When the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ finally completed the long, hunted road out of Makkah, the first place his camel carried him was not the great city that would one day bear his name. It was a settlement on the edge of it, a cluster of date gardens and low houses belonging to a single tribe, where the dust of the road was washed off in the quiet of two weeks that the histories almost pass over. The place was Quba. And the men who opened their homes to him there, two of them in particular, were ordinary in every way the world counts greatness, and extraordinary in the only way that lasts.
Their names were Kulthum ibn al-Hadm and Sa'ad ibn Khaythamah (may Allah be pleased with them). To understand why they matter, you have to understand what the Prophet ﷺ was walking into, and what it cost them to receive him.
The land that remembered every feud
Yathrib, before it became Madinah, was a city written in tribal lines. The land itself recorded the hostilities. Each clan held its own quarter, and the quarters were not neighbourhoods so much as fortified positions, because the tribes had been at war with one another for generations. There was no single ground they all shared. There was only territory, won and held and grieved over.
Into this the Prophet ﷺ arrived as a complete stranger from Makkah, and somehow, in a way that should leave anyone studying it quietly amazed, he wove these warring people into one body. He did it through an intentionality so deliberate that it touched everything: how he spoke to a man, how he honoured a tribe, how he divided even his hours among them. He moved between the great tribes and their many sub-tribes like a man carrying water across uneven ground, never spilling, never favouring one at the expense of another, giving each its rightful place.
The first of those places was Quba, on the outskirts. It belonged to a sub-tribe whose people, the histories agree, were among the purest who ever came to Islam. There were no hypocrites in Quba in those early days, no double hearts. It was, as one description has it, like a camp pitched for two weeks that held the best of those who had fled Makkah and the best of those who had come out to receive them, with the Prophet ﷺ living in the middle of it. And the men who hosted that camp, who turned their gardens and their homes over to it, are the subject of this chapter.
Kulthum, the old man who believed at once
Kulthum ibn al-Hadm was the chief of his tribe in Quba, and he was an elderly man. That detail matters more than it first appears. In Makkah it was the tribal chiefs, the men with status and standing to lose, who gave the Prophet ﷺ the hardest time of all. Pride hardens with age and with rank, and Kulthum had both. Yet when news reached him that a Prophet was coming, this old chief did not calculate, did not weigh his position, did not stall. He believed immediately. And in the same breath, he made a decision that tells you the whole shape of the man: let us set aside everything we have for the Messenger of Allah. Whatever he wants, it is his. Let him come, and we will receive him, and we will honour him.
He was the one who extended the invitation. Come to the tribe of Banu Amr, he sent word, and we will take care of you, O Messenger of Allah. And so when the Prophet ﷺ reached Quba on a Monday, the twelfth of the month, the same day of the week, the histories note, on which he had been born, it was the home of Kulthum that opened to him first. For the first week he stayed there.
The Prophet ﷺ made Kulthum, in effect, his brother. When the believers of Madinah were later paired with the emigrants of Makkah, brother to brother, this old man was already something like that to the Prophet ﷺ: the one whose roof sheltered him, whose house held him through the nights. And it was during those nights that Kulthum's home became a council chamber. The elders and the chiefs of the tribes would come, and the senior companions who had made the journey would be there, and in that gathering the future of a community was quietly being built. By day the Prophet ﷺ would go elsewhere, but the evenings belonged to the elders, in the house of the old man who had believed at once.
There is a courtyard preserved in Quba even now, a shaded garden beside a resting place, where the Prophet ﷺ would receive the delegations of elders. The house of Kulthum stood right beside it. A man can stand there today and be standing where an old chief gave away his comfort without a moment's hesitation, simply because the truth had come and he recognised it.
Rifa'ah, the man Allah praised for purity
There was a second host in Quba whose name the world has almost forgotten, and yet whose praise is recited in the Qur'an in nearly every corner of the earth. He was the brother in faith of Kulthum, a man the histories preserve under the name Rifa'ah, and the Prophet ﷺ lodged in his house as well. When the Prophet ﷺ later spoke of "my brother from the Ansar," it was this man he meant.
His reputation was a strange and beautiful one. He was, the companions said, the man whom Allah was describing when He spoke of those who love to purify themselves. There is a mosque in Quba that Allah honoured directly in His Book, and He honoured its people in the same verse. When the verse came down, the Prophet ﷺ walked out to the people of Quba and told them plainly that Allah had beautified His praise of them in the story of their mosque. What is it, he asked them, that you do? They answered that their neighbours had taught them to wash for prayer, and they had taken to it with such care, washing themselves before they prayed, cleansing themselves with diligence, that it had become their habit even before Islam arrived. Listen to what was revealed about them:
[Prophet], never pray in that mosque. You should rather pray in a mosque founded from its first day on consciousness of God: in this mosque there are men who desire to grow in purity- God loves those who seek to purify themselves.
