MEET THE HEROES

Nuh was sent to a people who had turned to idols, and he called them for longer than any prophet named in the Qur'an — nine hundred and fifty years among them, by the Qur'an's own count.

He was met mostly with mockery. The Qur'an preserves his complaint that he called them by night and by day, in public and in private, and that they only turned further away. When the command finally came, he built a ship far from any water while his people watched and laughed.

Those who believed with him were few. His story is not one of easy success but of holding a position for a lifetime without the reward of seeing it accepted, and being right anyway.

Ibrahim was born among people who worshipped what they had carved themselves. The Qur'an shows him reasoning with them rather than simply refusing — asking whether a thing that cannot hear, see or help is worth calling a god. When argument failed, they threw him into a fire, and the Qur'an records the command that turned it cool and safe for him.

He left his home, his father and his people for a land he did not know. With his son Ismaʿil he raised the foundations of the Kaʿbah and prayed that it be a place of security, and that their descendants keep the prayer.

Muslims still say his name in every prayer. The Qur'an calls him a nation in himself, and Allah took him as a close friend — khalil.

ʿIsa was born to Maryam without a father, by the command be — the Qur'an compares his creation to Adam's, made from dust and then brought into being.

He came to the Children of Israʾil confirming what came before him, and Allah supported him with clear signs: healing the blind and the leper, and giving life by Allah's permission. The Qur'an records his own words that he called people to worship Allah, his Lord and theirs.

On the end of his life the Qur'an is direct and leaves no room for guessing: they did not kill him and did not crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them, and Allah raised him to Himself. Muslims hold him among the great messengers, and honour his mother alongside him.

Musa was born under a decree that killed the sons of his people. His mother set him on the river, and he was raised in the household of the very ruler he would later be sent to confront.

When the command came he asked for help — for his chest to be opened, his task made easy, and for his brother Harun to be sent with him. He stood before Pharaoh with a plain message and a plain sign. When the magicians of the court saw what he brought, they recognised it as something beyond their craft and believed, knowing the cost.

The Qur'an singles him out among the prophets: Allah spoke to Musa directly. He is named in the Qur'an more often than any other prophet.

Muhammad ﷺ was born in Makkah and known among his people as trustworthy long before he was known as a prophet. Revelation came to him in his fortieth year and continued for twenty-three.

The early years in Makkah were years of rejection. When he called his own clan openly from the hill of as-Safa, Quraysh admitted they had never known him to lie — and rejected the message anyway. After the loss of his wife Khadijah and his uncle Abu Talib, he took the message to Taʾif and was driven out; offered vengeance on that city, he refused it and asked instead that their descendants be guided.

He died in Madinah having left the Qur'an intact and a community in place of scattered tribes. The Qur'an describes his sending in five words: a mercy to the worlds.

Abu Bakr was a merchant of Makkah with a reputation for honesty before Islam, and he spent much of what he had on it afterwards. He bought and freed Muslims who were being tortured for their faith — Bilal among them — which ʿUmar later summarised in a sentence: Abu Bakr is our master, and he freed our master.

He was the companion in the cave on the migration to Madinah, and the Qur'an refers to that night without needing to name him. In the Prophet's final illness it was Abu Bakr who was ordered to lead the prayer, and the community understood what that meant.

He led for just over two years. He held the community together at the moment it was most likely to come apart, and left it intact.

ʿUmar opposed the Muslims hard before he joined them, and brought the same force with him when he did. The Prophet's companions have preserved that his acceptance changed what they could do openly in Makkah.

He is remembered for a particular thing: on a number of occasions he suggested something to the Prophet, and revelation came agreeing with it — that the Station of Ibrahim be taken as a place of prayer, and the verse of the screen among them. The companions counted these and gave them a name.

As caliph he governed an expanding state and was known for holding himself to the same account as anyone else. He was killed while leading the dawn prayer.

ʿUthman was wealthy and known for spending it. When the Muslims needed a well in Madinah he bought it; when the army of hardship had to be equipped he equipped it.

His most lasting act came later. As Islam spread, Muslims in different regions were reciting with differences that were beginning to cause dispute. Hudhayfah brought the problem to ʿUthman directly. ʿUthman had one standard written copy produced — Zayd ibn Thabit among those who did the work — and sent copies to the main centres.

That decision is why a Muslim in any country today opens the same text. He was killed in his own house, with the Qur'an in front of him.

