There is a way to read history that leaves a person untouched. You hear of the great ones who came before, you admire them for an hour, and then you close the book and go back to a life that is in no way changed by what you read. Dr. Omar Suleiman opens this entire series by refusing that way of reading. If we only study history to admire people, he says, then we will never be part of making history ourselves. And when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ speaks of certain distinguished human beings who will stand apart on the Day of Judgment, and we do not aspire to be among them, then we have not really understood the words he left for us.
So before we meet any single companion, we begin with a question that hangs over all of them: what does it mean to be first? Not first in fame or fortune, but first in the only race that matters. The Qur'an and the Sunnah lay out several kinds of firsts, several doors through which an ordinary person can walk into something extraordinary. This chapter is about five of them: the forerunners, the trendsetters, the strangers, the revivers, and the distinguished. They are not five different elites. They are five faces of one heart, the heart that will not wait, will not blend in, and will not let what is good slip quietly out of the world.
The forerunners, who do not wait
The first group are the sabiqun, the forerunners. These are people who rush toward good the moment they hear of it or see it. They do not wait for anyone to lead them. They do not drag their feet, do not glance around to see who is going first, do not measure the room before they move. The instant the good appears, they are already moving toward it.
Allah describes them as people locked in competition, racing one another and racing themselves, always pushing toward a higher level. The Prophet ﷺ said the same in plain words: hasten to do good deeds. The scholars call these the people of high ambition, those who refuse to let their surroundings set the pace for them. They do not wait for an environment to drag them upward, and they do not wait for someone else to outdo them. They are self-driven, because they know that this rushing is pleasing to Allah, and so they hurry to be among the first to please their Lord.
The Qur'an names them with a strange and beautiful repetition. Allah does not call them simply the forerunners. He says it twice:
And those in front--ahead indeed! For these will be the ones brought nearest to God
Qur'an 56:10-11
Why repeat the word? Dr. Omar Suleiman draws out what the scholars saw in it. On the Day of Judgment, humanity is sorted into the people of the right hand and the people of the left, and the vast majority fall into those two groups. But there is a third, smaller group who belong to neither side. They are brought directly near, under the shade of Allah's throne on a day when there is no other shade. One reading of the doubled word is this: they rushed to Allah in this world, so they will be rushed to Allah in the next. Picture the dead rising from their graves, each one driven by an angel to the place prepared for them. No one wakes that morning and opens a map. You are taken. And these, may Allah make us among them, are escorted to their Lord at once, into His protection, because that is exactly how they lived. In this life they rushed to Allah. In the next, they are rushed to Him.
There is a second, intensely practical reading, and it is the one that should reach into our ordinary days. The forerunners are defined by their response time. Allah honored the earliest believers in Makkah, those who embraced the faith before the conquest of the city, who stood with the Prophet ﷺ under threat, who were driven from their homes and spent everything for the cause of Allah. He gave them a rank that those who came later, in easier times, would never share, while still promising every believer a reward. And Dr. Omar Suleiman is honest with us here: you may say you could never have been among those first believers in Makkah. True. But the meaning reaches you anyway. When good calls, in whatever form, a person urging you, an inner pull toward the right thing, a verse you hear, what is your wait time? Do you run, or do you hesitate?
That hesitation is not a small thing. The Qur'an, in the same breath where it warns against corrupting the soul, also condemns the holding back, the cold feet, the "tomorrow" that never comes. Dr. Omar Suleiman paints the scene unforgettably: there were people in Makkah who heard the Prophet ﷺ and went to bed having decided that tomorrow they would go and accept the faith, and they woke in the morning and said, never mind. Because of that single delay, they never became companions. They are forgotten. And he sets beside them the moment Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) read the opening of Surah Taha in his sister's house and recognized it as revelation. Had he said, let me go home and think for a few days, he might have woken the next morning and gone back to his old intent to harm the Prophet ﷺ. Instead he said, take me to the Messenger, now. The race is not lost only by those who quit. It is lost by those who sit down on the side of the road and tell themselves it is just for ten minutes.
The trendsetters, who light the first hand
The second group are the trendsetters, and to meet them we go to a scene narrated by Jabir ibn Abdullah (may Allah be pleased with him). A group of poor desert Arabs came before the Prophet ﷺ and the companions. They were barely clothed, with only scraps of wool to cover themselves, no food, clearly starving, not from any prominent tribe, the kind of people no one feels an automatic pull to defend. The Prophet ﷺ looked at them and told the companions to hurry and give in charity. This was not the obligatory zakah; it was a call to generosity, and he expected a quick answer.
But Jabir says the Prophet ﷺ saw the hesitation and the slow pace of the people, and his face changed; the disappointment showed on it. Then one man from the Ansar came forward with a pouch heavy with silver and laid it before the Prophet ﷺ. And something broke open. The companions saw it, and they went home and came back with their coins and their jewelry, until the sadness on his face turned to joy. Anyone who has ever stood before a crowd waiting for the first hand to rise knows exactly what happened in that moment. The first hand makes the second possible.
