Ukkashah ibn Mihsan

ProfileUkkashah ibn Mihsan

Ukkashah (may Allah be pleased with him) was the son of Mihsan, of the tribe of Asad, and an ally of the clan of Abd Shams of Quraysh. He and his brothers and his sister accepted Islam early in Makkah, when they were all young. His sister Umm Qays bint Mihsan, who lived to be over a hundred, was one of the first Muslim women and a narrator of hadith, and some of the tabi'un narrated from her. Her brother Abu Sinan ibn Mihsan, according to one report, was the first to pledge allegiance to the Prophet ﷺ under the tree at Hudaybiyyah, and two other brothers, Amr and Wahb, were among the first Muslims too, though nothing else is known of them. According to the early biographies, Ukkashah was one of the handsomest and most generous of men, with a smile on his face, and he gave whatever he undertook everything he had.

Abu Hurayrah told that he heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ say that seventy thousand of his community would enter Paradise without being asked for their accounts, their faces shining like the moon. Ukkashah ibn Mihsan al-Asadi got up, lifting his covering sheet, and said, "O Messenger of Allah, ask Allah to make me one of them." The Prophet ﷺ said, "O Allah, make him one of them." Then another man, of the Ansar, got up and asked the same, and the Prophet ﷺ said, "Ukkashah has beaten you to it" (Sahih al-Bukhari; Sahih Muslim). In the narration of Ibn Abbas, the Prophet ﷺ had been shown the nations in front of him, and Jibril told him that these seventy thousand were those who did not seek treatment by branding, or by ruqyah, or take omens from things, and put their trust in their Lord (Sahih al-Bukhari). The scholars have given several explanations of why the second man was told what he was told, and the man is not named. According to the early biographies, he asked from a life already given to Islam: he had migrated, fought at Badr and led men for the Prophet ﷺ.

According to the early biographies, the Prophet ﷺ sent him early in Islam as the commander of forty men. According to some early reports, at Badr his sword broke in his hand, and he came to the Prophet ﷺ and said that he had nothing to fight with, and the Prophet ﷺ gave him a stick, or a branch, and told him to fight with it. When he swung it, it became a long, shining sword, and he fought with it for the rest of his life, and the Companions called it the sword of help. The report is told in the early biographies, but not in the six books, and this page tells it only as a report.

According to the early biographies, when the Prophet ﷺ died and Abu Bakr sent out the armies against those who had left Islam, Ukkashah was among the first to come forward. He was killed in those wars, at Buzakhah, with Thabit ibn Aqram, when Khalid sent them ahead as scouts and Tulayha ibn Khuwaylid and his brother killed them. Years afterwards, when Tulayha accepted Islam and came to Makkah, Umar told him that he could never love him, because of Ukkashah and Thabit.

His name has come to mean a forerunner in Arabic. He had been told that he would enter Paradise without reckoning, and he was still the first to answer when the Prophet's ﷺ successor called.

Umm Qays bint Mihsan told that she took a son of hers to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ who would not eat, and the boy urinated on him, and he asked for water and sprinkled it over the place (Sahih al-Bukhari). She also told that she heard him say to use Indian incense, for it has healing for seven diseases (Sahih al-Bukhari).

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