ʿAli was raised in the Prophet's own household and was among the earliest to accept Islam while still young. He married the Prophet's daughter Fatimah, and their sons were al-Hasan and al-Husayn.

Before Khaybar the Prophet said he would give the banner to a man who loves Allah and His Messenger and whom Allah and His Messenger love. The companions spent the night wondering which of them it would be. In the morning he called for ʿAli.

When the Prophet left ʿAli behind in Madinah on the expedition to Tabuk, ʿAli asked whether he was being left with the women and children. The Prophet answered him with a comparison to Harun and Musa. ʿAli became the fourth caliph, in the hardest years the community had yet seen.

Hamza was the Prophet's uncle but near him in age, and had grown up alongside him. He was known in Makkah as a hunter and a man not to be crossed.

He accepted Islam at a point when the Muslims had almost no protection in the city, and his acceptance changed the calculation for Quraysh — they now had to reckon with a man from within their own leadership standing on the other side.

He fought at Badr and was killed at Uhud, where the Muslim position collapsed after the archers left their post. His death was one of the heaviest losses of that day, and the Prophet's grief over him is remembered in the Seerah as among the deepest he showed.

Al-Hasan was the elder son of ʿAli and Fatimah, and the Prophet's grandson. He grew up in the Prophet's household and is among those gathered under the cloak.

After his father's death he was given the caliphate, and the community was on the edge of a war it had already tasted. He negotiated with Muʿawiyah and stepped down — handing over authority he had a claim to, to stop Muslims killing Muslims.

What makes this remarkable is that the Prophet had said it before it happened. On the pulpit, with al-Hasan beside him, he called this son of his a sayyid and said Allah would reconcile two great groups of Muslims through him. Years later that is precisely what took place.

Al-Husayn was the younger son of ʿAli and Fatimah, and the Prophet's grandson. He was carried by him, prayed with beside him, and gathered under his cloak.

Years after both his grandfather and his father were gone, he refused to give allegiance to Yazid. Called by people of Kufa who then failed to stand with him, he set out with his household and a small number of companions and was intercepted at Karbala. He was killed there, and members of his family were killed with him.

The Muslim world has not stopped mourning that day. Whatever else divides Muslims, the killing of the Prophet's grandson is not something any of them defend.

Khalid commanded the cavalry that turned Uhud against the Muslims. He was, by any measure, the most dangerous soldier Quraysh had — and he was on the other side.

He accepted Islam some years later, before the opening of Makkah. At Muʾtah, after the appointed commanders were killed one after another, the command came to him and he brought the army out of a battle it should not have survived. It was of that day that the Prophet called him a sword among the swords of Allah.

He went on to lead campaigns under Abu Bakr and ʿUmar. When ʿUmar later removed him from command, he served under the man appointed over him without complaint.

Abu Hurayrah came to Islam late, only a few years before the Prophet died. He was poor, unattached, and he used that: while others were occupied with trade and land, he stayed near the Prophet and listened.

He said plainly that people wondered why he narrated so much, and explained that his companions were busy with their markets and their fields while he was filling himself with what he heard. He also said he had complained of forgetting, and that the Prophet had prayed for his memory.

More narrations reach us through him than through any other companion. A great deal of what Muslims know about how the Prophet prayed, spoke and behaved arrived by way of a man who owned almost nothing.

Bilal was enslaved in Makkah, and when his belief became known he was punished for it in the open — the city's way of showing what accepting Islam would cost anyone without protection. He did not give it up.

Abu Bakr bought him and freed him. ʿUmar later put it in a single line: Abu Bakr is our master, and he freed our master. In Makkah's terms this was backwards — a freed slave described as the master of the Quraysh.

He became the one who called the Muslims to prayer. The first voice to call a community to stand before Allah belonged to a man that same society had owned.

Yasir had come to Makkah from Yemen and settled there without the protection of a tribe of his own. When he, his wife Sumayyah and their son ʿAmmar accepted Islam, that lack of protection was the whole story — there was no one whose anger anyone had to fear.

The family was taken out into the heat and tortured to make them recant. The Prophet passed them there and told them to hold firm, promising the family Paradise.

Yasir died under that treatment, and Sumayyah was killed. Their son ʿAmmar survived to become one of the well-known companions. The Qur'an addresses what a believer says under that kind of duress, and it was revealed in connection with him.

Abu Hanifa earned his living in the cloth trade in Kufa, and taught in the years when Islamic law was first being worked out as a discipline.

