There is a kind of story that does not move in a straight line. It doubles back, it switches sides, it breaks your heart in one scene and mends it in another, and only at the very end do you see that a single hand was guiding all of it from the start. This is that kind of story. It is not the story of one companion but of one family: a father who held out against Islam longer than almost anyone alive, and the children he tortured for entering it, all of them ending in the same place, fighting side by side for the sake of Allah.
To understand it, you have to begin on a night in the dark valleys of Makkah, when nobody yet knew who could be trusted.
Two hearts in the dark
In the earliest years, when belief was a secret a person carried at the risk of his life, the Muslims of Makkah were still learning to read one another. Who was hiding their faith? Who was open about it? Who was a danger? One night a young man named Abdullah ibn Suhayl (may Allah be pleased with him) went out into the valley, looking up at the stars, trying to breathe past something pressing on his chest. And there in the darkness he met Umar, who in those days had not yet accepted Islam.
They circled each other warily, each asking what had brought him out at such an hour. Then Abdullah, still not naming it directly, asked a strange and searching question. Could a man live with two hearts: one he keeps for his family and his people, and another for what he truly feels inside? Should a person obey his fathers and deny what his own heart knows? Umar understood at once. "Is it Islam," he asked, "that is causing you this confusion?" And then Umar, of all people, helped Abdullah decide. If it is Islam, he said, then follow it and bear the consequences, and I will respect you even as your enemy. But if you turn coward and choose safety over what you know is right, you will be small in my eyes. Follow your conscience.
Abdullah went home to his father with that advice still ringing in him, and his father was no ordinary man. Suhayl ibn Amr was the chief orator of Quraysh, the most eloquent tongue in the city, its negotiator, admired by every tribe, a man with a great deal to lose if Islam was true. Abdullah, only about sixteen when revelation began, came to him with a question shaped like his father's own wisdom. Would you rather have a two-faced son? Of course not, said Suhayl. Then would you rather have a son who is a loyal coward, or a courageous opponent? Suhayl, caught in his son's logic, answered that he would prefer the courageous opponent, though he wished his son could be loyal and courageous at once.
So Abdullah told him plainly: I have followed the religion of Muhammad ﷺ, and I have rejected your idols. The threats came one after another. I will kill you. I will let you inherit nothing, and I am the richest man in Quraysh. I will imprison you for life. To each one Abdullah answered without flinching: you will not kill me; what is with Allah is better and everlasting; you will imprison me neither in body nor in mind. In the end Suhayl threw him out and disowned him, still secretly hoping his son would come back.
A house emptying around one man
Abdullah was the older brother. The younger was Abu Jandal (may Allah be pleased with him), little more than a boy when the message came, who looked up to Abdullah and quietly followed him into Islam, hiding it even from his father. And it did not stop with the two sons. Two sisters became Muslim and migrated to Abyssinia, one of them Sahla, the wife of Abu Hudhayfah. The brothers of Suhayl embraced Islam too, one of them, Sakran, the first husband of the woman who would later become the Prophet's wife Sawda (may Allah be pleased with her). One after another the family of Suhayl ibn Amr turned toward the Prophet ﷺ, and many fled the persecution to Abyssinia with their spouses to save their faith.
And in the middle of it stood Suhayl, alone. His children believed, his brothers believed, his in-laws believed. He had been given every possible doorway into Islam, and refused to walk through any of them. The reason was not that he had not heard the truth. It was that he was the pride of Quraysh, their spokesman, the keeper of their unity, and his tribalism had grown stronger than his faith and even stronger than his love for his own household. His insistence on the ways of ignorance was, in part, the very thing persecuting his children.
When the rumor reached Abyssinia that Makkah had accepted Islam, Abdullah returned home, only to find it false. This time his father did not let him go. Suhayl seized him and made good at last on his old threat, imprisoning and torturing his own son, making an example of him before the younger boy, Abu Jandal, who still had not confessed his own faith. Under that torture Abdullah pretended to renounce Islam, and so was released, and went on quietly aiding the cause of the Prophet ﷺ while wearing the mask of a man who had given up.
