There is a man in the story of Islam about whom we know almost nothing. We do not know his family name, or who his parents were, or whether he ever married, or where he was buried, or what became of him after a single afternoon in a garden. He was a slave, owned by other men, counted by the world as nothing. And yet of all the people Allah could have chosen to be the first soul to embrace the message of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in the lands beyond Makkah, He chose this man, this stranger from a distant country, dragged across the world in chains, set down at the edge of a vineyard at the exact moment the Prophet ﷺ needed him most.
His name was Addas (may Allah be pleased with him), and his whole share of the story is one conversation. But that conversation is one of the most quietly devastating moments in the entire seerah, and to understand it you have to walk first into the worst day of a Prophet's life.
The city that should have said yes
Ta'if is not like the rest of Arabia. If you go there even now, you wonder what you are looking at. It sits up in the mountains, green where the land around it is bare, with trees and flowing water and seasons that actually change, a winter and a summer, instead of the unbroken heat of Makkah. It grows fruit of every kind and flowers of every kind. To this day it is one of the great rose-growing places of the world, and the famous rose-scented perfume you read about in the descriptions of the Prophet ﷺ comes from there. Its raisins were said to be as large as its dates. And the scholars say that almost no fruit reached Makkah except from Ta'if.
So Ta'if was the orchard of the region, the food and the fragrance of it, and its people were its elites: rich, comfortable, refined, sure of themselves. Their great idol, al-Lat, was a huge thing, decked in jewelry and rubies and pearls, and even that idol, when it was later destroyed, held enough wealth to pay off the debts of a man. Ta'if was a city that mattered.
That is why, when the Prophet ﷺ reached the lowest point of his life, his heart turned to it. This was the year his beloved wife Khadijah (RA) had died, and his uncle and protector Abu Talib had died, the year the books call the Year of Sorrow. Makkah had become unbearable. And the Prophet ﷺ, who was wise enough to plan before he travelled, believed he had reason to hope in Ta'if. He had relatives by marriage there. He went carrying not even a demand, only a request: that the three chiefs of the city, the sons of Amr ibn Umayr, accept his call to the worship of the One God, or if not that, then at least grant him refuge, a safe place to gather his strength and let the rest of the Qur'an descend. And if they would refuse even that, he asked only one small mercy: that they not tell Makkah he had come to them seeking shelter, because his enemies there were already looking for any reason to crush him.
Their answer could not have been worse. One of them sneered that surely Allah could have found someone better than him to send. The second said that if this man truly were the Messenger of Allah, he would go and tear down the covering of the Kaaba in protest. The third swore he would never so much as speak to him: if you really are a messenger, you are too great for me to answer; and if you are lying, you are too low for me to bother with. Three men, and three doors slammed in the face of the most truthful human being who ever lived.
Then they broke even the small mercy he had asked for. They sent word to Makkah anyway. And as a parting gift they did something crueler still. They lined up the slaves and the children and the fools of the city in two narrow rows along his path, and as the Prophet ﷺ made his way out they stoned him, kicked him, spat on him, and screamed at him.
A long road, and the blood in his sandals
The historians say it was about fourteen miles of this. Fourteen miles of being driven downhill out of the mountains while stones rained on him and voices hurled insults, the kind of words a person never forgets. The stones collected in his sandals as he ran, and they came so fast and so hard that he could not even stop to pull them out. He bled from the blows and he bled from the stones underfoot, until, as he himself later said, by the time he came out of it he did not even know where he was.
He found himself at last in a garden, an orchard outside the city, and he sat down under a vine, alone, with no friend, no protector, no human being anywhere who wanted him. And there, in that condition, drenched in his own blood, he turned his face to his Lord and wept and called out to Him.
This is the moment to slow down. Because here is the Prophet of Allah ﷺ at the absolute floor of his life, having gone to the city that should have embraced him and been beaten out of it by its lowest people, and what he does in that moment is not curse them, and not give up. He prays. The famous supplication of Ta'if belongs to this garden, the prayer in which he complained of his weakness only to Allah, and said that as long as Allah was not angry with him, nothing else mattered.
