Muhammad a Prophet For all Humanity
5. Lessons of the Prophet’s Life
~ 85 ~
‘Ammar ibn Yasir and his parents were slaves of the
Banu Makhzum tribe in Makkah when they
accepted Islam. Their conversion was complete
anathema to the Banu Makhzum. They would take
the family out to the desert in the heat of noon and
lay them down on the blazing sand, where they
would savagely torture them. They even went so far
as to murder ‘Ammar’s mother. Relating this
incident, this is what the Prophet’s biographer, Ibn
Hisham, writes:
When the Prophet passed them by, from what
I have heard, he would say to them: “Be
patient, family of Yasir, heaven is your
promised land.”
3
If the
hadith
mentioned above was meant in an
absolute sense, then the Prophet’s advice to
Yasir would have been tantamount to
encouraging cowardice. The Prophet would then
have never given such advice. Rather he would
have urged Yasir to fight and be martyred. He
himself would have taken up this holy cause,
whether the result had been Yasir’s release, or
his own martyrdom.
