They are real, and Islam keeps them as names, not ranks. Allah made us peoples and tribes to know one another; the noblest is the most mindful of Him (Qur’an 49:13). When two Companions rallied their groups against each other, the Prophet ﷺ said: “Leave it, for it is rotten” (Bukhari 4905, sahih (al-Bukhari)).
Made different, to know one another
Our page What is the ummah? covers Qur’an 49:13: peoples and tribes exist so that we may know one another, and honour with Allah comes from taqwa. Another verse counts our languages and colours among Allah’s signs, beside the heavens and the earth:
وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ خَلْقُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَاخْتِلَافُ أَلْسِنَتِكُمْ وَأَلْوَانِكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِلْعَالِمِينَ
And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors. Indeed in that are signs for those of knowledge.
The difference is part of how Allah made us. What Islam removes is ranking people by it.
“Leave it, for it is rotten”
Jabir ibn ’Abd Allah narrates that on a campaign, a man of the Muhajirun kicked a man of the Ansar. The Ansari shouted, “Ansar, to me!” and the man of the Muhajirun shouted, “Muhajirun, to me!” The Prophet ﷺ heard it:
مَا بَالُ دَعْوَى جَاهِلِيَّةٍ قَالُوا يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ كَسَعَ رَجُلٌ مِنَ الْمُهَاجِرِينَ رَجُلاً مِنَ الأَنْصَارِ. فَقَالَ دَعُوهَا فَإِنَّهَا مُنْتِنَةٌ
What is this, the call of jahiliyyah?” They said, “Messenger of Allah, a man of the Muhajirun kicked a man of the Ansar.” He said, “Leave it, for it is rotten.
Muhajirun and Ansar are names of honour. The Qur’an praises both groups by name (Qur’an 9:100). Shouted as rallying cries against fellow Muslims, even these names became the call of the age of ignorance. Any name can go the same way: a tribe, a country, a skin colour, a group within the ummah.
Abu Dharr and a man’s mother
Al-Ma’rur ibn Suwayd met the Companion Abu Dharr at al-Rabadhah, wearing a cloak, and his servant was wearing one just like it. Asked why, Abu Dharr told this story:
إِنَّهُ كَانَ بَيْنِي وَبَيْنَ رَجُلٍ مِنْ إِخْوَانِي كَلاَمٌ وَكَانَتْ أَمُّهُ أَعْجَمِيَّةً فَعَيَّرْتُهُ بِأُمِّهِ فَشَكَانِي إِلَى النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم فَلَقِيتُ النَّبِيَّ صلى الله عليه وسلم فَقَالَ يَا أَبَا ذَرٍّ إِنَّكَ امْرُؤٌ فِيكَ جَاهِلِيَّةٌ. قُلْتُ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ مَنْ سَبَّ الرِّجَالَ سَبُّوا أَبَاهُ وَأُمُّهُ. قَالَ يَا أَبَا ذَرٍّ إِنَّكَ امْرُؤٌ فِيكَ جَاهِلِيَّةٌ هُمْ إِخْوَانُكُمْ جَعَلَهُمُ اللَّهُ تَحْتَ أَيْدِيكُمْ فَأَطْعِمُوهُمْ مِمَّا تَأْكُلُونَ وَأَلْبِسُوهُمْ مِمَّا تَلْبَسُونَ وَلاَ تُكَلِّفُوهُمْ مَا يَغْلِبُهُمْ فَإِنْ كَلَّفْتُمُوهُمْ فَأَعِينُوهُمْ
There were words between me and a man among my brothers whose mother was not an Arab. I taunted him about his mother, and he complained about me to the Prophet ﷺ. When I met the Prophet ﷺ, he said: ‘Abu Dharr, you are a man with jahiliyyah in you.’ I said, ‘Messenger of Allah, whoever insults men, they insult his father and mother.’ He said: ‘Abu Dharr, you are a man with jahiliyyah in you. They are your brothers. Allah has placed them in your care, so feed them from what you eat, clothe them from what you wear, and do not burden them with more than they can bear. If you do, help them.’
Abu Dharr was one of the earliest Muslims, and he was still told this to his face. A remark about where someone’s family comes from is not a small thing.
No Arab over a non-Arab
At Mina, in the middle of the days of tashriq during his Farewell Hajj, the Prophet ﷺ addressed the pilgrims from his camel. A man who heard the sermon narrates:
“O people, your Lord is one and your father is one. No Arab is better than a non-Arab, and no non-Arab than an Arab, no red man than a black man, and no black man than a red man, except by taqwa” (Musnad Ahmad 23489, isnad sahih (Ibn Taymiyyah); sahih (al-Wadi’i); our translation). In the Arabic of the time, “red” meant fair-skinned.
Another hadith gives the reason:
إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ قَدْ أَذْهَبَ عَنْكُمْ عُبِّيَّةَ الْجَاهِلِيَّةِ وَفَخْرَهَا بِالآبَاءِ مُؤْمِنٌ تَقِيٌّ وَفَاجِرٌ شَقِيٌّ أَنْتُمْ بَنُو آدَمَ وَآدَمُ مِنْ تُرَابٍ
Allah, Mighty and Majestic, has taken from you the arrogance of jahiliyyah and its boasting about forefathers. There is only a God-fearing believer or a wretched sinner. You are the children of Adam, and Adam was from dust.
Abu Hurayrah narrates it. Al-Tirmidhi has it too (Tirmidhi 3955, hasan (al-Albani)).