And the garden, as it happened, belonged to two of the most prominent men of Makkah, Utbah and Shaybah, the sons of Rabi'ah. They were no friends of his. Both of them would later die fighting against him at Badr. They watched this broken man under their vine, and something in them stirred, the way even hard hearts sometimes feel a flicker they did not ask for. But their idea of nobility was small. They did not go to him. They did not bring him into the house, or clean his wounds, or offer him the comfort that their long familiarity with him should have demanded. Instead they called for their servant, a slave they owned, and told him: take some grapes out to that man.
The servant's name was Addas.
The grapes and the basmala
Think for a moment about the strange path that brought this man here. Addas was not from Arabia at all. He was a Christian, from far away in the north, and somehow the turning of the world had carried him into slavery and set him down in this orchard, owned by these two particular men, on this particular afternoon. He had been a slave in that region for years and, by his own admission, had never once met a person there who worshipped God alone. And now he was the one chosen to carry a plate of grapes to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.
He came and set the grapes before him. And as the Prophet ﷺ reached out his hand to eat, he said, "In the name of Allah," and ate.
Addas stopped. Those words caught him completely. He said, "These are words the people of this land do not say." In all his years among them he had never heard anyone speak like that. Where had it come from?
The Prophet ﷺ answered the question with a question. He asked Addas where he was from. Addas said he was from Nineveh. And the Prophet ﷺ, beaten and bleeding under that vine, his eyes still wet, said something that must have stopped the man's heart: "From the town of the righteous man, Yunus, son of Matta?"
Addas was stunned. "How do you know Yunus?" he asked. "Who is he to you?" A man from Nineveh, far away, a Christian, hearing the name of the prophet of his own land spoken by a stranger in an Arabian orchard. And the Prophet ﷺ said, "He is my brother. He was a prophet, and I am a prophet." He told him that Allah had sent them all with the same single message: to worship Him alone.
From the house, Utbah and Shaybah were watching. They saw their slave change before their eyes, saw his curiosity break open into something else. And then they saw Addas bend down and begin to kiss the hands of the Prophet ﷺ, kiss his feet, weeping over a man their own city had thrown away. When they called him back they were laughing. "This man," they said, "has corrupted you. Be careful." Addas answered them simply: there is no one on the earth better than this man. He has told me something only a prophet could know. They mocked him for it, and they sent the Prophet ﷺ on his way.
And that is all we are told. Addas vanishes from the story here, with grape juice perhaps still on his fingers and tears still on his face. We do not know what happened to him after. But what happened in that garden is enough. In the very pit of his rejection, with the wounds still fresh, Allah sent His Prophet ﷺ a believer. Not one of the chiefs. Not one of the elites who had refused him. A slave. A foreigner. The lowest, by the world's reckoning, of all the people present that day.
Why a follower of Yunus
There is a detail in this that the Prophet ﷺ himself surely felt, and that we should not pass over.
Of all the prophets Allah could have connected to this moment, He sent the Prophet ﷺ a follower of Yunus. Not a follower of Musa, not a follower of Ibrahim, not one of the learned men of the scriptures. A man from Nineveh, the town of Yunus, peace be upon him. And followers of Yunus are rare in the whole of history.
Why Yunus, of all the prophets? Because the very first prophet whom Allah held up to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in the order in which the Qur'an came down was Yunus. In the early revelation, the Prophet ﷺ was told:
Wait patiently [Prophet] for your Lord's judgement: do not be like the man in the whale who called out in distress: if his Lord's grace had not reached him, he would have been left, abandoned and blameworthy, on the barren shore, but his Lord chose him and made him one of the Righteous.
Qur'an 68:48-50
Yunus had a unique experience among all the prophets. He is the one who, for a time, gave up on his people and walked away from them before Allah had given him leave to. No one should imagine this lowers his rank: Allah chose him and made him among the righteous, and his ending was greater than his beginning. But the lesson was carved into the earliest words the Prophet ﷺ received: do not walk away from your people prematurely. You do not know who your people are, or what may yet come out of them.
So look at the mercy and the precision of it. The Prophet ﷺ has just been driven out of Ta'if. The blood is not yet dry. Any one of us, in that state, would have been done with those people forever, would have prayed for their destruction and never looked back. And in that exact moment Allah sends him a follower of the one prophet whose whole story is a warning against giving up on people too soon. It was as if heaven itself leaned down to remind him: be patient. Do not abandon them. You cannot see what I can see.