His method was unusual for the time. Rather than dictating conclusions, he put questions to a circle of capable students and let them argue, sometimes over long stretches, before a position was settled. Much of what carries his name was written down by those students rather than by him.

He repeatedly declined official appointment as a judge, at real personal cost. The school of law that grew from his circle became the most widely followed in the Muslim world, from Turkey through Central and South Asia.

Al-Bukhari was from Bukhara in Central Asia and began memorising hadith as a boy. He travelled for years across the Muslim world to hear reports directly from those who carried them.

His work was not collection but elimination. For each report he examined the chain of people who had transmitted it — whether they were reliable, whether they were precise, and whether they could actually have met. Reports that failed were set aside, however well known they were.

What survived that filter became Sahih al-Bukhari, out of a far larger body of material he had gathered. It has been treated ever since as the most rigorously screened collection in the Sunnah, and it is the reason a Muslim today can ask not just what was said, but how sound the chain behind it is.

Malik ibn Anas spent nearly his whole life in Madinah, and that was the point. He held that the living practice of the city — where the Prophet had lived and where his companions had settled — was itself evidence, because a whole community does not quietly change how it prays or trades.

He taught in the Prophet's mosque and was known for refusing to answer when he did not know, a habit his students recorded because it was rare.

His Muwattaʾ gathers hadith together with the practice of Madinah and the rulings of its scholars. It is one of the earliest works of Islamic law to survive intact, and it is still read.

Al-Shafiʿi learned in both of the great centres of his time — under Malik in Madinah, and in the Iraqi tradition that had grown from Abu Hanifa's circle. Having seen two ways of reasoning, he became interested in a question neither had fully answered: not what the ruling is, but how you are entitled to reach it.

His Risalah set out that question directly — the sources of law, their order of priority, and what counts as valid inference. It is the reason the discipline of usul al-fiqh exists as a discipline.

He taught in Iraq and later in Egypt, where he revised a number of his own positions. His students preserved both sets, which is itself telling: he was willing to be seen changing his mind.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal spent his life gathering hadith, travelling for it and assembling the Musnad, one of the largest collections of its kind.

He is remembered most for what happened when the caliphate adopted a particular doctrine about the Qur'an and required scholars to affirm it publicly. Most affirmed it, some under duress. He refused. He was imprisoned and flogged, and he still refused, saying he would need evidence from the Qur'an and the Sunnah before he said it.

The policy was eventually abandoned. He had no army and no office; he had a position and would not move off it, and that turned out to be enough.

Ibn Taymiyyah's family fled the Mongol advance and settled in Damascus, and he grew up in a Muslim world that had recently been overrun.

He wrote across law, creed, logic and political argument, and he did not confine himself to books — he argued in public, took positions against scholars and rulers alike, and joined the mobilisation against the Mongol invasion in his own city.

That combination put him in prison more than once, in Egypt and in Damascus. He kept writing in confinement, and when writing materials were finally taken from him, that was the end. He died imprisoned in the citadel of Damascus. His influence on later Muslim thought is enormous and, to this day, contested.

Salah al-Din was born in Tikrit to a Kurdish family in service to the rulers of northern Syria, and rose through that service rather than by inheritance.

His achievement before any battle was political: he brought Egypt and Syria under one authority, which is what made facing the Crusader states possible at all. In July 1187 he destroyed the Frankish army at Hattin, and Jerusalem surrendered that October after eighty-eight years of Crusader rule.

What was remembered afterwards was the terms. The city's people left under a negotiated ransom rather than the massacre that had accompanied its capture in 1099. European chroniclers, writing about an enemy, recorded that restraint — which is a rare thing to find in the record of any war.

Malcolm X grew up in the American Midwest, lost his father young, spent time in prison, and came out of it as one of the most effective speakers his country had produced.

In March 1964 he separated publicly from the Nation of Islam. The following month he travelled to Makkah for Hajj, and what he found there did not match what he had been taught. He wrote home describing worshippers of every colour performing the same rites together, and said plainly that it had changed what he believed about race. He returned as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, having entered Sunni Islam.

He was assassinated in February 1965, less than a year later. He had been a Sunni Muslim for a matter of months.

Muhammad Ali was the most famous athlete in the world when, in 1967, he refused induction into the United States military on religious grounds.

The cost was immediate. He was stripped of his heavyweight title, his boxing licence was withdrawn, and he was convicted and sentenced. He lost more than three years at the peak of his career — the years an athlete does not get back — and he did not change his position during any of them.

