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The Firsts (Sahaba Stories) | The Forerunners of Islam
Abu Mihjan (ra): The Sahabi With A Substance Use Disorder | The Firsts
He was fierce on the battlefield, yet fighting a quieter battle within himself.
Abu Mihjan (ra) had a weakness, but it never stopped his courage. He owned his struggle and still showed up for his community, time and again. What finally became his turning point?
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
00:00The next person I want to talk about has an almost identical story to him, but he's someone
00:12who SubhanAllah, his conversion to Islam comes so late that it's not clear whether it was at the end of the life of the Prophet ﷺ or if it was before.
00:24And his name is Abu Mihjan al-Thaqafi, may Allah be pleased with him. And as the 'ulama mention, there is a difference of opinion regarding his name. Was it Malik
00:36ibn Habib or Abdullah ibn Habib? But his nickname, his kunyah, is Abu Mihjan, and he is Thaqafi, may Allah be pleased with him. If you remember, we did a whole series on people that are Thaqafi, people that come
00:51from that tribe, because obviously this Thaqafi connection intersects with the whole story of Ta'if and the late entrance into Islam.
01:01And so he's one of the people who, most of the writers, like Ibn Abdul-Barr and Ibn al-Athir, say that he accepted Islam when Thaqif accepted Islam in the ninth year, in Ramadan,
01:16in the life of the Prophet ﷺ. And so he actually is a Sahabi, so he had companionship; he's someone that would be considered a companion, but we don't have any stories of his interactions with the Prophet ﷺ directly because of how
01:28late he would have become Muslim, may Allah be pleased with him. Who is Abu Mihjan? He was one of the people of strength. He was one of the heroes in Jahiliyyah.
01:42He was known to be someone who was extremely courageous. He was a horseman, may Allah be pleased with him. He was a poet, very eloquent, and he was financially of means, so he used to be very generous.
01:56So he checks a lot of boxes, may Allah be pleased with him, in terms of his character: strong, militarily capable, eloquent, and a poet. He comes from a very powerful tribe, Banu Thaqif.
02:06He is very generous and spends his money. But of all of that, the one weakness that he has is al-khamr—alcohol. And that's
02:18why I chose to actually bring his biography next to Nu'man, may Allah be pleased with him, because of the similarities in the story.
02:26Ibn Abdul-Barr says, or narrates: "He would never be able to leave it. Not the punishment of a punisher
02:36nor the blame of a blamer would restrain him from that khamr." He could not give up his alcohol. And so SubhanAllah, he's someone who is overall strong in every way, but he has this weakness.
02:49He's not a weak man by any means. He has many strengths, but he has this glaring weakness. And you know, many of the 'ulama, when they talk about this idea—like how can someone
03:01be so strong in battle but then fall in this regard? And this is a side tangent, but it's actually very important. How is it that someone could be so courageous, so great in so many respects, but somehow
03:13they have this glaring weakness when it comes to their own personal battles, right? Like, how can you imagine a person on the battlefield who's willing to die fi sabil Allah—willing
03:26to die fi sabil Allah—like, face the enemy over and over again, but they can't get over this? And that's why jihad al-nafs, mujahadah al-nafs, is the ultimate battleground. The mujahad
03:38of the self—that a person is able to overcome themselves. Because if you are able to overcome yourself, then you will be able to overcome anybody
03:49else. This was the struggle, the battlefield, that Abu Mihjan, may Allah be pleased with him, struggled with. Now, despite that struggle, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, may Allah be pleased with him,
04:01used him. Abu Bakr, may Allah be pleased with him, used him in battle despite that consistent struggle that he had with alcohol. Which shows you, by the way, that there's still benefit in people, even as they're struggling
04:14with their personal sins. That we don't necessarily disqualify people from the community and say, "Once you're done with this personal sin, then you can come back." No. Like, Abu Bakr, may Allah be pleased with him, sees benefit in him.