Loving your homeland
None of this asks you to stop loving your people or your land. The Prophet ﷺ said to Makkah:
مَا أَطْيَبَكِ مِنْ بَلَدٍ وَأَحَبَّكِ إِلَىَّ وَلَوْلاَ أَنَّ قَوْمِي أَخْرَجُونِي مِنْكِ مَا سَكَنْتُ غَيْرَكِ
How good a land you are, and how dear you are to me. Had my people not driven me out of you, I would not have lived anywhere else.
In Madinah he prayed: “O Allah, make Madinah dear to us as You made Makkah dear, or more” (Bukhari 1889, sahih (al-Bukhari); our translation). Love of home is part of being human. What he called jahiliyyah is when that love decides who you stand with, right or wrong, or who you look down on.
Who carried Islam’s knowledge
Abu Hurayrah narrates the moment the Prophet ﷺ spoke about a people who were not yet Muslim:
كُنَّا جُلُوسًا عِنْدَ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم فَأُنْزِلَتْ عَلَيْهِ سُورَةُ الْجُمُعَةِ {وَآخَرِينَ مِنْهُمْ لَمَّا يَلْحَقُوا بِهِمْ} قَالَ قُلْتُ مَنْ هُمْ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ فَلَمْ يُرَاجِعْهُ حَتَّى سَأَلَ ثَلاَثًا، وَفِينَا سَلْمَانُ الْفَارِسِيُّ، وَضَعَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم يَدَهُ عَلَى سَلْمَانَ ثُمَّ قَالَ لَوْ كَانَ الإِيمَانُ عِنْدَ الثُّرَيَّا لَنَالَهُ رِجَالٌ ـ أَوْ رَجُلٌ ـ مِنْ هَؤُلاَءِ
We were sitting with the Prophet ﷺ when Surat al-Jumu’ah was revealed to him, with ‘and others of them who have not yet caught up with them’. I said, ‘Who are they, Messenger of Allah?’ He did not answer until I had asked three times. Salman al-Farisi was with us. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ put his hand on Salman and said: ‘If faith were at the Pleiades, men, or a man, from these would reach it.’
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), the historian from Tunis who spent his last years as a judge in Cairo, gave a section of his Muqaddimah a striking title: most of the bearers of knowledge in Islam were non-Arabs. Even a scholar who was Arab by descent, he wrote, was usually non-Arab in his language, his upbringing and his teachers.
He names the masters of Arabic grammar, Sibawayh, al-Farisi and al-Zajjaj, all non-Arab by descent. Most of the hadith scholars were non-Arabs, he says, and so were the scholars of usul al-fiqh, the theologians and most of the mufassirun. He saw in it the truth of the Prophet’s ﷺ words about the people of Persia. (The Iraqi historian Naji Ma’ruf, d. 1977, answered him in ’Urubat al-’Ulama’ al-Mansubin ila al-Buldan al-A’jamiyyah, a study of more than 300 scholars named after non-Arab cities who were Arabs by descent.)
His reason: the first Muslims were Arabs who carried the law in their memories. When it had to be written down, taught and argued as a craft, the people of the old cities took it up. And in his own day, he wrote, no land had more of the settled life that learning needs than Egypt, “the mother of the world, the hall of Islam and the spring of knowledge and crafts”.
The six best-known hadith collections all came from east of Iraq: al-Bukhari from Bukhara and al-Tirmidhi from Tirmidh, both in today’s Uzbekistan; al-Nasa’i from Nasa, in Turkmenistan; Muslim from Nishapur and Ibn Majah from Qazvin, both in Iran; and Abu Dawud from Sijistan, on today’s border of Iran and Afghanistan. Islam’s first muezzin, Bilal, was an Abyssinian. The ummah has never belonged to one people.
This week
Learn the story of one Muslim people other than your own. The Athar pages on Timbuktu, the scholars of the Malay archipelago and the Muslims of China are a good start. And at the masjid, after the prayer, sit with someone whose family comes from somewhere different from yours.
Read next: Living as a Muslim minority: what Abyssinia teaches
Sources
- Dorar al-Saniyyah, hadith encyclopedia: the Mina sermon (Musnad Ahmad 23489, isnad sahih (Ibn Taymiyyah)), with the sources of the grades: Ibn Taymiyyah, Iqtida’ al-Sirat al-Mustaqim 1/412; al-Wadi’i, al-Sahih al-Musnad 1523. dorar.net
- Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia), on Naji Ma’ruf’s ’Urubat al-’Ulama’ al-Mansubin ila al-Buldan al-A’jamiyyah and its reply to Ibn Khaldun. alwatan.com.sa
- Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddimah, the section “Most of the bearers of knowledge in Islam were non-Arabs”, vol. 1, pp. 542-544 (OpenITI text). raw.githubusercontent.com
Qur’an and hadith on this page
- Qur’an 30:22
- Bukhari 30, sahih (al-Bukhari)
- Bukhari 1889, sahih (al-Bukhari)
- Bukhari 4897, sahih (al-Bukhari)
- Bukhari 4905, sahih (al-Bukhari)
- Muslim 1661, sahih (Muslim)
- Muslim 2546, sahih (Muslim)
- Muslim 2584, sahih (Muslim)
- Abu Dawud 5116, hasan (al-Albani)
- Tirmidhi 3926, sahih (al-Albani); hasan (Zubair Ali Zai)
- Tirmidhi 3955, hasan (al-Albani)