the Prophet ﷺ except a few”

The response

First, the Book. Allah said that He was pleased with the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār and those who gave the pledge under the tree, that He knew what was in their hearts, and that He promised them Paradise. The Rāfiḍī has to say that Allah did not know how they would end, or that He knew and was pleased with them anyway. Either is disbelief.

Secondly, the transmission. The Qurʾān that the Rāfiḍī recites was gathered by Abū Bakr and copied by ʿUthmān, and it reached him through the very men he calls apostates. If they were apostates who betrayed the Prophet ﷺ in the matter of the caliphate, nothing stops them from betraying him in the matter of the Book. That is why some of their scholars said that the Qurʾān was altered, and why the imams said, as Abū Zurʿah did, that the attack on the Companions is an attack on the Book.

Thirdly, ʿAlī himself. He gave the pledge to Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān, he prayed behind them, he married his daughter Umm Kulthūm to ʿUmar, and he named his sons Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān. He said from the pulpit of Kūfah, as al-Bukhārī reports through his son Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥanafiyyah, that the best of this Ummah after its Prophet ﷺ is Abū Bakr and then ʿUmar. The Rāfiḍī who claims to follow ʿAlī has to make ʿAlī a coward or a hypocrite to keep his doctrine.

Fourthly, the outcome. A religion whose Prophet ﷺ spent twenty-three years and left behind no more than three or four believers is a failed religion, and the Rāfiḍī has said of the Messenger ﷺ what no enemy of Islam could say better. Allah said: “You are the best nation brought forth for mankind.” The first to hear that address were the Companions.

“Their justice must be examined man by man, as with every narrator”

The response

Ahl al-Sunnah do not say that the Companions were free of sin. They say that they are all trustworthy (ʿudūl) in what they report from the Prophet ﷺ, because Allah and His Messenger ﷺ declared it of them, and because no one of them is known to have lied against him. The hypocrites were known by name to the Prophet ﷺ and by their deeds to the Companions, and they are not counted Companions, for the definition of a Companion requires faith.

The fighting between them was a difference of judgement among men each of whom sought the truth. The Prophet ﷺ said of al-Ḥasan that Allah would make peace through him between two great parties of the Muslims, and called both of them Muslims. Ahl al-Sunnah hold their tongues about what happened between them, say that each was either right with two rewards or mistaken with one, and say with Sūrat al-Ḥashr: our Lord, put no rancour in our hearts toward those who believed.

And the man who wants to examine them one by one has nothing to examine them with. Every report about their conduct reached him through them or through those who learned from them. He weighs them by the scales they handed to him. The critics of ḥadīth examined everyone after them with the greatest strictness, and they did not examine the Companions, because Allah had already examined them.

“Abū Hurayrah narrated too much, and the Companions doubted him”

The response

This objection is not new. It was raised in the lifetime of Abū Hurayrah (raḍiyallāhu ʿanhu), and he answered it himself, before the Companions, in words that al-Bukhārī recorded in his Ṣaḥīḥ.

Al-Bukhārī reported from al-Aʿraj that Abū Hurayrah said:

So he gave three reasons, and each is a matter of the record of the Companions. The first is that he kept to the Prophet ﷺ at every hour while the others had their trades and their palm groves. The second is the supplication of the Prophet ﷺ for his memory. The third is that he feared to conceal knowledge. And the Prophet ﷺ himself bore witness to his eagerness for ḥadīth.

Al-Bukhārī reported in the Book of Knowledge from Abū Hurayrah:

As for the claim that the Companions doubted him, the report on which it is built is the report of Ibn ʿUmar, and when it is read in full it is a testimony for Abū Hurayrah and not against him. Al-Bayhaqī gave it with its chain and graded it.

Al-Bayhaqī reported in al-Madkhal ilā al-Sunan al-Kubrā, by his chain to Ibn ʿUmar:

As for the comparison with Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and ʿAlī, they were occupied with the caliphate and its burdens and died before the people needed their narration as they needed it later, while Abū Hurayrah lived until the year fifty-seven or after it, sat in the mosque of Madīnah for decades, gave verdicts, and was asked by the Followers who came from every land. The count of his reports that is quoted against him includes every route and every repetition. And al-Bukhārī said that around eight hundred men of knowledge narrated from him, among them Companions and the senior Followers. Whoever doubts him has doubted all of them, and has doubted the Companions who heard him narrate in their midst and did not deny him. That is the purpose of those who raise it: as Abū Zurʿah said, they wish to impugn our witnesses in order to abolish the Book and the Sunnah.

