Anas ibn Malik

ProfileAnas ibn Malik

Anas (may Allah be pleased with him) was the son of Umm Sulaym and Malik ibn an-Nadr of Madinah, and he was named after his uncle Anas ibn an-Nadr, who was killed at Uhud. When the Prophet ﷺ came to Madinah, his mother brought him, then about ten, and said that every one of the Ansar had given the Prophet ﷺ some gift, and that she had nothing to give except her son, who would serve him. The Prophet ﷺ prayed that Allah would increase Anas in wealth and children and bless what He gave him (Sahih al-Bukhari). He was called the servant of the Messenger of Allah. The Prophet ﷺ called him Unays, little Anas, and once called him the one with two ears, as a joke (Sunan Abi Dawud, graded sahih, and Sunan at-Tirmidhi, graded hasan). According to the early biographies, he also called him my son, and gave him the kunya Abu Hamzah.

Anas said that he served the Prophet ﷺ for ten years, and he never said to him a word of impatience and never blamed him for what he did or did not do (Sahih al-Bukhari). One day the Prophet ﷺ sent him on an errand, and on the way he stopped to play with some boys in the street. The Prophet ﷺ came up behind him, took him gently by the back of the neck, and, smiling, asked him whether he had gone where he had been told. Anas said that he was on his way (Sahih Muslim). He was too young to fight at Badr and Uhud, but he took the pledge under the tree at Hudaybiyyah. Because he was with the Prophet ﷺ every day, most of what we know of the Prophet's ﷺ daily life outside his house comes from him. He was with him when his son Ibrahim was dying (Sahih al-Bukhari), and when the Prophet ﷺ told a weeping woman at a grave to be patient (Sahih al-Bukhari). He saw the Prophet ﷺ visit a young Jewish boy who served him and was ill, and ask him to accept Islam. The boy looked to his father, who told him to obey Abu al-Qasim, and the Prophet ﷺ came out thanking Allah for saving him from the Fire (Sahih al-Bukhari). A Bedouin once pulled his cloak so hard that it left a mark on his neck and demanded a share of the wealth Allah had given him, and the Prophet ﷺ smiled and ordered that he be given something (Sahih al-Bukhari). He described him as having had very few white hairs when he died (Sahih al-Bukhari). A man once asked the Prophet ﷺ when the Hour would come and said that he loved Allah and His Messenger, and the Prophet ﷺ told him that he would be with those he loved. Anas said that nothing had pleased them so much, and that he loved the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr and Umar (Sahih al-Bukhari). He asked the Prophet ﷺ to intercede for him on the Day of Judgment, and asked where he would find him. The Prophet ﷺ told him to look for him first at the Sirat, then at the Scale, then at the Pond (Sunan at-Tirmidhi, graded hasan).

Anas was in the mosque on the last Monday of the Prophet's ﷺ life, when Abu Bakr was leading the prayer. The Prophet ﷺ lifted the curtain of his room and looked at them, his face like a page of the Quran, and smiled. The people were nearly distracted in their prayer, and Abu Bakr stepped back, thinking he would come out, but the Prophet ﷺ signalled to them to finish and let the curtain fall (Sahih al-Bukhari). Anas said that the day the Prophet ﷺ entered Madinah everything in it was bright, and the day he died everything was dark, and that when they buried him they had hardly taken their hands from the grave before their hearts felt estranged (Sunan at-Tirmidhi, graded hasan). When he was buried, Fatimah asked him how he could bring himself to throw earth on the Messenger of Allah ﷺ (Sahih al-Bukhari). According to the early biographies, he said that he saw the Prophet ﷺ in his dreams almost every night for the rest of his life.

According to the early biographies, he fought in the wars against the apostates under Abu Bakr, collected zakat for Abu Bakr and Umar, and kept out of the fighting among Muslims. He settled in Basra, where he taught in the mosque for decades, and many of the great scholars of the next generation, among them al-Hasan al-Basri, Ibn Sirin and az-Zuhri, sat with him. Many of his children and grandchildren were killed over the years in the troubles of the Umayyad period. According to the early biographies, al-Hajjaj summoned him and humiliated him as an old man, and he answered only with the words that to Allah we belong and to Him we return; the caliph Abd al-Malik wrote to al-Hajjaj telling him to apologise. According to the early biographies, his gardens bore fruit twice a year. He lived to be over a hundred, and was one of the last of the Companions to die. He said that he was the last of them left to have prayed towards both qiblahs. According to the early biographies, he asked to be buried with some hair of the Prophet ﷺ and a stick he had kept, and Ibn Sirin led the prayer over him.

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