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The Firsts (Sahaba Stories) | The Forerunners of Islam
Sawad ibn Ghaziyya (ra): He Demanded Payback. This Is What He Got. | The Firsts
Minutes before Badr, the Prophet ﷺ straightened the rows and pressed the stomach of one companion back into line. Sawad ibn Ghaziyya (ra) said, “You hurt me, O Messenger of Allah. I want payback.” The Prophet ﷺ didn’t brush him off. He lifted his own shirt and said, “Take it.” What Sawad (ra) did next was an amazing act of love.
Here we begin a new set of biographies: Companions whose lives were changed by the physical touch of the Prophet ﷺ. Sawad (ra) went on to capture two of the most valuable prisoners at Badr and was later placed in charge of Khaybar, where the Prophet ﷺ corrected him on an exchange of dates that amounted to riba (interest).
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
00:00I want to welcome you all back to the first, Alhamdulillahi Rabbil 'Alamin, as we come to
00:11this particular set of biographies. I wanted to go into a different theme, very different from the theme that we just finished, which was the theme of redemption and people that
00:21did horrible things, especially those that did horrible things to the Prophet ﷺ and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ forgave them. And I wanted to move into a broad theme and
00:34that is touched by the Prophet ﷺ. And I mean physically. People that had the healing
00:42touch of the Prophet ﷺ or the touch of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ changed their trajectory. SubhanAllah, it's an incredible genre of biographies. Some of those biographies
00:56we've already covered, so we're not going to repeat them. But just how the hand of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ could heal somebody. And so many of the biographies that we'll
01:07be covering, bi'idhnillahi ta'ala, they fall under the chapter of dala'il al-nubuwwah, the books of the proofs of prophethood and the miracles of the Prophet ﷺ. Because the
01:18Messenger of Allah ﷺ, whose hands, when he would put his hands on food and it would become plentiful or water and it would start to flow, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would
01:28put his hands on people and it would heal, alayhis salatu was salam, by the permission of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And you may remember a very famous incident with Sayyidina
01:40Ali ﷺ because obviously only the sahaba got to experience this physical touch of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. When the Prophet ﷺ said that I'm going to give
01:53the raya, the banner, tomorrow to someone, yuhibbu Allaha wa rasoolahu wa yuhibbuhu Allahu wa rasooluhu. I'm going to give the banner tomorrow to someone who loves Allah and His
02:07Messenger wa yuhibbuhu Allahu wa rasooluhu. And Allah and His Messenger love that person. And all of the sahaba were poking their heads out at Khaybar, hoping that the Prophet ﷺ
02:17would announce them. And then the Messenger of Allah ﷺ the next morning said, ayna Aliyy, where is Ali ﷺ, and they said yashtaki aynayhi, that he's suffering from pain in
02:30his eyes. Ali ﷺ had some sort of condition that was so bad that he could not see. So the Prophet ﷺ said call him to me, fabasaqa fi aynayhi wada'a lahu. The Prophet ﷺ took
02:44some of his saliva and he put it on the eyes of Ali ﷺ and he made du'a for him. So that cured him to the point that he no longer had any pain. So he could see perfectly and he
02:56no longer had any pain. Fa a'taahu ar-raya. So the Prophet ﷺ gave him the banner and Allah ﷻ opened Khaybar on his hands. And so there was something healing about the touch
03:09of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. And it's not just the physical healing, it was also the desire that so many of the believers would have to have been in that situation where
03:21they could have been with the Prophet ﷺ, been in his company, seen him ﷺ, felt him ﷺ. And that is why you find, subhanAllah, that Thabit al-Bunani, rahimahullah, he would
03:33say to Anas ibn Malik ﷺ, qala bi abi hatani al-yadani al-latani, massata Rasool Allah ﷺ. May my father be sacrificed for these two hands that touched the Prophet ﷺ. So
03:50when he's touching the hands of Anas ﷺ, he's imagining that I'm touching the one that touched the Prophet ﷺ. And there is shawq, there is love, there is longing in that touch
04:01of Anas ﷺ. Qala wa bi abi hatani al-yadani al-latani, ra'ata Rasool Allah ﷺ. And may my father be sacrificed for these two eyes that saw the Prophet ﷺ.
