18 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
18 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
**Foreword**
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O my brother, the discerning reader.
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Imagine a quiet night in the valley of Mecca, when stone idols still received worship and the blood of infant girls still seeped into earthen pits. An old man knelt on a worn mat. His lamp guttered. In his hands lay pages of scripture — not the writing of his own illiterate people, but words in a foreign tongue, softened on his tongue and in his heart across many years. His eyes had looked far to Yathrib, to Syam (Syria), to lands where scripture fell like rain. Yet his heart never knew rest. He sought the One God, as Ibrahim and Ismail had done before him. He was Waraqah bin Naufal. His story, from his birth in the lap of Quraysh to his death not long after he witnessed the last dawn of the age of darkness, is one we should keep in the brightest corner of our hearts.
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Sometimes, O my brother, we read the history of the Prophet Muhammad, shallallahu ‘alaihi wa sallam (peace and blessings be upon him), as if that light burst suddenly over a dark sea. Not so. Allah, the Most Just and Most Merciful, never left this earth without guidance. Before Jibril descended to the Cave of Hira, hands had already cleared the path; hearts already waited. Among those who waited, Waraqah stood tallest. He was no prophet, nor messenger. He was only a *hanif* — a monotheist on the path of Ibrahim — a Muslim before Islam came by that name. But his soul was so pure that when Khadijah, that faithful wife and his own niece, brought the trembling man before him, he knew at once the voice of heaven. “This is the *Namus* (the angelic messenger of revelation) that Allah sent down to Musa,” he said. That sentence, O my brother, was the rope between the old heaven and the new. And the story of how those words came from the mouth of a man already grown frail is the heart of the book you hold.
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Insya Allah (God willing), in the journey we are about to take — twelve chapters and one closing — I will invite you to step behind the curtain of time. We will smell the dust of the Jahiliyyah (Age of Ignorance) roads thick with depravity, and meet the isolated *hanif*, those who rejected idols before the idols were shattered. We will stand before Waraqah’s house and hear him read the Taurat (Torah) and Injil (Gospel) in his halting Arabic, searching for the name “Ahmad” among worn lines. We will climb Jabal Nur, enter the Cave of Hira, and feel the cold of the night that changed the course of humankind. We will hear Khadijah’s trembling voice as she comforts her husband just come down from the mountain. And we will sit at Waraqah’s deathbed, witness his last tears, and ask: was he the first believer? Or had that station already been prepared for Abu Bakar, or for Khadijah herself?
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All this is not for debate that hardens hearts, but to draw lessons. History without wisdom is like a corpse left unburied: the stench offends, but it yields nothing. I write not as an expert scratching footnotes, but as your brother in Islam, who sometimes is also blind in his own night. May the reading of Waraqah’s journey open that mirror a little, and may we see that truth is sought in blood and tears, not in self-interest and the clamour of megaphones.
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May Allah have mercy on Buya Hamka, who taught us that this religion must be written with a living soul. And may He also have mercy on Waraqah bin Naufal, whose eyes closed in Mecca, but whose name endures in every narration that speaks of the first light.
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Let us begin the journey.
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**The Author**
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*In a corner still touched by sunlight* |