In 1971 the Supreme Court of the United States overturned his conviction, unanimously. He returned, fought again, and spent his later decades as one of the most recognised Muslims alive. The refusal, not the record, is what is quoted about him now.

Badr was fought in Ramadan of the second year after the migration to Madinah, and it was the first real trial of the Muslim community.

Their numbers are given precisely in the hadith: three hundred and some, which al-Baraʾ compared to the number who crossed with Talut. Against them stood a Makkan force considerably larger and better equipped. The night before, the Prophet stood in prayer asking Allah for what had been promised.

One of the companions, hearing that Paradise lay ahead, threw away the dates he was eating rather than delay for them, and fought until he was killed. Badr became the standard the community measured itself against afterwards — the Prophet spoke of the people of Badr as those Allah had looked upon.

Al-Masjid al-Aqsa is named in the Qur'an, in the verse describing the Night Journey — the Prophet taken from the sacred mosque in Makkah to the farthest mosque, whose surroundings Allah describes as blessed.

It was also the first qibla. For roughly sixteen to seventeen months after the migration, Muslims in Madinah prayed toward Bayt al-Maqdis, before the command came to turn toward the Kaʿbah. Those who heard the news mid-prayer at Qubaʾ turned where they stood.

That is why this land holds the place it holds in Muslim life, and why what happens there is felt by Muslims who have never seen it.

Asiyah lived inside the household of a man who claimed lordship over his people. She had every material thing that household could give, and she believed anyway.

The Qur'an sets her as an example for the believers and records the words of her prayer: My Lord, build for me a house near You in Paradise, and save me from Pharaoh and his work, and save me from the wrongdoing people. She asked for a house while living in a palace, which tells you what she thought the palace was worth.

The Prophet named the men who reached completeness as many, and among women named only two — Maryam bint ʿImran, and Asiyah the wife of Pharaoh.

Maryam was given to the service of the sanctuary by a mother who had vowed the child within her before knowing who it would be. She grew up under the care of Zakariyya, who found provision with her he could not account for.

The Qur'an records that she was told she would bear a son though no man had touched her, and that she asked how — and was told that Allah creates what He wills. She carried the child, withdrew to a distant place, and returned to her people carrying him, knowing exactly what they would say. The Qur'an gives her the instruction to say nothing, and lets the child answer for her.

She is the only woman the Qur'an names by name, and the chapter that carries that name is hers.

Sumayyah bint Khayyat was among the first to accept Islam in Makkah, at a time when accepting it offered nothing and cost a great deal. She had no tribe to shield her and no wealth to buy safety, which in Makkah meant she could be punished in the open without consequence.

She, her husband Yasir and their son ʿAmmar were tortured for their faith in the sun outside the city. The Prophet passed the family in their suffering and told them to hold firm, promising them Paradise.

She was killed and did not recant. She was among the first to give her life for this faith — a woman who owned nothing anyone thought worth protecting.

Fatimah was the Prophet's daughter and lived close to him through the Makkan years and after the migration. She married ʿAli and their sons were al-Hasan and al-Husayn.

The Prophet gathered ʿAli, Fatimah and their two sons under his cloak, and the ayah of purification was recited over them. ʿAʾishah, who narrated it, described the cloak and who was brought beneath it.

In his final illness he called her close and said something to her that made her weep, then said something more that made her laugh. She told the story afterwards: he had told her he was leaving, and then that she would be the first of his household to follow him. She died a few months later.

Nusaybah bint Kaʿb, known as Umm ʿUmarah, was among the Ansar who pledged to the Prophet at ʿAqabah before the migration to Madinah — one of the very few women present.

She went out to Uhud intending to carry water and tend the wounded. When the line broke and the Prophet was exposed, she did not withdraw. She stood with those who stayed, took up a sword and a bow, and shielded him from what was coming at him.

She was wounded more than once that day, and one of those wounds was deep enough to take a year to heal.

Khadijah was a merchant of standing in Makkah, and she employed Muhammad before she married him. She was the senior party in that arrangement in every worldly sense.

When revelation first came to him he returned home shaken and asked to be covered. She did not doubt him. She told him that Allah would never disgrace him, and gave her reasons — that he kept ties of kinship, carried the weak, and helped others through hardship. She was the first to believe.

She supported him with her wealth and her position through the years Makkah turned against him, and she died before he saw the community established. Jibril sent her greeting of peace and the news of a house prepared for her.