Muʿādh ibn Jabal
معاذ بن جبل
Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
- Dates
- 603–639 CE / 20 BH–18 AH
- Relation to the Prophet ﷺ
- Young companion from the Anṣār; the Prophet's ﷺ envoy to Yemen
The Prophet ﷺ said: "The most knowledgeable of my community in ḥalāl and ḥarām is Muʿādh ibn Jabal."
Life
Muʿādh was a young man from the Anṣār — a native of Madinah — when he accepted Islam at seventeen. Tall, handsome, bright, with a voice that carried, he became a favourite of the Prophet ﷺ. When the Prophet ﷺ sent him to govern Yemen as a qāḍī and teacher, he asked Muʿādh how he would judge. Muʿādh said: by the Book of Allah. And if you don't find it there? By the sunnah. And if you don't find it there? "I will exercise my own judgement." The Prophet ﷺ struck his chest in pleasure and said: all praise is to Allah, who has guided the messenger of His messenger to what pleases His messenger.
Muʿādh survived the Prophet ﷺ by only seven years. He died of the plague at thirty-six, in al-Shām. The methodology attributed to him in that Yemen dialogue is the classical foundation of uṣūl al-fiqh.
Passages that mention Muʿādh
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"Mudrik, the jurist, told me that a man from Tlemcen known as Ibn Shaikh al-Laban had once favored Sultan Mansa Musa in his youth with seven and a third mithkals when Mansa Musa was just a boy of no significance at the time."
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"There, I encountered a distinguished jurist from Baghdad called al-Sarsari, named after a town ten miles from Baghdad on the road to Kufa, its name being the same as the sur sur near us in the Maghreb."
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"It is one of the great ports in the land of Malabar, visited by people from China, Java, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen, and Persia, where merchants from all over gather."
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"The jurist Hussein recounted that one of his sons renounced his faith after his father, defiantly ordering the tree to be uprooted entirely, which was done."
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"Similarly, it is reported that the Mujahid king of Yemen appointed a cousin with a large army to take it from their king, who was also a relative."
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"The jurist may say that zakat was waived, but if this means only the ruler's and collector's demand is waived,"