Badr, and a son who crossed the lines
When the Prophet ﷺ tried to return to Makkah after the cruelty he suffered at Ta'if, he sent Bilal seeking protection, and Suhayl was among those approached. He could have answered with contempt. Instead he sent a courteous message back: if it were up to me I would let you in, but my clan and yours do not intersect in a way that lets me meaningfully protect you. He did not spit, he did not gloat; he held a strange dignity even in his refusal, and the Prophet ﷺ noticed it.
Then came the migration to Madinah, and then Badr. Suhayl went out to fight, pushed along with the other chiefs by Abu Jahl, and he took his son Abdullah with him, believing Abdullah had abandoned Islam years before. But as the two armies drew close, in the night, Abdullah slipped away from his father and ran to the Muslims. Think of what that took. The Muslims were outnumbered and expected to be slaughtered, and not one of them fled back to his family. Yet Abdullah, alone, defected from the disbelievers to stand and fight beside the Prophet ﷺ.
His father was captured at Badr. Umar had no love for Suhayl, the insider whose tongue could cut alliances out from under the Muslims and isolate the Prophet ﷺ. So Umar came with a plan. Let me knock his teeth out, he said, so that his tongue lolls out for the rest of his life and he can never again use his eloquence against you. The Prophet ﷺ refused twice over. First: I will not mutilate him, lest Allah mutilate me. We do not mutilate our captives. And then the words that would not make sense for years to come: leave his mouth, for it may be that one day this mouth will please you, and Suhayl may take a stance that you would envy him over. No one else saw anything in Suhayl. The Prophet ﷺ saw what was not yet visible to a single human eye.
Suhayl was ransomed like the other captives, a man of his own tribe taking his place in captivity while he went to fetch his wealth from Makkah, returned, and paid it. Nobility and obstinacy lived in him side by side.
The hardest day at Hudaybiyyah
Years passed. At some point Suhayl discovered that his younger son, Abu Jandal, was a Muslim too, and did to him exactly what he had done to Abdullah: he locked him in a chamber in his own house and tortured him. But Abu Jandal had no one. He had never grown up around the Prophet ﷺ, never had his older brother near. He was a young man wasting away in a cell in Makkah while Abdullah lived in Madinah as an honored companion.
Then the Prophet ﷺ set out with the believers for the lesser pilgrimage, and at Hudaybiyyah a treaty was negotiated. The man Quraysh sent was Suhayl. The Prophet ﷺ, who loved a good omen, heard the name, which means ease, and told his companions that their affair had now been made easy. Suhayl drove a hard bargain. The Muslims would turn back this year and come the next, staying only three days, carrying only sheathed swords. And the cruelest clause: if anyone fled from Quraysh to the Muslims, the Muslims must return him, but if a Muslim fled to Quraysh, he would not be returned. As the document was written, Suhayl objected even to the words. Not "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious," but simply "In Your name, O Allah." Not "Muhammad the Messenger of Allah," for if we believed that we would not be fighting you, but "Muhammad son of Abdullah." The Prophet ﷺ erased the title with his own hand.
The believers were already burning inside. They had set out for the Sacred House and could not enter, they had erased the word Messenger, they had accepted terms that felt like humiliation. And then, into the middle of all this, came the scene the companions would speak of for the rest of their lives.
Abu Jandal had escaped his father's chamber and crossed more than a hundred miles, chains still on his hands and feet, his body covered in wounds, his hair and beard wild, dragging himself toward Hudaybiyyah. One of the companions said they had never seen a sight like it. He came stumbling toward the Muslims, crying out, "O Muslims! Help me! Save me!" The ink on the treaty was barely dry. And Suhayl saw his son, slapped him, seized him by the iron collar at his neck, and said: this is the first one. You return him to me under our agreement.