“There were hypocrites among the Companions, so any one of them could be a hypocrite”

The response

The verse itself answers them. In the verse before it Allah said: “And the foremost, the first of the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār, and those who followed them with excellence, Allah is pleased with them and they are pleased with Him, and He has prepared for them gardens beneath which rivers flow” (al-Tawbah 100). So He separated the two groups in one place: those with whom He declared His pleasure, and the hypocrites among the Bedouins and the people of Madīnah. Whoever takes the second verse and uses it against the people of the first has reversed the order of the Book.

And hypocrisy had a known place. The Muhājirūn left their homes and wealth in Makkah when the disbelievers held it, and no one does that while hiding disbelief, for there was nothing to be gained by a false faith. Hypocrisy appeared in Madīnah, when Islām had strength and men needed to show it. Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah (raḥimahullāh) reported this from Imām Aḥmad.

Ibn Taymiyyah said in Kitāb al-Īmān:

As for the ḥadīth of the twelve, Muslim reported it from ʿAmmār from Ḥudhayfah, and in the second narration in the same place the wording is “in my Ummah”. So “my companions” there means those who were counted among his followers outwardly, as the Arab says “my companions” of those who are around him. The Companion in the language of the scholars is the one who met the Prophet ﷺ as a believer and died upon that, and the hypocrite is not a believer, so he was never a Companion in that sense. The ḥadīth itself is a proof against the objector, for it gives a number: twelve, known to Ḥudhayfah by name, who were destroyed as the ḥadīth describes.

Muslim reported in his Ṣaḥīḥ from Qays:

Hence, the hypocrites were a small, known number, whom the Prophet ﷺ named to Ḥudhayfah, and from whom no one took the religion. Not one ḥadīth of the Sunnah is transmitted by a man known to the scholars as a hypocrite. The transmitters of the Sunnah were the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār whom Allah praised by name, the people of Badr, the people of the Pledge under the Tree of whom Allah said “Allah was pleased with the believers when they pledged allegiance to you under the tree”, and those who followed them. And the Prophet ﷺ said: “None of the people of the Tree who pledged allegiance beneath it will enter the Fire, if Allah wills”, as Muslim reported from Umm Mubashshir. So whoever makes the hidden hypocrite a reason to doubt the Companions has doubted the testimony of Allah and His Messenger for them, in order to reach the Book and the Sunnah that came through them.

“Ahl al-Sunnah love Yazīd, the killer of al-Ḥusayn”

The response

Ahl al-Sunnah love al-Ḥusayn (raḍiyallāhu ʿanhu) as a member of the Household and as one of the two masters of the youth of Paradise, and they hold that he was killed unjustly and that his killers are among the worst of creation. As for Yazīd, they neither love him with the love due to the righteous nor curse him by name. Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah (raḥimahullāh) set out the two extremes and the position of the imams between them.

Ibn Taymiyyah said, in Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā:

Then he mentioned what Yazīd’s army did to the people of Madīnah at al-Ḥarrah and the siege of Makkah, and called it transgression and oppression done by his order, and he gave the position of Imām Aḥmad.

He said:

Hence, the charge is false on both of its counts. Ahl al-Sunnah do not love Yazīd, and Aḥmad refused even to narrate from him. And they do not make the curse of a specific Muslim a part of their religion, because the Prophet ﷺ forbade the cursing of the man who was repeatedly brought to him for drinking wine, saying that he loves Allah and His Messenger, as al-Bukhārī reported. The Rāfiḍah, who make cursing the foundation of their religion, curse Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and the wives of the Prophet ﷺ, and they have no standing to judge others by their love for the Household.

And the record of the killing of al-Ḥusayn is against them, not against Ahl al-Sunnah. It was the people of Kūfah who wrote to him and called him, then abandoned his envoy Muslim ibn ʿAqīl to be killed, then gave him up at Karbalāʾ. The Companions who were alive, Ibn ʿAbbās, Ibn ʿUmar and others, counselled him not to go to them, knowing what they had done to his father and his brother. Those who claim his blood today descend in their doctrine from those who called him and betrayed him, and the Sunnah is that the Muslim says at the calamity: “Indeed we belong to Allah and to Him we return”, and does not strike his cheeks or tear his garments, for the Prophet ﷺ said: “He is not of us who strikes his cheeks, tears his garments and calls with the call of the Jāhiliyyah”, as al-Bukhārī and Muslim reported.