Abdullah ibn Hudhafah as-Sahmi

Abdullah ibn Hudhafah was of Banu Sahm, a clan of Quraysh, and accepted Islam early enough to be among those who left for Abyssinia to escape the pressure in Makkah. He later made his way to Madinah with the rest of the community.

He is remembered in the biographical dictionaries as a man given to joking, even among serious company — and one report of this, considered solid enough to be stated plainly, is set out above: he once stood up in a gathering and asked the Prophet ﷺ outright who his own father was, and was told plainly.

After Hudaybiyyah, the Prophet ﷺ sent letters to several rulers inviting them to Islam, and it was Abdullah ibn Hudhafah who carried the one addressed to the Persian emperor. The emperor tore it up without giving an answer.

He is also identified in the biographical works with a report, carried in the Sahih collections, of a detachment commander who lit a fire and ordered his men into it to test their obedience — and of the Prophet ﷺ ruling afterwards that obedience holds only in what is right. The hadith itself does not always name the commander; the identification as Abdullah ibn Hudhafah comes from the biographical dictionaries rather than from within the report.

At some later point, in the years of expansion into Byzantine territory, he was taken captive by the Romans. The classical sources agree only in outline: that he was pressed to give up his religion, and that he did not. Fuller versions of the story — what exactly he was offered, and what happened when he was released — are told at much greater length in modern retellings than in the earlier biographical dictionaries, and the record here does not go beyond what those dictionaries themselves state.