Every heart among the believers wanted to tear the treaty apart and save the boy. The Prophet ﷺ pleaded with Suhayl: give me this one, just him, the treaty is not even finished. Suhayl refused. No, this is the first, and I will not let him go. And Abu Jandal, dragged away, stopped calling to the Prophet ﷺ and began calling to the believers themselves: O Muslims, you are returning me to the disbelievers, and I came to you as a Muslim. Do you not see what they did to me?
There was nothing the Prophet ﷺ could do but honor his word. He went close to Abu Jandal and said only what he had once said to the tortured in Makkah: be patient, and seek your reward from Allah, for Allah will make for you a way out. One companion later confessed that this was the single moment in his life when he felt he might disobey the Prophet ﷺ. And yet the Prophet ﷺ submitted to the decree, and Abu Jandal was carried back into captivity, screaming, while the believers watched and could not understand why no one was saving him.
This was the test. It tested every Muslim there: are we truly on the truth, and is this truly how it ends? But more than anyone, it tested Abu Jandal. He could have gone home and told his father he had been right all along. He did not. He held to his faith. That is certainty.
The road that came back around
The story did not end at Hudaybiyyah; it turned. Soon another believer, Abu Basir (may Allah be pleased with him), escaped Makkah to Madinah, and under the treaty the Prophet ﷺ handed him back to the men sent to collect him. On the road Abu Basir killed one of his captors and the other fled. Unable to keep him in Madinah without breaking the treaty, the Prophet ﷺ let him go to the coast, and Abu Jandal escaped again and joined him. Together they gathered other Muslim fugitives until they were a band of more than seventy, camped along the trade road between Makkah and Syria, crushing the caravans of Quraysh.
It worked so well that Quraysh themselves begged the Prophet ﷺ to take the very clause back: send for these men, only stop them strangling our trade. So the clause that had broken the believers' hearts was struck out by the hands that had insisted on it, and the two brothers, Abdullah and Abu Jandal, were finally reunited among the believers in Madinah.
Then came the conquest of Makkah. Suhayl was still holding out, one of a handful not covered by the general amnesty. He sent his son Abdullah to plead for him, and the Prophet ﷺ granted him safety. His sons called him to Islam, and still he refused. Only at the Kaaba itself, when the Prophet ﷺ asked what they expected of him and Suhayl answered, a noble brother and the son of a noble brother, did the moment come. The Prophet ﷺ answered them with the words of a prophet to the brothers who had wronged him:
but he said, 'You will hear no reproaches today. May God forgive you: He is the Most Merciful of the merciful.
Qur'an 12:92
At those words, Suhayl ibn Amr (may Allah be pleased with him) finally became Muslim.
A life of redemption
He belonged now to the last of all to believe, the ones whose hearts the Prophet ﷺ softened with gifts of camels after Hunayn, while the Helpers asked for nothing but the Prophet ﷺ himself. The Qur'an does not pretend these are equal to the first. It says so plainly:
Those who gave and fought before the triumph are not like others: they are greater in rank than those who gave and fought afterwards. But God has promised a good reward to all of them.
Qur'an 57:10
But that same verse holds a door open: a good reward to all of them. And Suhayl walked through it. He did not become a lukewarm Muslim trading old power for new. He became known for his prayer, his fasting, his charity, and for weeping before the Kaaba, begging Allah's forgiveness. He went out to the edge of Makkah to learn the Qur'an from a teacher who was one of the Helpers, and when a man mocked him for not learning from one of Quraysh, Suhayl answered that this was exactly the ignorance that had ruined them, the arrogance that had let everyone else race ahead to the good while their pride held them back. He carried his regret openly, wishing aloud that he had been among the first.
