leave your religion.”
I said, “O Messenger of Allah, how could I ever hate you when through you Allah has guided me?” He replied, “If you were to hate the Arabs, you would in fact be hating me.”
Al-Tirmidhī commented: “This ḥadīth is ḥasan gharīb; we know it only through the narration of Abū Badr Shujāʿ ibn al-Walīd.” (1)(2)
In this way the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—made hatred for the Arabs a cause of departing from the faith, and he considered such hatred to entail hatred of him personally.
It is likely that the Prophet—peace be upon him—addressed these words to Salmān, the foremost of the Persians and a man of well-known virtues, as a warning to others among the Persians, for Allah had informed him that Satan might lure certain souls toward this attitude.
Likewise, when he—peace and blessings upon him—said, “O Fāṭimah, daughter of Muḥammad, I can avail you nothing against Allah…"
(1) This is how it appears in MS A. The other manuscripts read: “unknown.” The reading adopted here is more accurate, as found in al-Tirmidhi.
(2) See Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Book of Merits, chapter on the virtues of the Arabs, no. 3927 (5:723). Al-Hakim also records it in al-Mustadrak, Book of Knowing the Companions, chapter on the collective merit of the Arabs, 4:89, and rules: “Its chain is sound, though neither al-Bukhari nor Muslim included it.” Al-Dhahabi remarks in his Talkhis: “Qabus has been criticized.” Cf. the marginal note to al-Mustadrak, 4:89.
(3) That is, he embraced Islam before all the others, making him the first Persian convert.
(4) MS A adds li-bughd (out of hatred); the phrase is omitted in the printed edition.
(5) Fatima bint Rasul Allah, wife of Ali ibn Abi Talib and mother of al-Hasan and al-Husayn, is nicknamed Fatima al-Zahra. She was the Prophet’s youngest daughter; Ali married her in the second year after the Hijra. She is one of the four foremost women of Paradise—Fatima, Khadija, Maryam, and Asiya—and she died in Ramadan of 11 AH. See al-Isaba, 4:377–380, no. 830.