At-Tawbah

Kaʿb ibn Mālik told it himself, when he was old and blind, to the son who led him by the hand. He had missed no campaign with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ but Badr, for which no one was blamed, and he had been at the Pledge of ʿAqabah. When the march on Tabūk was announced he had never been stronger or better off: for the first time in his life he owned two riding camels. It was the height of the heat, the road was long and waterless, the enemy was many — and the fruit of Madinah had just ripened in its shade. Every morning he went out to make ready and came home having done nothing, telling himself he could do it whenever he chose; and so it went on until the army had left, and he was still telling himself he would ride after it.

Walking in Madinah afterwards, it grieved him that he saw no one but men known for hypocrisy, or the weak whom Allah had excused. At Tabūk the Prophet ﷺ asked, “What has Kaʿb done?” A man of his own clan said: “His two cloaks have kept him back, Messenger of Allah, and looking at his own shoulders.” Muʿādh ibn Jabal answered him: “What an evil thing you have said. By Allah, Messenger of Allah, we know nothing of him but good.” The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said nothing.

When Kaʿb heard that the army had turned for home, he began to think of lies, and to ask the shrewd among his family which would get him out of it. When he was told it was almost upon the city, falsehood left him. “I knew I would never come out of it by anything that had a lie in it, and I resolved to tell him the truth.” The Prophet ﷺ prayed two rakʿahs in the mosque, as he did on every return, and sat for the people. Those who had stayed behind — eighty and some men — came with their excuses and their oaths. He accepted what they showed, took their pledge, asked forgiveness for them, and left what was within them to Allah.

Then Kaʿb came and gave the greeting. He ﷺ smiled the smile of one who is angry, and said: “Come.” And when Kaʿb sat before him: “What kept you back? Had you not bought your mount?” Kaʿb said: “I had. By Allah, were I sitting before anyone else of the people of this world, I would expect to escape his anger with an excuse; I have been given skill in argument. But by Allah, I know that if I tell you a lie today that contents you with me, Allah will soon make you angry with me; and if I tell you the truth and you are displeased with me for it, I hope for Allah’s pardon in it. No, by Allah, I had no excuse. I was never stronger or better off than when I stayed behind.” The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “As for this man, he has told the truth. Rise, until Allah decides concerning you.”

Men of his clan followed him out and reproached him: could he not have made an excuse as the others had, and let the Prophet’s ﷺ prayer for his forgiveness be enough? They pressed him until he nearly went back to call himself a liar. Then he asked whether anyone else had met with the same, and they named two: Murārah ibn al-Rabīʿ and Hilāl ibn Umayyah, righteous men who had fought at Badr. He went on his way.

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ forbade the Muslims to speak to the three of them. “The people avoided us and changed towards us, until the earth itself became strange to me; it was not the earth I knew.” It lasted fifty nights. His two companions kept to their houses, weeping. Kaʿb, the youngest and hardiest of them, went on attending the prayer and walking the markets, and no one spoke to him. He would greet the Prophet ﷺ where he sat after the prayer and ask himself: did his lips move in answer, or not? He would pray near him and steal a look: when he turned to his prayer, he ﷺ looked towards him; when he looked up, he ﷺ turned away. At last he climbed the garden wall of Abū Qatādah, his cousin and the dearest of people to him, and greeted him, and was not answered. “Abū Qatādah, I ask you by Allah: do you know that I love Allah and His Messenger?” Silence; and again; and at the third asking: “Allah and His Messenger know best.” His eyes overflowed, and he climbed back over the wall.

In the market a Nabataean from Syria, come to sell grain, was asking for Kaʿb ibn Mālik. He handed him a letter from the king of Ghassān: We have heard that your companion has treated you harshly. Allah has not put you in a place of humiliation or of loss; come to us, and we will console you. “This too is part of the trial,” Kaʿb said, and he took it to the oven and burned it. When forty nights had passed, a messenger came: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ commands you to keep away from your wife. “Am I to divorce her?” — “No; keep apart from her.” He sent her to her family. The wife of Hilāl ibn Umayyah was given leave to go on serving her husband, an old man with no servant, who had not stopped weeping since the day it began.

On the morning after the fiftieth night Kaʿb prayed the dawn prayer on the roof of his house, and sat there in the state Allah has described: his own soul straitened upon him, and the earth, for all its breadth, straitened too. Then he heard a man shouting from the top of Mount Salʿ at the height of his voice: “Kaʿb ibn Mālik — good news!” He fell down in prostration, and knew that relief had come. The Prophet ﷺ had announced at the dawn prayer that Allah had turned to them. A man spurred a horse towards him, and another ran up the mountain and called out, and the voice was faster than the horse. When its owner reached him Kaʿb took off his two garments and gave them to him for his news — he owned no others that day — and borrowed two to go to the mosque.

The people met him in group after group, congratulating him. In the mosque Ṭalḥah ibn ʿUbayd Allāh rose and hurried across to take his hand: “By Allah, no other man of the Emigrants rose for me, and I shall never forget it of Ṭalḥah.” The face of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was shining with joy — when he was glad his face lit up as though it were a piece of the moon — and he said: “Rejoice in the best day that has passed over you since your mother bore you.” Kaʿb asked: “Is it from you, Messenger of Allah, or from Allah?” — “No; it is from Allah.” Kaʿb offered to give away all that he owned, and was told to keep some of it, which would be better for him. And since it was truthfulness that had saved him, he vowed never to speak anything but the truth for as long as he lived. Then Allah sent down: “Allah has turned to the Prophet, the Emigrants and the Helpers…” as far as “O you who believe, be mindful of Allah, and be with the truthful.”