04:26He's an asset to the community overall, even as he's struggling with this personal weakness of alcohol. So he's not discarded from the community. He can still serve Allah, the Exalted,
04:37but he still has to struggle against himself for the sake of Allah, the Exalted. With that being said, just like with Nu'man, accountability is still there. And so 'Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, carried out the hadd—the flogging for khamr—on him
04:51seven times. Seven times. And one report says even eight times that he was brought to Sayyidina 'Umar, may Allah
05:02be pleased with him, and he was flogged for the crime of khamr—of drinking wine—seven or eight times. So just like Nu'man, this is a repeated relapse that he had.
05:15May Allah, the Exalted, be pleased with them both. And 'Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, exiled him to an island in the sea. 'Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, basically exiled him at some point.
05:27Because of the repeated offense of alcohol, he sent a man to be with him. Abu Mihjan ran away and caught up with Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas, may Allah be pleased with him, at al-Qadisiyyah.
05:37Abu Mihjan, may Allah be pleased with him, ran away and he caught up with Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas, may Allah be pleased with him, in Persia. As Sa'd, may Allah be pleased with him, was about to undergo the legendary Battle of al-Qadisiyyah.
05:49Like the most consequential battle with the Persian Empire was about to happen. And Abu Mihjan, may Allah be pleased with him, was a man of heroic capacity in the battlefield.
06:01He knows how to take on the enemy. He lives for this. Someone who lives for the battlefield, Abu Mihjan lives for the battlefield. So he says to Sa'd, may Allah be pleased with him, that please, let me fight with you.
06:15Let me go out on the battlefield. I don't want to be exiled; let me go out on the battlefield. 'Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, wrote to Sa'd to restrain him, to hold Abu Mihjan,
06:26to restrain him because of everything that he was doing, because he kept on returning to that sin over and over again. So Sa'd, may Allah be pleased with him, despite him saying that he really wants to go out and
06:39fight in the Battle of Qadisiyyah, Sa'd, may Allah be pleased with him, instead basically chained him. He locked him up and said, "I'll deal with you later, right?" Right now we have an important battle to deal with, and Amir al-Mu'minin 'Umar, may Allah
06:53be pleased with him, flogged you multiple times for the alcohol. For now, I will leave you in this way, restrained, and later on, I'll deal with you in that case.
07:01And so as he was in these chains, he was chanting these lines of poetry: "What grief, what sorrow is it
07:10that the horses are driven by their spears while I am here in this pathetic state, bound in my chains?"
07:21He said, "What grief, what sorrow is it that the horses are driven by their spears, while
07:29I am here in this pathetic state bound in my chains, right? Like, what a terrible state to be in." And he cried because he realized that the sin that he had committed was keeping him
07:44from a deep moment with the companions of the Prophet, and perhaps it also dawned upon him that his wasting away personally was hurting his community.
07:54Like, they could benefit from me. They need me right now. I could be there with them, but because I keep on drinking alcohol over and over and over again, this sin is keeping me from being able to be the person that I want to
08:07be. So what does he do? He pleads to the wife of Sa'd, may Allah be pleased with him, and he says, "You know, let me go.
08:21And I promise that if Allah, the Exalted, allows me to return from this battlefield, not killed fi sabil Allah—in His path—that I will come back to you and I will put myself in these chains, and no one will need to know.
08:35Let me go. This is my tawbah, right? To go and to fight for the sake of Allah, the Exalted. And he said, "And if I am killed, then you're rid of me anyway.
08:48Like, if I die a martyr, then you're rid of me anyway. And if I don't die, then I'll come back and I'll put myself in the chains, and you won't be in trouble. Because at the end of the day, Sa'd, may Allah be pleased with him, is going to come home, and he's going to find me in the chains."
09:01SubhanAllah, she believed him. She could tell that he was sincere and he's not a man that's trying to escape accountability. He's actually a man who's asking permission to go and fight for the sake of Allah, the Exalted,
09:12and perhaps be redeemed and then returned back to accountability for the sin that he now realizes is getting in the way of him realizing his own potential. So he's asking for the chains to be removed just long enough for him to go and to participate
09:26in the Battle of Qadisiyyah. So he takes one of the horses of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas, may Allah be pleased with him, that was known as al-Balqa, and he wraps his face, may Allah be pleased with him, and he shows up right at the
09:38moment that Qadisiyyah starts. And he takes his spear and he's fighting so bravely, right and left, just cutting through
09:51the enemy. And then at the end, when people were looking for the man whose face was wrapped—the masked
10:01man that was on the al-Balqa who was going throughout the opposing enemy—he disappeared.