That man was more than a forerunner. He set the trend. The others did what he did, moved by his doing. And the Prophet ﷺ captured the moment in words that should make every one of us reconsider the weight of a single good act. He said that whoever introduces a good practice in Islam, a practice already part of the faith that he revives or initiates among the people, and it is then followed by others, will have a reward like the reward of everyone who follows it, without their reward being diminished in the slightest. The trendsetter and the one who acted on it share the reward, and the follower loses nothing.
Dr. Omar Suleiman draws out how staggering this is. The "after that" in the Prophet's words can mean ten seconds later, or ten years later, or a thousand years later. So when someone today cleans the masjid and the memory of the woman who used to clean it is honored, she receives reward in her grave. When someone removes something harmful from the road, the unnamed man of that hadith is rewarded. When someone gives water to a thirsty animal, the one who first did so is remembered and rewarded, centuries on. He mentioned other forms of this same gift from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ: that whoever guides another to a good deed has a reward like its doer, and whoever calls people to guidance receives a reward equal to all who follow it. You learn something good and teach it, you say it aloud, and a person acts on it, and the trail of reward runs back to you for as long as it lasts. The trendsetter does not need a stage. He only needs to be the first hand in the room.
The strangers, who will not follow the crowd
The third group are the ghuraba, the strangers, and here the direction of motion reverses. The forerunner rushes toward good and the trendsetter pulls others along with him. The stranger does something quieter and, in its own way, harder: he refuses to be carried by a current that is going the wrong way.
The Prophet ﷺ said that Islam began as something strange and will return to being something strange, and then he gave the glad tidings: so blessed are the strangers. Dr. Omar Suleiman explains that the strangers are those who hold to unpopular truths and who rectify themselves when the people around them are sinking into corruption. They do not follow the trend of corruption simply because it is the trend. Set this in line with the others and a clear pattern appears. The forerunners rush to good and away from evil. The trendsetters set good and others follow. And the strangers hold their ground against negative trends that have already become dominant, and for that holding they are rewarded.
The pressure to follow the crowd is real, and the Prophet ﷺ armed his companions against it. He took Abdullah ibn Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) by the shoulder and said, be in this world as though you were a stranger or a traveler passing through. And Ibn Umar would add his own counsel: if you reach the evening, do not expect to see the morning; if you reach the morning, do not expect to see the evening. There is urgency in being a stranger, because people most often follow popular corruption out of pressure, to fit in. But the one who keeps the next life before his eyes is not so easily frightened or shamed into trading away what would raise him with Allah for the sake of what is merely common around him now.
This is where the Qur'an cuts against one of our deepest instincts, the instinct that the majority must be right. It is not always so. Dr. Omar Suleiman points to Allah's warning that if you were to obey most of the people on the earth, they would lead you away from His path, following nothing but their own guesses. The majority of a passing trend is no proof of truth. The stranger knows this, and so he stands a little apart, not out of arrogance, but because he has measured his life against eternity and found the crowd a poor judge of it.
The revivers, who bring the lost back to life
The fourth group are the mujaddidun, the revivers, and they are built directly on the work of the strangers. The Prophet ﷺ said that at the head of every century, Allah sends to this ummah one who revives for it its religion, who brings back to life what has been lost of it. To revive is to notice what has gone missing from the way of the Prophet ﷺ among the people, and to restore it, and in restoring it to bring the religion itself back to life in that place or among those people.
Dr. Omar Suleiman widens the idea past the famous reading where each century is assigned a single named figure. The Arabic, he notes, does not force the word to a single person; there may be many revivers in one age, each restoring a different lost element of the faith in a different land. He offers Umar ibn Abdul Aziz (may Allah be pleased with him) as the one revival nearly everyone agrees upon: a man who brought back the justice his great forefather Umar ibn al-Khattab had established, restoring to the ummah a sense of fairness that had slipped away, and in doing so reviving something that had grown faint.
But the part of this that belongs to us is the part he calls revival in the small sense. You do not have to be the reformer of a century to be a reviver. If you find a sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ that has gone missing in your own corner of life, something conceptual or something as simple and concrete as a forgotten practice, and you take it upon yourself to bring it back to life, you have entered the work of the revivers. The point is the initiative: to look at what has quietly disappeared of the good your Prophet ﷺ taught, and to decide that in your context, in your home, in your circle, it will live again because of you.
The distinguished, who are measured by quality
The fifth and final group are the muhsinun, the distinguished, and they are different from all who came before. They are not first to do something, nor are they reviving what was lost. They simply do good so well, with such excellence, that they are set apart by it. They go the extra mile when no one requires it. And here Dr. Omar Suleiman ties the strangers and the distinguished together with a thread from Ibn al-Qayyim. When a person embraces Islam, he becomes a stranger in the broad world of humanity. When a person becomes truly conscious of Allah, leaving off the sins that have become normal even among Muslims, he becomes a stranger among the Muslims themselves, because turning away from what everyone tolerates can draw more pressure than anything an outsider could level at you. And the distinguished are strangers even among the people of piety, because they reach for good that even the conscious do not reach for.
