Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith: The Prophet's Cousin Who Fought Him for Twenty Years

Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith ibn Abd al-Muttalib, born al-Mughira, was a first cousin of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ — the son of al-Harith ibn Abd al-Muttalib, and so a grandson of Abd al-Muttalib through a different son than the Prophet's own father, Abdullah. He is not to be confused with Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, the Meccan leader who converted separately around the same time and whose descendants included the Umayyad caliphs; the two men share only a kunya and are consistently distinguished from one another in the sources. From the time the Prophet declared his mission until the last months before the conquest of Mecca, Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith stood against him — in verse, composed against him for years, and in arms, fighting in the Meccan ranks at Badr. He sought to convert only on the eve of that conquest, and was at first refused an audience over the specific injuries he had caused; weeks later, at the Battle of Hunayn, he was one of a small number of men who did not flee when the Muslim army broke, an act attested independently in more than one of the canonical hadith collections.

Opposition Sustained in Verse and in Arms

Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith's opposition to the Prophet was not confined to a single episode but continued across the greater part of the Medinan period, and it took a form distinctive among the Quraysh who resisted the new message: he was a poet, and he used the craft against his cousin directly. Muhammad Husayn Haykal's The Life of Muhammad places him among the small number of Quraysh who composed satirical verse aimed at the Prophet, alongside Amr ibn al-As and Abdullah ibn al-Zib'ari. Tafsir Ibn Kathir, the Qur'anic commentary of Ibn Kathir, states plainly on the verses exempting repentant poets from condemnation (26:221-227) that he "was one of the most hostile people towards the Prophet ﷺ, even though he was his cousin," and that this hostility found its outlet specifically in the mockery he composed and circulated against him.

The clearest surviving instance of this hostility is preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, in the chapter devoted to the story of Banu al-Nadir. After the Prophet ordered the burning of the date-palm groves belonging to that tribe, Hassan ibn Thabit composed verses mocking the indifference of the Quraysh nobility to the loss, naming the site of the burning, al-Buwaira. Ibn Umar's narration records that Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith answered him directly, in verse of his own: invoking a blessing on the burning and turning the image back on Medina, promising that its lands too would come to harm. Bukhari's own narration identifies him explicitly at this point as "the Prophet's cousin who was still a disbeliever then" — language that only makes sense set against what he would later become, and that the hadith itself preserves as a marker of the distance he still had to travel.

That opposition was not only literary. When the Meccan army marched out to Badr in 624 CE, Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith went with it, and he is one of the few men on the Meccan side whose own account of the battle's outcome survives in the sources. Hayatus Sahabah preserves his report, given on his return to his uncle Abu Lahab, as transmitted by Abu Rafi, at the time a slave in Abu Lahab's household. A report reached Abu Lahab that a man calling himself Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith ibn Abd al-Muttalib had returned from Badr with news — and that his name was in fact al-Mughira. Abu Lahab called him over and pressed him for what had happened. He answered without evasion: "By Allah, as soon as we engaged them in combat, they started killing us and taking us prisoner as they pleased. By Allah, the blame cannot be placed on our men, because the men we fought were extremely fair in complexion and rode spotted horses that glided between the ground and the sky. By Allah, they left nothing, and nothing could stand before them." Given by a man still opposed to the Muslim community, with no reason to flatter the side that had defeated his own, this is among the earliest first-hand descriptions of the Meccan defeat at Badr to survive, and it stands as his own testimony rather than a later reconstruction.

Conversion on the Eve of the Conquest of Mecca

Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith's opposition continued for close to two decades before he sought to join the community he had spent that time resisting. As the Prophet advanced from Medina toward the conquest of Mecca in 630 CE, he and another cousin of the Prophet, Abdullah ibn Abi Umayya, met him on the road and asked permission to accept Islam. Haykal's account of the episode, set at Niq al-Uqab, and Hayatus Sahabah's account, drawing on al-Waqidi's narration as preserved in Al-Bidaya wan-Nihaya and separately by Ibn Asakir in his Tarikh Dimashq, agree on what followed: the Prophet at first declined to receive either man, and named his reasons specifically. Of Abu Sufyan, he said, "He humiliated me in Mecca" — a reference, in the context the sources give it, to precisely the sustained poetic mockery described above. Of Abdullah ibn Abi Umayya, he said that the man had "made derogatory statements" about him in the same city.

Umm Salama, the Prophet's wife, interceded on their behalf, setting out their exact relationship to him — one his paternal cousin, the other his maternal cousin and brother-in-law. When the two men learned that the Prophet had still not relented, Abu Sufyan, who had a young child with him, declared that if he were not permitted to approach, he would take the child and go out into the wilderness until they both died of hunger and thirst. On hearing this, the Prophet was moved to pity and permitted them to come forward. Both men were received and accepted Islam, at the very end of the period in which Mecca's opposition to the new faith was still being reckoned with directly.