04:15Al-Imam bin Sirin, rahimahullah ta'ala, and this is actually narrated in the chapter heading in Al-Bukhari, in one of the chapters in Al-Bukhari, where Muhammad ibn Sirin, rahimahullah ta'ala,
04:28one of the, of course, followers, not one of the sahaba, qala qultu li Abidah, Abidah as-Salmani, Ibn Hajar, rahimahullah, says Abidah as-Salmani was a man in Yemen that embraced
04:41Islam in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, but he did not get to meet the Prophet ﷺ. So he's technically a tabi'i. He wanted to make his way to see the Prophet ﷺ and to actually
04:53greet the Prophet ﷺ, but he never got to physically meet the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. So Ibn Sirin says, qultu li Abidah, indana min sha'ari al-nabi ﷺ asabnaahu min qibali
05:07Anas, aw min qibali ahli Anas. That we have, Ibn Sirin is speaking about himself, that we have some of the hair of the Prophet ﷺ that we received from Anas, radiyallahu ta'ala,
05:20or from the family of Anas, radiyallahu ta'ala, anhu. Faqal la'an takuna indi sha'aratun minhu ﷺ ahabbu ilayya min ad-dunya wa maa feeha. Again this is in one of the sub-headings
05:33of Al-Bukhari. He said, if I was to have the hair of the Prophet ﷺ, or a piece, anything from the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, that would be more beloved to me than this dunya and
05:45everything that is in it. Pause here. Most of the people that claim they have relics of the Prophet ﷺ, unfortunately it's not really relics of the Prophet ﷺ. So there
05:55has to be an accuracy check here for sure. There is something that is very detailed and there is a science to the verification of this. The preservation of whatever was physically
06:08left of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and obviously there is blessing in having that connection to something that touched the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. And that never led to or spiraled
06:23into any type of elevating the Prophet ﷺ to a demigod or to a place of shirk. Knowing that there is blessing in being able to touch the Prophet ﷺ or to have something from
06:35the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, never exceeded the bounds and the sahaba never compromised their monotheism in that process. Because you love the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and you
06:48know he is blessed because of the one who blessed him ﷺ. So why do I give this introduction? Because the next several biographies all fall within this genre of how bad would you want
07:02to be in that situation where you got to accompany the Messenger of Allah ﷺ in such a way. And the first biography is the shortest biography in this regard but these next biographies
07:15all are in the battlefield of Badr and they all involve something of this nature. So I want you to follow along the pathway of three of the Badriyyun. Obviously the people of
07:31Badr are the best of the companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. They are the veterans of Islam. And three of them look through their eyes as to what this actually means. And the
07:43first one is a biography that does not actually include the healing touch of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ but simply speaks to that shawq, that love, that longing for the Messenger
07:56of Allah ﷺ. And the companion's name is Sawad ibn Ghaziyah al-Ansari. Sawad ibn Ghaziyah al-Ansari.
08:04Again, Sawad ibn Ghaziyah al-Ansari. Sawad ibn Ghaziyah, he's from a tribe that
08:23is allied to Banu Najjar. Banu Najjar are the maternal uncles of the Prophet ﷺ. It's a tribe of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, Umm Sulaym, some of the famous companions, right? But
08:34they're the maternal uncles of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. So there's a dispute whether Sawad is actually from Banu Najjar or his family basically integrated themselves amongst
08:46Banu Najjar to where they were, he was a halif of Banu Najjar but was basically one of them. So whether he is their lineage or not, he is considered from Banu Najjar, the maternal
08:58uncles of the Prophet ﷺ. And he's considered to be from the elite of the companions in terms of participation in battle. That's why when someone asks me like, when are you going
09:10to stop doing the first? I'm like, we haven't even scratched the surface with the Sahaba. You're hearing about some of the cream of the crop till now and we're almost at episode 200, right? And you're still rediscovering some of the earliest companions of the Prophet
09:24ﷺ. And so he fought in Badr, he fought in Uhud, he fought in Khandaq, he fought in all of the military campaigns alongside the Prophet ﷺ. And his story with the Messenger
09:37of Allah ﷺ, it particularly resembles an incident that happened with Usaid ibn Hudair but it's different. If you go all the way back to Usaid ibn Hudair ﷺ. Sawad ﷺ was
09:55described as having a little bit of a stomach. And when he was lining up on the day of Badr, and you can imagine the stress of the day of Badr as he's lining up, his stomach was
10:10poking out. And it was as if he was a bit relaxed. So I want you to imagine that you're the Prophet ﷺ. What are you doing before the battle starts? You're getting everyone
10:23in line, right? You can't afford anything to be out of place here. You know, imagine SubhanAllah when it comes to the Salah, like narrations of the Prophet ﷺ going before
10:34the Salah and making sure everyone was in place. This is for Salah. For the battle of Badr, you are significantly outnumbered, you're out-armed for sure, you're out-horsed. Everything
10:47is against you in terms of the military capacity and the numbers, right, and the resources
10:56of this battle. So the Prophet ﷺ has a lot obviously on his mind, on his heart. He's making du'a. He didn't sleep the night before ﷺ. He made du'a all night long in his tent
11:09ﷺ. And he's going and he's getting the lines straightened. And so as he is getting the lines straightened,
11:18the Prophet ﷺ pushed his stomach in, just poked it in, and said to him,
11:29right, istawi ya Sawad. When we say istawu istaqeemu, you hear that. He literally used that word ﷺ, like stand up straight, like get in line, stand up straight. Not disrespectful, just the Prophet ﷺ is going forth and he's getting this all done.
