Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas

Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas was one of the first Muslims, an archer at Badr, and the general who broke the Sasanian Empire's army at al-Qadisiyya. The garrison city of Kufa was his foundation.

A young Qurayshi of Banu Zuhra — the Prophet's mother's own clan — Sa'd embraced Islam through Abu Bakr when barely in his teens, among the first dozen converts ¹. He fought at Badr — tradition calls him the first to loose an arrow in the defense of Islam — and through the Medinan battles ¹.

In 636 CE, commanding for Umar, he met the Sasanian army at al-Qadisiyya in Iraq and, in a multi-day battle, destroyed it — opening the whole Sasanian heartland ². On Umar's orders he laid out the garrison city of Kufa and governed Iraq before retiring to his estate near Medina, where he died about 674 ¹.

Kufa — seat of Ali's caliphate, crucible of Arabic grammar and early law, launching point of the east — began as Sa'd's camp. And the saying recorded of the Prophet praying for "Sa'd's shooting" made him the tradition's emblematic archer.