Standing Firm at the Battle of Hunayn

Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith's most consequential recorded act as a Muslim came only weeks later, at the Battle of Hunayn. When the Hawazin ambush threw the Muslim advance into disorder in the valley and the greater part of the army broke and fled, a small number of men remained with the Prophet, and multiple independent hadith narrations agree closely on who they were.

Al-Bara ibn Azib's testimony, preserved in three separate places in Sahih al-Bukhari (nos. 2874, 3042 and 4315), states that the Prophet did not flee that day, but that his less experienced companions did, and that the Hawazin loosed their arrows at them as they scattered; through it all, Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith held the head, the reins or the stirrup of the Prophet's white mule — the three narrations vary slightly in which part of the animal's tack he is said to have held, a small and unremarkable variation of the kind ordinary in multiply-transmitted testimony — while the Prophet called out, "I am the Prophet, without a lie; I am the son of Abd al-Muttalib." Sahih Muslim preserves a fuller account in the first person, narrated by Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib himself: he and Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith, he says, "stuck to the Messenger of Allah" and did not separate from him; Abbas held the bridle of the Prophet's mule to check its pace as it moved toward the enemy, while Abu Sufyan held the stirrup. It was at this point, according to Abbas's narration, that the Prophet directed him to call out to "the people of al-Samura" — the men who had taken the Pledge of the Tree at al-Hudaybiyya — and that once they had rallied, the Prophet took up a handful of pebbles, threw them toward the enemy, and said, "By the Lord of Muhammad, the infidels are defeated." The same narration is corroborated in Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Jami' at-Tirmidhi.

Hayatus Sahabah preserves a related tradition, drawn from men who had themselves fought on the losing side that day — al-Harith ibn Badal, and separately Amr ibn Sufyan al-Thaqafi together with an unnamed tribesman — stating that when the Muslim ranks broke, "it was only Abbas and Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith who remained" with the Prophet. Tafsir Ibn Kathir, commenting on the Qur'anic verses addressed to Hunayn (9:25-27), preserves a different and considerably larger tradition, naming a company of between eighty and a hundred Companions who are said to have stood firm, including Abu Bakr, Umar, Abbas, Ali ibn Abi Talib, al-Fadl ibn Abbas, Ayman ibn Umm Ayman and Usama ibn Zayd, as well as Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith himself. The two traditions are not straightforwardly reconcilable — one holds that scarcely anyone remained, the other that a substantial company did — and both are preserved here as the sources give them rather than resolved in favour of either: what both agree on, without qualification, is that Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith was among those who did not break with the rest of the army, close enough to the Prophet's own person to be named individually in every version of the episode that survives.

Convergence of this kind — testimony from men fighting against the Muslims that day, cross-confirmed by Companions' own first-person accounts in the most authoritative hadith collections — places Abu Sufyan's stand at Hunayn on a firmer footing than most of what is recorded of his life either before or after it. It is also, on the evidence available, the last of his recorded acts: no source consulted for this article establishes when he died, where, or under what circumstances, and none is supplied here. What the sources preserve of him is bounded by two decades of hostility, expressed in verse and carried into battle, and a single afternoon in which he chose, decisively and at the risk of his life, to stand where almost everyone around him had fled.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Sahih al-Bukhari, nos. 2874, 2930, 3042 and 4315 — al-Bara ibn Azib's testimony that Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith held the Prophet's mule at the Battle of Hunayn
• Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 4032 — the exchange of verse between Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith and Hassan ibn Thabit following the burning of the palm groves of Banu al-Nadir
• Sahih Muslim, no. 1775a — Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib's first-person narration of the Battle of Hunayn
• Quran, Surah at-Tawbah (9:25-27) — the Qur'anic address to the Battle of Hunayn, and Surah ash-Shu'ara (26:221-227), on repentant poets

Classical Islamic Sources

• Al-Waqidi, Muhammad ibn Umar. Kitab al-Maghazi, as preserved in Ibn Kathir's Al-Bidaya wan-Nihaya and in Ibn Asakir's Tarikh Dimashq. [Original c. 823 CE]
• Ibn Kathir, Ismail ibn Umar. Tafsir al-Qur'an al-Azim [Tafsir Ibn Kathir], commentary on 9:25-27 and 26:221-227. [Compiled c. 1370 CE]
• Kandhlawi, Muhammad Yusuf, compiler. Hayatus Sahabah, Vols. 1 and 3.
• Al-Nawawi, Yahya ibn Sharaf. Riyad al-Salihin, with commentary.

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. The Life of Muhammad. Translated by Isma'il Razi A. al-Faruqi. Selangor: Islamic Book Trust, 2008.
• Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad at Medina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
• Peters, Francis E. Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
• Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1983.
• Guillaume, Alfred, trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Further Reading

• Landau-Tasseron, Ella, trans. The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXXIX: Biographies of the Prophet's Companions and Their Successors. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
• Faizer, Rizwi, trans. The Life of Muhammad: Al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.
• Bewley, Aisha, trans. The Women of Madina [from Ibn Sa'd's Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir]. London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1995.