10:09Now some of the Sahaba, what do you think they said? What do you think they thought? A male angel. They said he must have been an angel.
10:23"Innahu malak." Because this man appears out of nowhere, and we have witnessed this in the Battle of Badr. This man appears out of nowhere and he does what he does, and suddenly he disappears. He must be an angel.
10:38He must be a malak. Sa'd, may Allah be pleased with him, he kind of recognizes: number one, his horse. Number two, the fighting style of Abu Mihjan is really pronounced, right? Number two, the fighting style of Abu Mihjan is really pronounced, right?
10:52Like he has an identity and if you're a war commander, you can kind of tell these different types of things. But he also can't reconcile it because he knows that Abu Mihjan is chained and was left behind.
11:03So he comes home and Abu Mihjan is in his chains. He went back to the wife of Sa'd radiallahu ta'ala anhu wa'anha and he said, put me back
11:14in these chains, stayed in his chains and when Sa'd radiallahu ta'ala anhu comes back, the wife of Sa'd tells him what happened.
11:24Sa'd radiallahu ta'ala anhu is so moved, so emotional that he goes to Abu Mihjan and
11:33he releases him and he says, by Allah, after today, I will never strike a man again through whom Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala granted the Muslims what he granted them on his hands.
11:47Like you're free. I'm not going to strike you again. And Abu Mihjan, he responds and he says that, I used to drink it, qad kuntu ashrabuha, idh
11:59yuqamu alayya al-hadd wa athuru minha. He says that I used to drink it and then the hadd would be carried out on me and I would be purified from the sin because the hadd, it purifies you from the sin. The punishment purifies me from the sins.
12:14And he says, but now, la wallahi la ashrabuha abada. This time, I swear by Allah that I will never drink it again. And one of the narrations in Abd al-Razzaq, by the way, Musannaf Abd al-Razzaq, he says
12:28something very interesting. He says that I only used to continue to drink it because I was too proud to say that Abu Mihjan left off something because someone hit him. Shows you the deception of Shaytan, like I'm not going to give this up because someone
12:42hit me. It's like someone says that I'm not going to start doing what Allah Azawajal commanded me to do because other people told me to do it. I'm going to do it when I want to do it. That's a trick of Shaytan. I'm not going to leave off the sin because somebody else told me to leave it off.
12:54I'm going to leave it off because I want to leave it off. So it's a trick of Shaytan. But Abu Mihjan radiyallahu ta'ala anhu, he says, I will never return to it again, whether you flog me or not.
13:07And Subhan'Allah, he never returned to that sin ever again. And his heart was conquered and he resumed fi Sabilillah.
13:17And he is amongst those, radiyallahu ta'ala anhu, who the ulama say he died in one of the futuhat, whether some of them say Azerbaijan and some of them say in other places.
13:28But the point is, is that whether it was in Azerbaijan or it was in Jurjan, one of the conquests that he continued in his ways, fi Sabilillah, having broken off the shackles
13:40of that sin of returning to the alcohol. And he used to have a poem that he would say, he said,
13:48رأيت الخمر صالحة وفيها خصال تهلك الرجل الحليم. He said that I used to see khamr, alcohol, as pleasant, yet within it there are traits
14:00that can destroy the most patient and forbearing man, someone that is haleem. فلا والله أشربها حياتي. I will never again in my life drink it. ولا أشفي بها أبداً سقيمة.
14:13And I will never use it to treat someone who is sick again. And so he became one of those success stories of someone that left off the sin, this major
14:27sin of alcohol. And his legacy does not become a person who's drunk. His legacy becomes what the best identity was of him, someone who was mujahid fi Sabilillah, and sincere in that. Radi allahu ta'ala anhu.
14:40And I want to conclude and bring these two stories to something that's very relevant to our lifetimes, insha'Allah. And then I'll end here because we won't have time to take on another biography given what we have tonight.
