Ta'if and What Came After

After Khadijah RA and Abu Talib died, the Prophet ﷺ walked nearly a hundred kilometres to Ta'if. He was looking for a tribe that might take in the believers when Makkah was closed to them. He went with Zayd ibn Harithah RA, the freed slave he had loved as a son.

He spoke to the chiefs of Thaqif for ten days. They mocked him. One of them said if Allah had sent you I would tear the curtains of the Kaaba. Another said could Allah find no one better than you. The chiefs of Ta'if then set the slaves and children of the town on him as he tried to leave. They lined the road and pelted him with stones until his sandals filled with blood and Zayd RA was injured shielding him with his body.

This is one of the hardest days in the seerah. The mercy that came out of it is the centre of the story.

The dua of the broken-strength

The Prophet ﷺ stopped under the shade of a vineyard outside Ta'if. He was bleeding. He had walked back the way he came, and the town that had refused him was now behind him. He was alone with his Lord. He made the dua that scholars call dua al-mustad'afin, the dua of the one whose strength has been broken.

The wording is preserved in several seerah works. It opens with him complaining to Allah of his own weakness before he complains about anything else.

O Allah, to You I complain of the weakness of my strength, the lack of my resources and my lowliness in the sight of people. O Most Merciful of the merciful. You are the Lord of the weak and You are my Lord. To whom do You leave me? To a distant one who frowns at me, or to an enemy You have given control over my affair? If You are not angry with me I do not care. But Your safety is more spacious for me. (Recorded by Ibn Hisham in Sirat an-Nabawiyyah and by Ibn Ishaq)

The hadith is graded weak by some scholars in its chain. Its meaning is preserved across the seerah literature and is accepted as part of the established narrative. The key line that scholars return to is the one about Allah's anger and Allah's safety. The Prophet ﷺ did not ask for revenge. He did not ask for relief. He asked that Allah not be angry with him. The rest he could carry.

There is a quiet power in this dua. The man who has just been stoned out of a town does not pray against the town. He prays about his own standing with his Lord.

The angel of the mountains

The Prophet ﷺ told the story himself, years later, when Aisha RA asked him whether there was a day harder for him than Uhud. He said yes. The day of Ta'if was harder.

He said he walked out of Ta'if with his head down and did not lift it until he reached a place called Qarn ath-Tha'alib. There he looked up and saw a cloud over him. In the cloud was Jibreel AS, who called out to him and said:

Allah has heard what your people have said to you and how they have answered you. He has sent the angel of the mountains to you so you may command him to do whatever you wish with them.

The angel of the mountains greeted him and said if you wish, I will fold the two mountains of Makkah upon them. The two mountains are al-Akhshabain, the rocky range that flanks Makkah and Ta'if. The angel was offering to crush the towns between them.

The Prophet ﷺ answered:

Rather, I hope that Allah will bring forth from their loins those who will worship Allah alone, associating none with Him. (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231, Sahih Muslim 1795)

He did not say no. He said rather. He had a counter-proposal. He was offering Allah a future that the people of Ta'if did not yet deserve. He was asking Allah to save them from their own descendants' unbelief.

Read this answer twice. The man bleeding from stones thrown by these very people is asking for their grandchildren to be Muslims. He is not asking that they convert. He is asking that their loins one day carry believers. He is praying for a generation he will never meet.

What came after

The Prophet ﷺ lived to see Ta'if come into Islam. After the conquest of Makkah, the tribe of Thaqif accepted Islam as a delegation. The grandchildren the Prophet ﷺ prayed for did walk into the masjid. The dua was answered in his lifetime.

This is the mercy of the messenger ﷺ. It is not soft and it is not naive. It is patient on a scale most of us cannot hold. It saw enemies and asked for their grandchildren. It chose the long arc.

A mercy to the worlds, the Qur'an says (Qur'an 21:107). Ta'if is one of the clearest places that verse becomes visible. He did not say it. He showed it. This is the heart of how we read the Prophet ﷺ as a mercy to the worlds, and it opens onto the mercy thesis at the heart of this site.

What this teaches the reader

Three small things.

One. The dua at Ta'if is the dua for the day your strength has been broken. Memorise the opening lines. They are not for big national disasters. They are for the day you have done your best and been answered with stones. You can read them in any sitting where you feel small and unhelped.

Two. The Prophet's ﷺ answer to the angel of the mountains is the standard for how a Muslim treats people who hurt them. Not erasure. Not revenge. A hope that Allah will bring something better out of them or out of their descendants.

Three. Mercy in the seerah does not look like silence. The Prophet ﷺ complained to Allah at Ta'if. He named his weakness. He asked that Allah not be angry with him. Complaining to Allah is not a failure of patience. It is patience.

These are the words he said with his back to the wall of the orchard.