Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Hassan ibn Thabit radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu, who is known as the poet of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam has a very interesting story. And he's actually a lot older than what might be suggested when you're reading about him. He was actually older than the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu was about seven years older than the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And he grew up in Yathrib, which would of course become Medina. And he actually could recall when the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was born, some of the rabbis in Medina expressing objection or speaking about the coming of Ahmed, that this prophet had been born, that they had a feeling that this prophet had been born. So he remembered quite a bit and he was quite traveled. Now his role, even as a young person, was to be a poet and Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu would do nothing but poetry. And he had a very unique genre of poetry, right? And this is going to span by the way, what he's believed to have lived of a total of 120 years. Okay, 60 years before Islam and 60 years after radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu and his whole life is poetry. So growing up, all he wanted to do was read poetry, attend poetry festivals, write poetry. And eventually he got so good at it that when he's traveling the world, whether it is Damascus or it is the rest of Ash-Sham, greater Syria, or it is Yemen, he is meeting these empires and he's meeting these powerful people and they start to pay him to author poetry on behalf of the rulers of those areas. And so what he does is he authors these poems, but as we said, it was a unique genre. All he did was satire. So if you wanted to ruin your enemies, then you would bring Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu and he would speak on behalf of the emperors in different places.
And that was enough to make him a very rich man. In fact, he would be invited to poetry festivals around the world. And if you really wanted to put someone down, you hired Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu to come and to author a poem on your behalf. So he was actually hired by some of the hypocrites in Medina to go out and see the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and he was older than the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and to, you know, author poems against the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. Instead, what ends up happening is he comes out, he sees the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and he's the most beautiful person he's ever seen. He is the most noble person he's ever seen. And he falls in love with the Messenger SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and dedicates himself to being the sha'ir of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, to being the poet of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. Now we know when we look at the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, Rasulullah SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam did not use to respond in like manner to people, but Hassan radiAllahu anhu could, right? So if someone came and they started to speak ill of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala anhu stood up and he would basically run them out of the room. So that was Hassan's job, was to stand up and that was his natural talent. He didn't fight in battles. He could not throw a spear. That's what they said about Hassan. You couldn't give the man a spear. All he could do was write poetry, but he used that talent to defend the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. And one time he had this conversation, interesting conversation with the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, which was about the way that he would do poetry. Usually he insults the qawm, usually he insults the people. So he will either insult, you know, your tribe, or he will say that you are not worthy of your tribe. And in the case of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, Rasulullah SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam is, you know, fighting against his own people, right? Or rather his own people are fighting against him. This is Quraysh versus Quraysh. So this is an interesting situation because you can't insult Abu Sufyan. He's my cousin. You can't insult Abu Lahab. He's my uncle.
You can't go after the qawm and start to assign certain things towards the qawm, towards their tribes. And so Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu, he says to the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, what he says, Ya Rasulullah, I'm going to extract you the way that a person would take hair out of dough, right? So if someone's preparing the dough and a piece of hair is in there, he's saying that, Ya Rasulullah, I'm going to take you out so carefully to make sure that I never insult you when insulting Quraysh on your behalf because of what they throw towards you. So what does he do? He studies the lineage of the people from Mecca through Abu Bakr as-Siddiq radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu. So he goes to Abu Bakr radiAllahu Anhu, who was the most knowledgeable of the companions of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam about the various lineages that existed in the tribes and where they came from. And he learns all of those tribes so that he makes sure he never says anything about the tribe of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam or anyone even remotely related to the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam in a direct way. So he has the help of Abu Bakr radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu, but he also has the help of who? He has the help of Jibreel Alayhi Salam. And that is a notable distinction for him. There were three poets that were notable amongst the companions of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. There's Ka'b ibn Malik radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu, Abdullah ibn Rawaha radiAllahu Anhu, and Hassan ibn Thabit radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu. But Hassan was the one who was so skilled that they literally put a minbar up for him in the masjid of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. So you had the minbar of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and then you had the minbar of Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu, where if someone came forth, he would stand up and he would praise the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. And if someone tried to insult the believers, Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu responded with satire towards the disbelievers and those that were hurting the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and hurting the believers. And Rasulullah SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam looked up at Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu one time and he said to Hassan that Jibreel Alayhi Salaam is standing next to you and he is supporting you. And Jibreel Alayhi Salaam supports Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu
