Show me the market

The emigrants arrived in Madinah with nothing. They had left property, businesses and houses behind in Makkah, and there was no mechanism for getting any of it back.

So the Prophet ﷺ paired each of them with a man of the Ansar. It was not a gesture. The Ansari was to share what he had.

The man paired with Abd ar-Rahman made the offer in the fullest terms the reports record: half of his property, and a choice from his household.

Abd ar-Rahman turned it down. He asked instead to be shown where the market was.

He went, and he traded, and within a short time he was supporting himself. Not long after that he was in a position to give rather than receive.

It is worth being careful about what this episode is and is not. It is not a rebuke of the Ansari, whose offer is one of the most generous things in the whole period and is recorded precisely because it was extraordinary. It is a statement about what Abd ar-Rahman wanted his own position to be. He would take the introduction. He would not take the money.