Zaynab Ansari – Muslimah Media The Firsts Sumayyah bint Khayyat

I'm Zaynab, and I am here with you

with Muslimah Media Channel. And today's story is

about Sumayyah

bint

Hayat,

and Sumayya is also one of those special

firsts.

She was the first martyr in Islam, but

I wanna tell you a little bit about

Sumayya's backstory.

So try to envision for

a few minutes the environs of Mecca, right,

and you might have already heard the story

of Khadija, how Khadija comes from a very

elite background and Khadija,

financially supports the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam. She

is the first person to believe in the

message of Islam.

Sumayya

comes,

also with, I think, a strength of faith

that is comparable to that of Khadija's,

but Sumayya comes from a drastically different background.

Whereas Khadija

comes from the elite,

Sumayya was a slave woman,

and her husband was also enslaved.

So Sumayya,

if you think about it, being a slave

woman in Mecca during this time

ensured that Sumayya was going to face a

very harsh

set of social conditions.

So when you think about the fact that

Samayya was willing to sacrifice everything in the

name of her faith, that makes her story,

you know, even more inspiring and even more

amazing.

Now her husband was Yasser ibn Aamer and

her son was was, was Ammar, ibn Yasir.

Right? So she is known as,

Umma Ammar

and like I said, Sumayya was a slave,

her husband was a slave, and after they

had

Amarah, it was said that their owner might

have freed them. But at any rate, she

and her husband, and her son for that

matter, were still treated

by the elite of Mecca as basically people

that they could victimize at will. Right?

So one of the things that we read

about in the story of Samayyah is that

she and her family, for example, because of

their faith, because they boldly proclaimed their faith

in Allah

they rejected the polytheism,

the idolatry of the Meccans because they said

that Muhammad was was Rasoolullah.

The Meccans were determined sadly to make an

example of them, so they would drag them

out into the desert

under the heat of the burning sun. It

was said they would actually be sort of

like encased in iron armor and be placed

in the burning sun essentially to sort of

burn alive. So these are the sorts of

things that they went through. They were publicly

beaten and whipped and humiliated.

They were taunted

And again, the Meccans were able to do

this because

Sumayyah and Yasir al Ammar didn't have the

recourse that, say,

others would have had. So the Prophet sallallahu

alaihi wa sallam, we know very much that

the Meccans wanted to torture him, but they

were prevented from doing that because he was

still under the protection of Abu Talib and

Bani Hashim, right, his clan. Abu Bakr, for

example, one of the earliest Muslims, but he

did have the protection, right, of his of

his tribe, for example.

But because Sumayya and Yasir Ammar were unaffiliated

with, you know, with with a clan or

a tribe, they didn't have

that particular level of protection. So the Meccans

were sadly able to subject them to all

sorts of brutality

but they never wavered. And what's really interesting

is that

the story, when you look at the family,

the mother, the father, the son,

that you see that of all the 3

of them, Simeon's

faith was the strongest.

And because her faith was the strongest she

was probably tortured the most. Abu Jahl himself,

who as we know was an inveterate opponent,

an enemy of Islam, would personally torture Samayyah,

and he was the one that actually ended

her life.

As we know he actually

takes a spear and he stabs her through

her abdomen

and kills her, and Samayya according to the

account of Imam Ahmed literally becomes the first

person to die

in the way of Islam. I mean imagine

that a woman

who is a slave who has no clan

or tribe

and that that makes a very powerful statement

I think in the environments of Mecca

that this type of woman is willing to

kind of like

sacrifice her life for this religion. And these

are the people who were coming to Islam.

These are the people who found empowerment and

upliftment and dignity in the message of Islam.

It was people like Samayyah, the oppressed, the

poor, the downtrodden.

This woman was so strong in her faith

it was said that even as Abu Jahl

would beat her and humiliate her that she

would defy him by smiling,

right, and by invoking the name of Allah

subhanahu wa ta'ala and every time he tried

to get her to say the names of

the idols, she would say the name of

Allah Allah the one and in his rage

he killed her. And you know Samayya's story

really just really does stay with us because

her strength is kind of is it really

is transmitted to those around her and she

is memorialized

from the very earliest days of Islam as

being one of the first Muslims. Indeed, it

was mentioned that there were only a handful

of people in that time who dared publicly

announce their Islam. They were the prophet himself,

peace be upon him, then Abu Bakr,

then,

Ammar,

then Sumayyah,

then Bilal, then Suhaib, and then Al Mikhdad

or Al Khabab depending upon the narration.

So for Sumayyah to be in the company

of those people is amazing and the Prophet

sallallahu alaihi wasallam said to them

that he told them be patient, be steadfast,

verily you have been promised paradise. And indeed,

Sumayyah

is one of those people who was promised

paradise in the very early days of Islam,

and we ask Allah

to give us just a measure of the

courage that Sumayyah had. So this is Zainab

with Muslimah Media. Thank you so much.

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