so long as he defends the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. As long as he is arguing on behalf of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, Jibreel Alayhi Salaam is standing with him. And so we find that Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu on the way to battle, he is the one who is chanting out Rasulullah Fina wa roohul Qudusi laysa lahu kifau that we are marching and the messenger of Allah SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam is amongst us and roohul Qudus, the Holy Spirit, Jibreel Alayhi Salaam has no match. And the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam would encourage him and say, Uhjul mushrikeen fa inna Jibreel maak that respond to the disbelievers and Jibreel Alayhi Salaam is with you. And something very powerful about this is that the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam said that while Hassan radiAllahu Anhu was authoring this poetry, that the poetry of Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu was more impactful than any arrows that would be thrown towards them. Okay. So the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam told Hassan radiAllahu Anhu that your poetry hurts them more than arrows. And that is certainly due to the support that would come from Jibreel Alayhi Salaam. And that should be a lesson for us as well. That when you defend the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam intellectually, when you speak on behalf of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, that you can be more impactful than any other way of defending the Messenger SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. However, and I hesitated to mention this, but I will mention it because I think it's important. That Hassan radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu was aided by Jibreel Alayhi Salaam so long as he defended the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. However, Hassan radiAllahu Anhu fell into a major sin. And that was that he was one of the people whose tongues passed the slander of Aisha radiAllahu Anhu. So can you imagine, SubhanAllah, this was the man that would defend the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and Jibreel Alayhi Salaam would be there on his behalf. But Hassan radiAllahu Anhu slipped and that same tongue that would defend the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam hurt the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam by passing the slander of Aisha radiAllahu Anhu. And of course he repented and he was punished and he was forgiven.
And the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam did not hold that against him, even though that was very hurtful to the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. And this part is really to the virtue of Aisha radiAllahu Anhu. That Aisha radiAllahu Anhu was the one that would defend Hassan when other people put him down because of that mistake that he made, even though she was the primary victim of that. And so the virtues of Hassan, some of them are narrated by Aisha radiAllahu Anhu. She's the one that will speak about the virtues of Hassan bin Thabit radiAllahu Anhu. And that is from the heart and the forgiveness of Aisha radiAllahu Anhu. And there was a time where Hassan visits her at the age of 120 years old and Aisha radiAllahu Anhu honored him, even though SubhanAllah one time he slipped and he said of Aisha what he should not have said about her. And she honored him and she had a chair placed for him and she treated him with respect. And Abdur Rahman, the brother of Aisha found out about that because people talked, they said, you know, Hassan visited Aisha, she let him in the house and she honored him despite the fact that he was one of those that fell into the slander of Aisha at one point. And Abdur Rahman came to Aisha and said, is it true? Did you let him into your home? Did you honor him in this way? And what does she say? She says, you know, may Allah forgive him. First of all, he's blind, he's old. But secondly, kani udafi AAana nabis salallahu alayhi wa sallam He used to defend the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam and Rasulullah salallahu alayhi wa sallam was pleased with that defense. Urwa ibn Zubair radiAllahu Anhu who captures much of the seerah for us, he once was sitting with Aisha radiAllahu Anhu, she was his maternal aunt. And he said to his son that I once started to say some bad things about Hassan and Aisha radiAllahu Anhu objected and she said, la tasubbuhu fa innahu kana yunafihu AAan Rasulullah salallahu alayhi wa sallam Do not say anything bad about Hassan because he used to defend the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam. So subhanAllah in it is, you know, a lesson for us of the blessing of a man when he's doing right,
but also that a person can get caught up in their own talent and that a tongue that was, you know, frequent in defending the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam and studying environments and, you know, putting satire forward and things of that sort also slipped for a moment. However, because of the redemption of Islam, he's held by the standard of which he was supporting the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam with Jabir al-Islam aiding him, not the time that he fell to the temptation of Shaitan and used his tongue to hurt the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam.
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