11:44So Sawad says, ya rasulullah awja'tani, O Messenger of Allah, you hurt me. waqad ba'athakallahu bilhaqq wal'adli. Allah sent you with truth and justice. You hurt me,
11:58ya rasulullah. So I want payback. SubhanAllah, the Prophet ﷺ could answer and he could say, later, we're busy right now. We have the Battle of Badr about to start. They're literally minutes
12:13away from the most consequential battle in the history of Islam and already outnumbered. We're busy right now. Focus on the battle. We'll talk about this later. Or two, he could have said,
12:27I am the Prophet of Allah ﷺ. Like what I do is forgiven. What are you talking about? Like why are you even talking about this? Basically get back in line. Or he could have told
12:40him, he could have rebuked him and started to remind him of the favors or the Prophet ﷺ could have perhaps justified it. He could have said, look, I'm just getting the line straight, maybe
12:49giving him an apology and just kept it moving. But when he said, faqidni, that give me my payback,
12:59the Prophet ﷺ told him, poke me back. He stopped ﷺ everything that he was doing and he said, poke me back. And he said, ya rasulullah, innaka ta'antani wa laysa alayya
13:13qamees. When you poked me, I wasn't wearing a shirt. Sawad was shirtless before the battle, which by the way, just shows you that Badr was not supposed to be what Badr ended up being in
13:24terms of, they didn't have like the armor of like battle, war here. They were on these small routes. They weren't ready for a full out war. You poked me and I wasn't wearing a shirt and you're wearing
13:37a qamees. So the Prophet ﷺ, kashafa Rasulullah ﷺ an batnahu, the Prophet ﷺ, he raised his shirt
13:45and he said, poke me. Qala fa'atanakahu faqabbala batnahu. So Sawad, radiyallahu ta'ala anhu,
13:56he hugged the Prophet ﷺ and he kissed the abdomen of the Prophet ﷺ. And the Prophet ﷺ said, ma hamalaka ala hadha ya Sawad. What caused you to do that,
14:09oh Sawad? And now here's where the precision of the words makes sense and it means something. See, in the previous narration of Usaid ibn Hudair, Usaid was laughing. He was joking too much, so the Prophet ﷺ was like, stop, you know, like this is going too far, your laughter, like calm
14:24down. This is different. This is about to be Badr. What was that all about? So he said, ya Rasulullah,
14:31hadhara ma tara, fa arattu an yakuna aakhirul ahdi bika, an yamassa jildi jildak. He said, oh Messenger of Allah, you see the army has come. Like we're about to fight, we're about to go to
14:45war in Badr, the presumption is that we're going to die. And he said, I wanted the last thing to be
14:52in this life that my skin would touch your skin, ya Rasulullah ﷺ. It was an act of love. So I was
15:02looking for an excuse. And when you poked me, I found an excuse that we would have that final
15:09embrace. And the Prophet ﷺ, what did he do? Da'a lahu bi khair ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ stopped
15:18and he made du'a for him, that Allah ﷻ bless him with good. So then the battle takes place. And as the battle takes place, and there's something here that's very important from
15:31a fa'idah, in terms of a beneficial point that justice is one of the things that brings about nasr, that brings about victory. And the Prophet ﷺ never departed from justice, even in the
15:42situation. When the Prophet ﷺ answered, he wasn't answering from a place of let me honor his shawq, his longing and his love. He was honoring his principles ﷺ. And that is one of the reasons
15:54why Allah ﷻ gives the Prophet ﷺ and gives his ummah victory in this regard. So the battle
16:01takes place. And Sawad ﷺ, who actually is one of the bravest warriors, goes forth, energized
16:11with that moment that he had with the Prophet ﷺ. And subhanAllah, I found he actually captures two people. One of them is Khalid ibn Hisham ibn al-Mughira. I don't expect you all to know who
16:23that is. But does anyone remember the name of Abu Jahl? Not Abu Jahl. What's his name?
16:33Amr ibn Hisham. So Khalid ibn Hisham is the brother of Amr ibn Hisham Abu Jahl. So he captured the brother of Abu Jahl in this battle. And by the way, his name is Khalid because he's
16:47also the uncle of Khalid al-Walid. Remember there's a relationship there. So he captured the brother of Abu Jahl, who was a huge man just like Abu Jahl. And remember when the Prophet ﷺ
16:59does the ransom, when he ransoms the prisoners back and he frees them, depending on the status of that prisoner in society, the ransom was higher. And so Khalid ibn Hisham comes from
17:13Banu Makhzum and he's Abu Jahl's brother. He has a powerful tribe behind him. And so he was one of those who were ransomed at the maximum of 4,000 dirhams to go back to his family in Mecca.
