Africans Around the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ: Companions, Cultures, and Legacies

Islam is commonly told as an Arab story. Africans Around the Prophet Muhammad tries to show readers that it is as much an African one.

Africans were present at the Prophet’s birth and at his grave, in his household, his mosque and his armies, and the first Muslims to flee persecution found refuge across the Red Sea in Africa. Their names are heard in every Muslim household: Bilal, the first muezzin; Umm Ayman, whom the Prophet called ‘my mother after my mother’; Usama b. Zayd; the Najashi, the king who sheltered the Companions; Wahshi. Yet beyond Bilal, none has been studied as the leading Arab Companions have, and no body of literature has grown up around them. Most histories leave them in the margins, as a footnote to an Arab Companion or a line in a biographical dictionary.

Mohammed Artan draws on the Qur’an, the hadith, the sira, the classical Arabic historians and works long left in manuscript. From them he writes the lives of almost fifty men and women around the Prophet, named and nameless, as one connected history: from the Horn of Africa and Arabia before the revelation, through the Prophet’s life, to the scholars and saints who came after them. He asks why this history was forgotten, and weighs the reports with the critical tools of the Muslim scholars themselves. He also answers modern scepticism from the sources.

It is the first book to tell this history as a whole: the African Companions, their place in early Islam, and Africa’s part in shaping the faith and carrying it beyond Arabia.