Qur'an 9:108
The scholars of the language noticed something gentle in the wording. The verb chosen for their purifying carries a sense that reaches past the body. They washed the dirt from their skin, yes, but Allah was praising people who also washed the filth from inside themselves: the hatred, the envy, the slander, the resentment. They cared about the inner stain more than the outer one. There are people who polish the outside and leave the inside rotting; these were the opposite. And Rifa'ah, who loved to purify himself, was among the foremost of them. The Prophet ﷺ said of him, in a sound report, what a great man, a man of Paradise.
When he died, a companion stood over his grave and said there was no man left on the face of the earth who could claim to be better than the one who lay in it. And then he added a detail that captures the quiet, unboastful service of these people: I never saw a banner raised for the Prophet ﷺ except that this man was standing beneath it. He did not push himself forward. He did not crowd into the affairs of the community for the sake of being seen. He simply gave himself, purely, again and again, and Allah lifted him into a verse that will be read until the end of time.
Sa'ad, the young man who hosted the youth
If Kulthum's house held the elders by night, another house held the young by day, and it belonged to Sa'ad ibn Khaythamah. He was a young man, but he was no latecomer. He had been there at the very beginning, one of those who travelled from Yathrib to Makkah and pledged themselves to the Prophet ﷺ in the first pledge, before the migration, before there was any safety in it. He was, in fact, the only one of his tribe present at that first pledge, and so he stood as its representative, young as he was.
His home in Quba was called the House of the Bachelors. All the young, single men gathered there, and so the Prophet ﷺ divided his days with a tenderness worth pausing over. The evenings he gave to the elders in Kulthum's home. The days he gave to the youth in Sa'ad's. Day with the young, evening with the old, day with the young, evening with the old, for two weeks, so that no age and no station of the community would feel passed over. From the first hours, the Prophet ﷺ made himself an accessible leader to every part of the people he had come to.
It was in these days too that the building of the mosque of Quba began, and the young men who clung to Sa'ad's circle got to see something they had not expected. The leader they had waited months for, the one they had climbed trees and scanned the horizon to glimpse, did not arrive exhausted and demand to be served. He arrived and went straight to work. He laid stones with his own hands. He stood in the heat. He helped prepare the food. The Ansar, who had imagined a king, found a man building a mosque beside them. And Sa'ad's house became the place where the plans were made, the matters discussed, the road forward charted.
A father, a son, and a coin between them
Sa'ad's father, Khaythamah, was a believer too, and the most touching part of this whole story lives in a single conversation between the two of them.
When the call came to march out to the Battle of Badr, father and son both wanted to go, and they could not both leave; one had to stay and care for the family. So the father came to his son and made his case as a father will. Let me be the one to go out and fight beside the Prophet ﷺ, he said. You stay back with the family. Prefer me in this.
The son's answer is one a parent never forgets. He told his father that if the stakes of this were anything other than Paradise, he would gladly have preferred him and stayed home. But this is Paradise we are talking about, he said. To go out at Badr and be with the Messenger ﷺ, this is Jannah. I cannot simply hand it to you. Forgive me, father. We have to settle it another way.
So they cast lots. Two believers, father and son, drew lots for the chance to risk their lives in battle, because each of them wanted that nearness to the Prophet ﷺ so badly that he would not yield it even to the one he loved most. The lot fell to Sa'ad. The young man marched out to Badr, and his father stayed behind.
Sa'ad was killed at Badr. He was among the very first to fall, and among the small handful of Muslims martyred in a battle the Muslims won. He was struck down by one of the champions of Quraysh. So the two hosts of Quba, Kulthum and Sa'ad, both left this world early: Kulthum dying soon after the migration he had welcomed, and Sa'ad falling on the field of Badr, his pledge fulfilled in blood.
When the army returned, the news of victory had run ahead of it. Khaythamah, the father, came out searching the ranks for his boy. Where is Sa'ad, he kept asking, where is Sa'ad. And they told him. The grief of it was sharpened by memory, because he could not stop hearing that conversation again, the coin, the lots, his son's gentle refusal to give up Paradise even to his own father.
Two verses, a father and his son
Then something happened that turned the father's sorrow into resolve. Khaythamah longed for what his son had been given. If I am granted another chance to be with the Prophet ﷺ, he said, in the very spirit Sa'ad had shown, I will show how I love my Messenger. And the chance came. At the Battle of Uhud, when the lines broke and chaos swallowed the field and so many fled, Khaythamah was among those who stayed and stood firm beside the Prophet ﷺ.