And then the prophecy came true. When the Prophet ﷺ passed away in Madinah, some in Makkah began to whisper that now was their chance to throw off Islam, and the rebellion grew so loud that the governor went into hiding. It was Suhayl who stood at the Kaaba and stilled them with almost the same words Abu Bakr had used in Madinah: whoever worshipped Muhammad, Muhammad has died, but whoever worshipped Allah, Allah is living and does not die. Do not be the last to enter Islam and the first to leave it. The mouth Umar had once wanted to silence forever was now the mouth that saved Makkah for Islam, exactly as the Prophet ﷺ had foretold.
He did not stop there. He went to Madinah, joined the armies of Abu Bakr, and went out to fight beside the two sons he had once tortured. At the battle of Yamamah, father and sons fought together, and Abdullah was martyred. Suhayl and Abu Jandal found his body and wept over it, and Suhayl said he hoped his martyred son would count him among the first he would intercede for, having heard that the martyr intercedes for seventy of his loved ones. Then he kept on. Already in his late sixties, he fought on the front lines against the Byzantines beside Abu Jandal, swearing he would never again spend an hour of his life except striving for Allah, until he was killed as a martyr or died as a stranger far from home. He had stood with the disbelievers once; he would now stand with the believers for as long as he drew breath. And he and many of his family did die as strangers, in the plague of Amwas, their households carried away together, counted as martyrs by the words of the Prophet ﷺ.
What this family's life asks of our faith
It is easy to read this as a tale of brave sons and a stubborn father who came around in the end. But there is something in it that reaches past character and touches our iman directly.
Look first at the children. Abdullah and Abu Jandal believed when belief brought them nothing but a whip and a chain. When his father offered him the richest fortune in Quraysh if only he would stay silent, Abdullah said, what is with Allah is better and everlasting, and he meant it with his whole life. When Abu Jandal was dragged back into torture before the eyes of the very believers he had run to, he did not let go of his faith. That is the question their lives put to us. We tend to give Allah our hearts only after we are sure it is safe, after the cost has been counted. They gave first, in the dark, with everything to lose. Ask yourself what it would mean to trust Allah's promise before the outcome is visible, to say what is with Allah is better and live as though you believed it when something you love is on the line.
Then look at Hudaybiyyah, where faith and feeling are pulled apart. Every instinct in those believers screamed that returning Abu Jandal was wrong, and the Prophet ﷺ returned him anyway, because Allah's decree required it. He could tell him only to be patient, and that Allah would make a way out, and within the year Allah did, more completely than any of them could have forced. This is the heart of contentment with Allah's decree. There will be moments in your own life when obedience feels like surrender, when patience feels like defeat, when the way out is nowhere in sight. Abu Jandal's life tells you to hold on through that hour without bitterness, because the One writing the story sees an ending you cannot yet see.
And then there is Suhayl, the reason this is a story of redemption and not only of the firsts. He wasted decades. His pride held him back while his own children raced ahead, and he knew it, and wept over it before the Kaaba for the rest of his life. But he did not let his late start become an excuse to stay where he was. The Prophet ﷺ had said that one who comes last might one day excel even the first, and Suhayl spent every remaining breath trying to close that distance: in prayer, in charity, in tears, on the battlefield, until he died a martyr. If you carry the weight of years given to the wrong things, his life is mercy to you. It is never too late to turn fully to Allah, and the door He held open in His own words, a good reward to all of them, is open still. He asks not that you grieve your wasted time forever, but that you give Him everything left.
So take one thing from this family into an ordinary day. Trust Allah's promise the way Abdullah did, before it is safe. Be patient under one hard decree the way Abu Jandal was, without a word of complaint to your Lord. And if you have wasted time, turn the way Suhayl turned, fully, with no more delay, beginning today, for the sake of Allah alone. May Allah be pleased with Abdullah and Abu Jandal, who believed when it cost them everything, and with Suhayl, who teaches us that no one is ever too far from coming home, and may He never leave us among those who hold back at the gates of Paradise.
This chapter follows the account of Abu Jandal, Abdullah, and Suhayl ibn Amr (RA) in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). Qur'an translations are from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (12:92, 57:10). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.