And He was right not to let him give up. Years later, when Makkah had fallen and the tribe of Thaqif sent its delegation to Madinah to enter Islam, among them, by some of the narrations, was one of those very chiefs who had given the Prophet ﷺ the worst day of his life. And the Prophet ﷺ forgave him and accepted his Islam, the way Yusuf forgave his brothers. The garden of Ta'if was a wound. It was also a seed.
The way this religion always moves
There is a second thing to take from Addas, and the Prophet ﷺ said it plainly elsewhere: this religion does not begin with the powerful. In every society it took root, Islam started not with the elites but with the weak, the vulnerable, the overlooked. The Prophet ﷺ taught that he was to be sought among the lowly, that the believers are given help and provision through their weak ones.
The first to carry the message in this region was not a chief of Ta'if behind his walls of wealth. It was a nameless slave who happened to be holding a plate of grapes. And this is no accident of history. It is the very nature of the message. The weak come first because there is the least between them and the truth, the fewest barriers of pride and property and standing. The chiefs of Ta'if had every worldly reason to say yes and they said no. Addas had nothing, and he fell to his knees.
So when you measure a person's nearness to Allah, set aside the scale the world uses. The world counted Addas as property. Allah counted him as the first fruit of the hardest day of His Messenger's life, and recorded his name in the story of this faith forever, while the names of the three chiefs who turned the Prophet ﷺ away are barely remembered at all.
What the life of Addas asks of our faith
It is easy to read about Addas and feel only a kind of wonder at the timing of it, the way Allah set a Christian slave from Nineveh in a particular orchard on a particular afternoon. That wonder is good. But his life is not only a marvel to admire. It is a question put to our own iman.
Start with him. Addas had every reason the world recognises to be bitter and closed. He had been torn from his homeland, enslaved, owned by men who treated grapes for a wounded stranger as the limit of their kindness. And yet when the truth crossed his path, he did not let his hardship harden him against it. He heard one sentence, the name of Allah spoken over food, and his heart was open enough to recognise it. Most of us guard our hearts behind our circumstances. We tell ourselves we will believe more, or give more, or soften more, once life is easier, once we have been treated better. Addas had been treated worse than almost anyone in that story, and he was still the one whose heart was ready. Ask yourself honestly whether your hardships have made you softer toward Allah or harder, because the same hardship can do either, and the choice is yours.
Then take the lesson Allah pressed on His Prophet ﷺ through this man: do not give up on people, and do not give up on the good you are trying to do, just because the result is not visible yet. The Prophet ﷺ went to Ta'if and, by every measure a person could see that day, failed completely. He was rejected, mocked, stoned, and sent away bleeding. And yet that failure was carrying, hidden inside it, the conversion of Addas, and beyond that the forgiveness of a chief who would one day return as a believer, and beyond that the slow unfolding of a mercy the Prophet ﷺ could not yet perceive. This is the patience the Qur'an demanded of him in those early words about Yunus, and it is asked of you too. You will do good for the sake of Allah and see nothing come of it. You will give the kind word, raise the child, keep the prayer, speak the truth, carry the burden, and the world will show you no result. Do not be like the man who walked away from his people before his Lord allowed it. Your task is the doing, sincerely, for Allah. The fruit is His to bring, in His time, often through a door you never thought to watch.
And let this settle deepest of all: Allah sees the one the world does not see. No one in Makkah was thinking about Addas. No one would have written his name on any list of people who mattered. But Allah knew him, and reached down into his slavery and his exile and gave him, in a single afternoon, what kings and chiefs were refused, the gift of recognising the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and believing in him. If you have ever felt unseen, overlooked, too small or too far from the centre of things to matter to your Lord, the grapes of that garden are an answer to you. Guidance is not handed out according to rank. It is a provision, a sustenance, that Allah grants to whom He wills, and He has a particular tenderness for the ones the world walks past.
So take one thing from Addas into your own ordinary days. When hardship comes, refuse to let it close your heart to Allah; let it soften you toward Him instead. Do one good deed for His sake without needing to see it bear fruit. And carry quietly the certainty that your Lord sees you precisely when no one else does, and that a single sincere turn toward Him, even from the lowest place a person can stand, is never wasted. May Allah be pleased with Addas, the brother in faith of a prophet he never met, and grant us hearts as ready as his to know the truth the moment it is set before us.
This chapter follows the account of Addas (RA) of Ta'if in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). The Qur'an translation is from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (68:48-50). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.