There is a warning folded into this, and it is one we badly need. You cannot be one of the distinguished without first being one of the God-conscious. Some people excel in one place and let it cover for them everywhere else. Dr. Omar Suleiman recalls the woman the companions described to the Prophet ﷺ: she prayed through the night, she fasted extra days, her worship was abundant, but her tongue wounded her neighbors. She had excellence in one direction and no restraint in another, and that abandons the foundation. Excellence in worship does not buy permission to be careless with people. The same drive that pulls a person away from what has become normal sin is the drive that makes him long for the good that everyone else has neglected. It is one motion, and it begins with reverence for Allah.
And the distinguished are not measured the way we instinctively measure. Their distinction has nothing to do with quantity and everything to do with quality. Dr. Omar Suleiman grounds this in the words of Allah about the purpose of life itself:
who created death and life to test you [people] and reveal which of you does best--He is the Mighty, the Forgiving;
Qur'an 67:2
The test is not who does the most. It is who does the best. He returns to Umar ibn Abdul Aziz, who, it is reported, prayed only two units of prayer each night, never more. His wife said those two were nothing like all the night prayers of the rest of them put together: two units that were, as she described them, out of this world. That is the mark of the distinguished. Not the count, but the quality, and beneath the quality, the longing for Allah that made them strangers to the world's indifference.
What the Firsts ask of our faith
It would be easy to read about five categories of the elect and quietly place yourself outside all of them, to admire the forerunners and the revivers as you would admire a mountain, beautiful and distant, with nothing to ask of you. That would be the very mistake Dr. Omar Suleiman warned against in his first breath. None of these five is a closed circle. Each one is a door, and the striking thing is how ordinary the entrance is.
To be a forerunner is not to have lived in Makkah in the first years. It is to shorten the distance between hearing of a good and doing it. The whole danger is the gap, the "tomorrow," the ten minutes on the side of the road. So make your faith a faith of quick response. When you feel the pull toward prayer, toward charity, toward an apology you owe, toward a kindness no one is asking of you, move before the moment cools. Trust that Allah, who placed the prompting in your heart, will honor the one who answers it at once.
To be a trendsetter is to remember that you are never the only one in the room. The man with the pouch of silver did not give more than the others would eventually give; he gave first, and his first hand unlocked every hand behind it. Your good deed is rarely just yours. Someone is watching, a child, a sibling, a coworker, a stranger, and the practice you revive may run on long after you are in your grave, carrying reward back to you for as long as it lives. So do the good thing visibly enough that it can be followed, not for your name, but so that it spreads, the willingness to be the first hand for the sake of the hands you will never see.
To be a stranger is to make peace with standing slightly apart. There will be currents around you that everyone seems to be riding, and some lead away from Allah. The stranger is not rude, not arrogant, not contemptuous of people; he has simply weighed the crowd against eternity and refused to let the majority decide his soul. That refusal will cost you a measure of belonging. Pay it. The Prophet ﷺ called the strangers blessed, and told you to live as a traveler passing through, holding nothing here so tightly that you would sell your hereafter to keep it.
To be a reviver is to look at what has gone quiet of your Prophet's way and to bring it back where you stand. Not the reform of an age, just one neglected good restored in your home, your masjid, your own habits, so that something he ﷺ loved is alive again because you decided it would be. And to be one of the distinguished is to care about quality over quantity, to offer the two units of prayer you do pray with a heart fully present, and to refuse to let excellence in one corner excuse carelessness in another. It begins, always, with reverence for Allah and the longing that reverence breeds.
Here is the heart of all five, the thing that turns them from a lecture into a life. Every one of these doors opens inward, toward Allah, not outward toward people. The forerunner rushes for Him. The trendsetter sets the trend for His sake. The stranger stands apart for Him. The reviver restores for Him. The distinguished excel for Him. The reward of each is held in His hand, seen by Him, and kept by Him when the world has forgotten the deed entirely. So you do not need a special century or a famous name to be among the firsts. You need a heart that will not wait, will not blend in, will not let the good die, and will not measure itself by the crowd. Choose one door today. Answer one prompting without delay. Be the first hand once. Hold to one truth the crowd has dropped. Revive one forgotten good. Do one small thing with excellence, for Allah alone, where no one will ever know. May Allah be pleased with the firsts who have gone before us, and make us, in our own ordinary days, among those who race toward Him.
This chapter follows the framing of the five categories of "the firsts" in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). Qur'an translations are from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (56:10-11, 67:2). The reflection draws on the meanings developed in the lecture and does not constitute a scholarly ruling.