Sahaba - The Blessed

THE SAHÂBA
‘alaihim-ur-ridwân’
INTRODUCTION
Beginning with Basmala, this book is written in the name of Allah!
The best refuge is in the name of Allah!
His blessings are beyond all calculations;
Most Compassionate, Most Forgiving is Allah!
Allâhu ta’âlâ created Paradise and Hell beforehand.
Preordaining, in the eternal past, that He would fill both of them
with men and genies, He declared this fact in His Books. As there
have been believing and good people deserving Paradise since (the
first man and Prophet) Âdam ‘alaihis-salâm’, there have also been
faithless, unwise and wicked people who have been committing the
evils which will carry them to Hell. These two groups of people will
go on occupying the earth till Doomsday. The number of angels is
incomparably greater than that of men, and they are all faithful and
obedient. Men, by contrast, are more rarely faithful than they are
faithless, disobedient and transgressive.
Good people and wicked ones have always tried to annihilate
each other, the wicked have also attacked one another and lived in
distress and anxiety throughout history. Believers have performed
jihâd in order to discipline unbelievers and to guide them to true
faith and thereby to endless bliss, and to steer mankind to a happy
and peaceful life in this world and the next. Unbelievers, on the
other hand, have established dictatorial regimes, wherein a minor
group abuses the weak and the inferior in order to lead a life of
debauchery and dissipation and to satisfy their voluptuous desires.
And, in order to conceal their evils, harms and disservices, they
have attacked Prophets ‘alaihim-us-salâm’ and the religions they
brought because they established the principles of ethics, virtue
and integrity. In some centuries these attacks were pressed with
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deadly weaponry, and sometimes they were made in clandestine
warfare, which included false propaganda, mischief-making,
raising social commotions, subversion, undermining religions from
within, and destroying Islamic states from the interior.
Likewise, the luminous Islamic religion, which is a guide to
salvation and improvement and a beacon to material and spiritual
progress, and which was revealed to our master, the final and the
highest Prophet Muhammad Mustafâ ‘sall-Allâhu alaihi wa sallam’,
whom Allâhu ta’âlâ created as the most superior, the most
beautiful and the most honourable one of the entire mankind
worldover in all respects, and chose and sent him as the Prophet to
all nations, was subjected to the same treatment. Faithless, immoral
and lecherous people not only attacked His religion in crusading
expeditions, which included all sorts of torment and barbarity, but
also strove hard to dupe Muslims by disguising themselves as
Muslims, making mendacious and misleading oral and written
statements, setting brothers against one another and thereby
demolishing Islam from within. The damage caused by their
seditionary endeavours howls of their success.
Subversive activities among Muslims date back to the time of the
Ashâb-i-kirâm ‘alaihim-ur-ridwân’, when a Yemeni Jew, who had
professed to embrace Islam and changed his name to Abdullah bin
Saba’, sowed the first seeds of discord among Muslims. He started a
diabolical trend. He attempted to vilify the Sahâba, who were the
companions of the Messenger of Allah ‘sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa
sallam’. The heresy invented by the Jew was called the Râfidî sect,
an appellation which has ultimately changed into the Shiite sect. His
example was followed by many an enemy of religion, who invented
many a heresy under the cloak of religious men and misled millions
of Muslims out of the true course.
The Messenger of Allah ‘sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam’ had
foretold about this deplorable catastrophe that was going to befall
his Umma (Muslims), with the following statements: “My Umma
will part into seventy-three different groups. Seventy-two of them
will swerve from the right path and end up in Hell. One group will
abide by my and my Sahâba’s path.” This group of the right path
has been called Ahl as-sunna(t).
The earliest of these heretical sects, the Râfidî sect, which is the
worst, too, reappears from time to time and spreads among
ignorant communities, and the faithless fan it to exploit it as a
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weapon. That this sect is a non-scientific assortment of distorted
facts and events reinforced with some misinterpreted Koranic
verses and Prophetic utterances manifests itself in the so-called
book Husniyya, one of their recent publications, in the booklets
which they sometimes hand out to uneducated people at the
entrances of mosques, and in the statements they make. Naming a
few valuable books is one of the stratagems that they use to make
their absurdities believable, although they cannot cite a single line
from those authentic books. When uneducated people hear the
names of those books, they believe these people. Their absurd and
unsound slanders, and the true tenets of belief explained in the
light of Qur’ân al-kerîm and hadîth-i-sherîfs by the scholars of (the
right path called) Ahl as-Sunnat, are collated under the
adjudication of authentic documents in the book Ashâb-i-kirâm
(Sahâba ‘The blessed’), by Sayyid Abdulhakîm Effendi
‘rahmatullâhi ’aleyh’. During the printing of this book, a list of the
biographies of the two hundred and sixty-five celebrities
mentioned in the book was appended in alphabetical order for the
purpose of informing our dear readers about them. The Turkish
original, Ashâb-i-kirâm, of our book Sahâba ‘The Blessed’ was
printed in 1982 for the first time. Allâhu ta’âlâ has now blessed us
with the lot of realizing its twenty-second edition, (and also this
first edition in English).[1]
May Allâhu ta’âlâ bless Muslims with reading this book with
unbiased attention and thereby learning the true path!
Muslims on the earth today have parted into three groups. The
first group are Muslims who follow the path led by the Ashâb-ikirâm.
They are called the Ahl as-Sunnat, or the Sunnî Muslims
(Sunnites), or the Firqa-i-nâjiyya (the group to be saved from
Hell). In the second group are the enemies of the Ashâb-i-kirâm.
They are called Râfidîs, or Shiîs (Shiites), or Firqa-i-dâlla
(heretical group). The third group are inimical towards the Shiites
as well as towards the Sunnites. They are called Wahhâbîs, or
Nejdîs, which originates from the Arabian province Nejd, the
birthplace of the heresy. The third group are also called the Firqai-
mel’ûna (the accursed group). Indeed, it is written in our
(Turkish) books K›yâmet ve Âh›ret and Se’âdet-i Ebediyye, (and
also in our publications in English, such as Advice for the Muslim,
and in the fourth chapter of The Sunnî Path,) that they call
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[1] This English version does not contain the biographies.
Muslims ‘disbelievers’. Our Prophet has accursed a person who
calls a Muslim ‘disbeliever’. The breaking of Muslims into these
three groups was contrived by Jews and British plotters.
Any person who indulges in the sensuous desires of his nafs and
has an evil heart will go to Hell, regardless of the group he belongs
to. Every Muslim should continually say the words, “Lâ ilâha il-l-
Allah,” in order to purify himself of the unbelief and sinfulness
which are inherent in his nature, -this act of purification is termed
‘Tazkiya-i-nafs’-, and also the words, “Astaghfirullah,” in order to
purify his heart from the disbelief and sinfulness which he
contracted from his nafs, from the devil, from evil company or
from harmful and subversive literature. If a person obeys the
(commandments and prohibitions of the) Sharî’at, his prayers will
certainly be accepted. Not performing (the daily prayers called)
namâz, looking at women who have not covered their bodies
properly or at other people who expose those parts of their body
that must be covered, and consuming goods that have been earned
through (an illegal way called) harâm, are symptoms of a person’s
disobeying the Sharî’at. Such a person’s prayers will not be
accepted.