Islam and Christianity
Family: Encounters with other traditions · 14 entries
Entries on this theme
Person
Abraha
c. 520 CEThe Aksumite governor who made himself ruler of Yemen, built the great church of San'a, and marched on Mecca with an elephant — the invader of the 'Year of the Elephant' remembered in Qur'an 105.Waraqa ibn Nawfal
c. 555 CEKhadija's cousin, an elderly Meccan Christian who had studied the scriptures; the man who first told the shaken Prophet that what had come to him in the cave was prophecy.Zayd ibn Amr
c. 560 CEA Meccan seeker who rejected the idols of his people and sought 'the religion of Abraham' years before the Prophet's mission — the tradition's example of the hanif, the indigenous monotheist.Salman al-Farisi
c. 568 CEA Persian seeker who passed through Zoroastrianism and Christianity before reaching Muhammad; freed from slavery in Medina, he is remembered for proposing the trench at the siege of 627.Heraclius
c. 575 CEByzantine emperor (610–641) who reconquered Jerusalem from Persia and then watched the Muslim conquest of Syria. The tradition preserves a letter from the Prophet and an audience in which Heraclius questioned Abu Sufyan.the Negus of Aksum
c. 580 CEThe Christian king of Aksum who gave the first Muslim exiles refuge and heard Ja'far's recitation — remembered in the tradition as a just ruler who, in some reports, himself became a Muslim.Ja'far ibn Abi Talib
c. 590 CEA brother of Ali who led the Muslim emigration to Abyssinia and answered the Negus for his people; killed at Mu'ta carrying the army's standard after Zayd ibn Haritha.Abu Haritha ibn Alqama
Bishop of Najran and its religious leader, one of the three chiefs who headed the sixty-man Christian delegation to Medina in 9 AH that debated Jesus and received the Prophet's offer of mubahala.Dhu Nuwas (Yusuf Asʾar Yathʾar)
The last Himyarite king before the second Abyssinian occupation: a convert to Judaism who in October 523 tried to force the Christians of Najran to apostatize and, on their refusal, dug the trench of fire — the event the Quran recalls in Surat al-Buruj.Faymiyun the monk
The ascetic and answered supplicant who entered Najran before the second Abyssinian occupation and called its people to Christianity; the Raheeq narrative names him as the agent of Najran’s conversion.
Event
The Massacre of Najran (Ashab al-Ukhdud)
October 523 CEIn October 523 the Himyarite king Dhu Nuwas, a convert to Judaism, marched on the Christians of Najran demanding they renounce their faith; on their refusal he dug the great trench and burned them — men, women, children and elders, twenty to forty thousand by report — the Ashab al-Ukhdud of Surat al-Buruj, whose blood summoned the Abyssinian occupation.The delegation of Najran
c. 631 CE · 9 AHSixty riders of Christian Najran came to Medina in 9 AH led by the Aqib, the Sayyid and Bishop Abu Haritha; when they declined Islam the Prophet offered the mutual invocation of God's curse (mubahala) with Fatima, al-Hasan and al-Husayn, they asked instead for terms, and a treaty granted them God's protection in exchange for two thousand garments a year.
Building
Place
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