Letters to the Kings of the Earth

With the truce holding, the Prophet ﷺ turned outward. He had a silver seal engraved, Muhammad Rasul Allah, and dispatched envoys carrying letters to the rulers of the known world, calling each to Islam in a few measured lines: accept Islam and you will be safe; Allah will give you your reward twice; but if you turn away, upon you is the sin of your people.

To Heraclius, emperor of Byzantium, came a letter that reached him as he was, by chance, questioning Abu Sufyan, then still a pagan Makkan trader in his lands, about this new prophet. Heraclius probed: is he of noble lineage? Do the weak or the powerful follow him? Do his followers leave him? Does he break his word? Abu Sufyan, who hated him, would not lie before the court, and his honest answers matched every sign of a true prophet. Heraclius said: if what you say is true, he will rule the ground beneath my feet; I knew he was coming, but I did not know he would be from among you. He did not believe, fearing his throne, but he honoured the letter.

To Khosrow II, emperor of Persia, the same invitation went. The proud king tore the letter to pieces, enraged that a desert Arab had placed his own name before the emperor's. When word reached the Prophet ﷺ, he said only: may Allah tear his kingdom to pieces. Within a few years the Persian empire that had ruled for centuries was shattered and its lands entered Islam, while the letter Heraclius preserved is remembered with his name.

To the Negus of Abyssinia, who had sheltered the believers, and to the Muqawqis of Egypt, letters went too; both responded with honour, the Muqawqis sending gifts. The pattern was set: the message was offered, plainly and without compulsion, to emperor and commoner alike; what each did with it was his own to answer for. A community that two decades earlier had been a handful hiding in a house was now writing, as an equal, to the masters of the earth, and time would prove whose letter outlasted whose throne.