17:27There's a second captive that's also registered to him, whose name is Mukhalad ibn Amr al-Amiri. Mukhalad ibn Amr al-Amiri is from Banu Amr ibn Ra'ay. And they were also of the highest
17:41caliber in Mecca. Banu Amr ibn Ra'ay is the same tribe as Suhail ibn Amr. I'm going to give you some perspective, right? So very powerful tribe as well. And they say that he too was one of those
17:52who was ransomed at the highest price to go back to Mecca. So subhanAllah, he ends up capturing after this moment with the Prophet ﷺ two of the most consequential prisoners on the day of
18:05Badr. And that is the narration we have from him in Badr. When it comes to the next narration of him, the next time we hear about Sawad radhiAllahu ta'ala anhu is after the Prophet ﷺ conquered
18:16Khaybar. He put Sawad ibn Ghaziya radhiAllahu ta'ala anhu in charge of Khaybar. So technically he was like the governor of Khaybar, and he reported back to the Prophet ﷺ. And so some of the
18:27narrations about governance and what is allowed in terms of the transactions of the people, especially because in Khaybar they were used to what was resembling riba. SubhanAllah,
18:40you get into the details of this stuff. Because they were not applying the rules of Islam, right? They're going by the standards of Banu Qurayza and so on and so forth. So because of
18:53that he comes to the Prophet ﷺ to ask him questions. And there's a very powerful narration between Sawad after he comes back to the Prophet ﷺ now as a governor of Khaybar, where he brought
19:04some dates to the Prophet ﷺ. And the Prophet ﷺ saw these dates, and they were really, really good dates. In Khaybar they had these dates called janeeb. And janeeb is like the highest premium
19:17dates. I'm not even going to start making comparisons of dates today, all right? I'm just going to tell you boycott Israeli dates, all right? Everything else, fair game. But janeeb was
19:28considered the best of tamr, right? So when he brought this tamr to the Prophet ﷺ, these types of dates to the Prophet ﷺ, the Prophet ﷺ said, akulla tamri Khaybar haadha? Are all of the
19:40dates of Khaybar of this caliber? Like, are they all this premium? And Sawad said, no, Ya Rasulullah,
19:48he said, in fact I purchased one sa'a of these dates with two sa'a of our dates. So imagine you take two handfuls of your dates to get one handful of their dates.
20:03And the Prophet ﷺ, he rejected that. He said, this is riba. This is interest, the Prophet ﷺ said, go back, sell all of our dates, return the dates, then sell our dates
20:18for currency, and then you can go buy some janeeb. You can go buy some of these dates, but don't exchange at these higher rates, because that would be riba, right? Which makes you think
20:29once again, especially when we're talking about the signs of the hour, how much of our financial transactions now incorporate riba. And when the Prophet ﷺ talks about the dust of riba touching
20:39each and every single one of us, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would pay attention to even something like this, to even something like this ﷺ. So it shows you the precision by which the
20:51Prophet ﷺ is concerned about these transactions. And so subhanAllah, when it comes to Sawad ﷺ, you have the correcting of Sawad in Badr, and then you have the correcting of Sawad in Khaybar,
21:03and these are the only two narrations that we really have about him. What we do know about him
21:10is that he has his descendants in Al-Sham and specifically in Al-Quds. So some of his descendants lived in Al-Sham and then in Jerusalem in particular, and his descendants continued, rather,
21:23in Al-Quds. May Allah ﷻ liberate it, Allahumma ameen. He had multiple
21:30narrations that were passed through his son, Amr ibn Sawad ibn Ghaziya, who was considered one of the early scholars of the Tabi'een in Al-Madinah, and he lived and remained amongst
21:44Banu Najjar in Al-Madinah. As for Sawad ﷺ himself, he lived in Madinah throughout the era of Khulafa' al-Rashidun, and then he was buried in an area of the Baqi' where you had
21:57the Badri companions. And so there's a part of Al-Baqi', it's obviously not marked today, but he died a natural death, radhiAllahu ta'ala anhu, and you have the Badri companions that are buried in that particular area, radhiAllahu ta'ala anhu. So that is Sawad ibn Ghaziya,
22:13the first lens from Badr.









































































































































































