The scholars looked at this father and son and noticed something that should make the heart still. Each of them is embraced in a verse of the Qur'an. The son, Sa'ad, was among the people of Quba whom Allah praised as those who love to purify themselves. And the father, Khaythamah, was among those Allah described when He spoke of the believers who kept faith with their covenant, who longed to prove their love at Badr, missed it, and swore they would not abandon their Prophet ﷺ if the chance ever returned:
There are men among the believers who honoured their pledge to God: some of them have fulfilled it by death, and some are still waiting. They have not changed in the least.
Qur'an 33:23
Some fulfilled the pledge by dying, as the son had at Badr. Some were still waiting, their resolve unbroken, as the father was until Uhud. They had not changed in the least. And there is no other father and son in the whole record, no other parent and child, where one is a martyr of Badr and the other is named among the faithful who never wavered. You can let yourself imagine the meeting the scholars described: the son, already among the souls of the believers, receiving his father into that company, the two of them reunited and rejoicing in what they had each given.
What the lives of Kulthum and Sa'ad ask of our faith
It would be easy to read this chapter and feel only warmth, to admire two generous hosts and a touching family story and move on. That would be to miss what their lives are actually asking of us. They are not a pleasant tale. They are a set of questions put to our own iman.
Begin with Kulthum, the old chief who believed at once. He had every worldly reason to hesitate. His standing, his age, his comfort, his authority over a tribe, all of it argued for caution, and the proud chiefs of Makkah had made exactly that calculation and lost their souls to it. Kulthum did not calculate. The truth came and he recognised it and he opened his hands and his home before anyone could promise him a return. That is what trusting Allah's promise looks like before the outcome is visible: to say yes to the truth while it is still inconvenient, still costly, still unproven in the eyes of the world. Most of us guard our hearts until we are certain it is safe to give them. The old man gave first. Ask yourself what you are still withholding from Allah while you wait for it to become easy, and whether the truth you already recognise deserves better than your hesitation.
Then there is the purity that Allah praised in the people of Quba. They were honoured in the Qur'an not for some great public feat but for washing themselves with care, outwardly for prayer and inwardly of the filth that rots a heart: the envy, the grudges, the quiet slander we let ourselves keep. This is within the reach of anyone reading this. You cannot host the Prophet ﷺ in your home, but you can do today what they did: guard your wudu, and just as seriously, drain the resentment out of your chest before you stand before Allah. He loves those who seek to purify themselves, and He named the ones who did. That love is still being offered. The inner cleaning is the harder and the more beloved of the two, and no one but Allah ever needs to see it.
And there is the coin between a father and his son. Sa'ad would not hand his father an easy escape from hardship, not because he loved his father little, but because he loved Paradise more, and he understood that nearness to Allah is not a thing you politely give away. His whole family treated closeness to the Prophet ﷺ as the one possession worth competing for, worth dying for, worth refusing your own father over. Set that beside how lightly we let our own chances at good slip past: the prayer we delay, the charity we mean to give later, the night we keep meaning to stand in. They cast lots for the danger. We make excuses to avoid the ease. Their lives ask whether we truly believe that what is with Allah is better, or whether we only say it.
Here is the part that should lift the heart. Nothing these men gave was lost. Kulthum welcomed the Prophet ﷺ and died soon after, and the world might have called it a small, brief life, hardly long enough to count. Sa'ad fell at Badr as a young man with so much unlived. Yet Kulthum lies among the very first buried in the blessed earth of al-Baqi, and Sa'ad is embraced in a verse of the Qur'an, reunited with a father who is embraced in another. What the world would weigh as short lives cut off too soon, Allah recorded as lives perfectly spent. This is the promise that should change how you measure your own days: what you give to Allah, He keeps; what looks like a life poured out for nothing may be, in His sight, the most complete success a person can be granted.
So take one thing from them into an ordinary day. Say yes to a truth before it is safe, the way the old man did. Clean one grudge out of your heart for the sake of Allah, the way the people of Quba cleansed themselves. Refuse to give away one chance at good that you have been letting slip, the way a son refused to surrender his place at Badr. May Allah be pleased with Kulthum ibn al-Hadm and Sa'ad ibn Khaythamah, and with every host of Quba whose name the world forgot and Allah did not, and may He gather us in the company of those who loved Him enough to compete for His nearness.
This chapter follows the account of the hosts of Masjid Quba in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). Qur'an translations are from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (9:108, 33:23). Where the auto-transcribed names were unclear, they have been rendered to standard seerah spelling; where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.