Transcription
Of times you hear people saying, "Well, Ala all Jewish." In fact, yeah, they had Jewish blood and they converted to Islam, and they're not real. These are fantastical accounts. But the truth is far more shocking than the fantastical accounts. The truth about the, if you go back in time, is far more shocking than the than the accounts people want to push as a means of attacking them effectively. It's like a, it's a fiction. But if you want to be historically accurate, there's more there in the historical catalog than anything in these bogus stories.
You know, when we talk of the Ala and disclosure, I am not pro. I'm not against. Quite frankly, I don't care. Okay? I don't have a horse in the race. So I'm not going to try to propagate a negative image of Ala, and I'm not going to try to also apologize for them. I'm just giving you the facts as they are. If you like the facts coming to you, good. If you don't like it, good. I'm not here to cape or to attack. It's just the facts as they are.
And the Ala in successive generations attempted to establish their own emirat or sultanate. This was the third time lucky. It was the third time lucky. Before him, there were two other Saudi states. We're going to cover them in here, who also established and were destroyed, and established and were destroyed. So there was a long history. And as I said before, it wasn't a new opponent in in in Arabia. The Ottomans had been struggling with them for centuries. They were not new. They were there for a long time, but they were persistent. They never gave up. They came back, and in the third iteration, they managed to succeed.
So now let's look at the history. Let's go back before we go forward, okay? We're going to go back to the time of Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Does anyone know who Musaylimah is? It's not Musaylimah. It is the false. He is Musaylimah. Yes. Oh, the false prophet Musaylimah. His name was Musaylimah, and it's like a diminutive form of his name, the little Musaylimah. And his tribe was Banu Hanifa, and they occupied the region of Yamamah. Banu Hanifa were in Yamamah. What was their religion? Does anyone know what religion did they follow before Islam? What faith did they follow before Islam? Judaism? Okay, Judaism. Anyone else? Take a wild guess. Huh? Paganism? Paganism? Anything else? Zoroastrianism? Zoroastrianism? All of these are wrong. They were Christians. They were Christians. They were Christians.
Banu Hanifa were Christian. Musaylimah was actually somebody who studied Latin and traveled to Jerusalem and studied Latin and the Bible. He was a Christian, and his people were Christians, and he was a learned Christian who also learned Latin. So there goes the theory of Arabs had no literacy skills. Many of them were actually multilingual. They had to travel to the Byzantine Emperor's regions in the summer, and down to Yemen, and to the Aksumite Kingdom in the winter. So they had language, and therefore also the ability to read and write, at least the trading that the merchant class.
So when he was, according to the historians, when he was in Jerusalem, he heard some of the priests and the clergy talking of the coming of a Messiah or the coming of a prophet amongst the Arabs, and he hoped that he was one. He was that person. He had hope to be that person. But when Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam enters Medina, there were many people in Medina, in surrounding regions, who already had ambition. So Musaylimah had the hopes of being a prophet. And, uh, Abdullah, I forget the name, the biggest hypocrite in Medina. Somebody help me out. Abdullah ibn Ubayy. Exactly. Abdullah ibn Ubayy had the ambition of being what in Medina before Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam arrived? King? King? Yes, the king of Medina. In fact, they prepared his crown. They were about to crown him. As one of the Sahaba said, they prepared his crown for him. He was about to be crowned, and you walked in.
So this, and then there were the Jewish tribes as well. People had ambitions. When Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam stepped into Medina as a prophet and as a sovereign ruler, whether you call it the king or not, many of these people grew frustrated, and the ego got in the way. So Abdullah ibn Ubayy, his ego and his hatred for Islam is because he lost. He believed he lost kingdom. Musaylimah, his hatred and loss was because of what he lost. Prophecy. He believed he was a prophet, literally. He believed it.
So in the ninth year of Hijrah, after Hijrah, known as the Year of Delegations. Why was it known as the Year of Delegations? Because in the eighth year of Hijrah, what happened? Yes. Yeah. So this was the year in which people were coming. All the tribes are coming to say, "We become Muslim. We accept Islam." Amongst the tribes coming to pledge their allegiance was Banu Hanifa, the Christians of Banu Hanifa. For me, personally, this adds so much texture to the story because we think, "Oh, they were all Arabs. They were all pagans." No, these were Christian Arabs. When the Quran talks about Christians becoming Muslims and how they get double reward, he's not talking about the Christians in Rome or the Christians in Yemen necessarily. Christians in the peninsula. Many of the Sahaba or the tribes or the clans that we hear of in the Hadith, we don't even know they're Christians.
For example, the very famous Hadith about Umar. He said, "I used to have a neighbor, and I would go to the Masjid because they lived a bit of a distance from Masjid Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So one day, I would go out, he'd stay home and look after my home, and the next day I would stay, and he'd go." Right? We had this back and forth routine. And one day, he came and said, "Umar," he knocked on my door frantically, "something terrible has happened in Medina. Something terrible." So Umar said, "The first thing he said, what, what did he say? What was his number one fear of something happening in Medina?" When the man said to him, "Something terrible happened in Medina." "Attack?" Yes. "Sariyah?" "Has Banu Ghassan finally, huh, made good of the promise and come to conquer Medina?" Because at the time, Banu Ghassan were a kingdom. They were a kingdom, a Christian kingdom, a Christian kingdom who was just north of, uh, of Medina, and were repeatedly threatening the Muslims of Medina. "We're going to come and take over." Repeatedly threatening. And they had the backing of the Byzantine Emperor. In fact, you can see to this very day, coinage. They learned Latin. They read the Bible. And this Banu Ghassan, there is a family to this very day, the royal family of Ghassan. They have a website, by the way. They still exist today. Christian? Yeah, Christians.
So when we have this imaginary scenario of all the Arabs were illiterate, they didn't know anything about Christianity, they were just all pagans, it's a misnomer. A proper documentary on that. Christians. They're still here. They're still here. They're still here. So that's just one example. So when we hear these Hadith and we hear these tribes, we don't necessarily know that behind it, some of them were Christians.
So there were these people, and Musaylimah was killed in the Battle of Yamamah, and that was the end of him. However, that tribe, Banu Hanifa, from that tribe, Al-Yamamah, all directly descends from that tribe.
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