with a docked tail. They wanted to exhume him, but ʿAmārah said to them, “Do not dig him up; by Allah, let not Muḍar say that we disinter our dead!”(1)

Khalid had already told them, “In the folds of my wife’s cloak are two tablets. If any matter confuses you, consult them; you will find in them what you seek. But let no menstruating woman touch them.” When they returned to his wife they asked her for the tablets; she brought them out while she was menstruating, and the knowledge they contained disappeared.(2)

Abū Yūnus said: Simāk ibn Ḥarb related that the Prophet ﷺ was asked about Khalid, and he replied, “That was a prophet whom his people neglected.”(3)

Abū Yūnus also said—on the authority of Simāk ibn Ḥarb—that the son of Khalid ibn Sinān came to the Prophet ﷺ, and he said, “Welcome, son of my brother.”(4)

This chain is halted at Ibn ʿAbbās and does not state that Khalid was a prophet. The mursal reports that describe him as a prophet are not admissible here. What appears more likely is that he was a righteous man to whom extraordinary states and miracles were granted.

If he lived during the period of interruption between prophets, it is established in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “The person closest to Jesus son of Mary, in this world and the next, is I, for there is no prophet between him and me.”(5)

And if he lived before that, he still could not have been a prophet, for Allah the Exalted says: “That you may warn a people to whom no warner had come before you, so that perhaps they might take heed” (Qur’an 28:46).

More than one scholar has affirmed that Allah did not send a prophet among the Arabs after Ishmael except Muḥammad ﷺ, the Seal of the Prophets—whom Abraham the Friend invoked while building the Sacred Kaʿbah, which Allah has made the qiblah for all people. The prophets thereafter gave their communities glad tidings of him, until the last to do so was Jesus son of Mary, peace be upon him.

By this very line of reasoning we reject what al-Suhaylī(6) and others reported about a prophet from the Arabs named Shuʿayb ibn Dhī Mahdhim ibn Shuʿayb ibn Ṣafwān, the man of Midian, as well as the claim that Ḥanzalah ibn Ṣafwān was likewise sent to the Arabs but was rejected, whereupon Allah loosed Nebuchadnezzar upon the Arabs, inflicting on them killing and captivity similar to what he inflicted on the Children of Israel—this occurring in the time of Maʿadd ibn ʿAdnān. The more plausible view is that these were righteous men who called people to goodness. Allah knows best.

We have already mentioned ʿAmr ibn Luḥay ibn Qamʿah ibn Khindif in the accounts of Khuzaʿah after Jurhum.