14:53But there are two things that you'll notice here in curing someone from a sin that is addictive. And I want to be clear here that none of this means that you don't seek the specific means
15:04to cure that specific addiction, whatever that addiction may be. That that's one of the ways that you're sincere fi Sabilillah. If there are ways that are particular to getting rid of this particular addiction or a sin
15:16that you keep on relapsing into, then take those means. Those means are a means to, bi-idhnillahi ta'ala, an end of Allah's pleasure. Along with tawbah and along with whatever it may be.
15:27Seek help and do what you have to do to get out of that addiction. But there are two very specific interjections that you have here in the story of Nu'man radiyallahu ta'ala anhu and then the story of Abu Mihjan radiyallahu ta'ala anhu.
15:40In the case of Nu'man radiyallahu ta'ala anhu, it's the belief that Allah's love is bigger than your sin. Allah's love is bigger than your sin.
15:51So don't think that your sin is too big to be forgiven. Don't think that your sin has disqualified you forever. Don't despair in the mercy of Allah. And even in the idea that Allah can still love you.
16:05This is actually one of the beautiful things about Al-Wadud. You know, sometimes we forgive people, but we can't love them again, right? We say, I forgive you, but I'll never be able to love you again, right? Like it's just too much.
16:20Allah 'Azza wa Jall, when He says, "La taqnatu min rahmatillah," Al-'Afu, Al-Ghafur, Al-Wadud, Allah 'Azza wa Jall invites you back into a relationship of love, where you could still be a wali of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala after having committed a major sin.
16:34May Allah 'Azza wa Jall protect us all and may Allah make us amongst those people. So in the case of Nu'man radiyallahu ta'ala anhu, the belief that Allah's love is bigger than your sin. In the case of Abu Mihjan radiyallahu ta'ala anhu, the belief that your purpose is bigger than your sin.
16:48And what's the difference between those two things? You know, you look at someone after the genocide in Gaza, who maybe woke up to the world as a young person and said, what am I doing? What am I doing with my life?
17:03What am I wasting away in? What purpose do I have to serve in this world? Right? Like here I am, spoiling myself, getting mad about all types of silly things, becoming
17:17saddened over things that really don't deserve a person to become sad over, my joy, my happiness, my sadness, my days are tied to things that are so superficial in their nature, and people
17:31are being slaughtered in Gaza. I need to do something. I need to wake up to this world. I need to realize I have a purpose here. Allah 'Azza wa Jall has put me here for a purpose beyond just spending extravagantly
17:45on myself with sin. I have talent that I need to unlock. I have a way that I can serve.
17:54And ultimately sin is when you serve yourself to an end, even if that end transgresses the boundaries of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. But it's very self-serving. Sin is very selfish in its nature, right? Like you don't care who you hurt, even yourself.
18:09No, I'm going to move away from that. I have an ummah that's depending on me. I have a community that's depending on me. I have a reason that Allah put me on this earth and this time to do something great.
18:21And my sins are getting in the way of unlocking that greatness. This is a realization that a person should have as they come into serious episodes of the ummah.
18:33And so what woke Abu Mihjan up was what am I doing with myself? I'm here drinking alcohol and people are fighting one of the most consequential battles in the history of Islam. And here I am. What a loser I am right now. I should be there, right?
18:47Doing something great. And so let the greatness of your purpose and your calling put aside these sins that serve
19:00such small parts of us and are so small in their thinking and the desires that they fulfill. May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala make us a people that connect to His love, that connect to His greatness.
19:13May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala forgive us for our shortcomings. May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala be pleased with the companions of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. May Allah Azawajal join us with the messenger of Allah, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.
19:25His beloved family, His companions with whom he is pleased. And may Allah Azawajal make us amongst them. Allahumma amin. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.





























































































































































































