Who Are the Strangers (Ghuraba) in the Hadith, and What Is Their Place in This Age?

Answered by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Question

Dear Shaykh, the hadith speaks of the strangers (ghuraba’). Those who hold to the religion as it once was. The hadith promises them glad tidings.

Who are they, and what does it mean to be among them today?

Answer

In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate.

The Foundational Hadith

The hadith is well-known. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

“Islam began as something strange, and will return to being strange as it began; so glad tidings (tuba) to the strangers.” [Sahih Muslim, from Abu Hurayra]

Variant reports complete the picture in converging ways.

In Ahmad and Ibn Maja, from Ibn Mas’ud (Allah be pleased with him), the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) was asked: “And who are the strangers?” He said, “Those who extract themselves from their tribes and kin for the sake of their religion.” [Ahmad; Ibn Maja]

In Tirmidhi: “Glad tidings to the strangers. Those who rectify what the people have corrupted of my Sunna.” [Tirmidhi]

In Tabarani and Ahmad, from Abdullah ibn Amr (Allah be pleased with them both): “A righteous people surrounded by people abounding in much evil.

Those who disobey them are more numerous than those who obey them.” [Musnad Ahmad; authenticated by al-Albani (d. 1420 AH) in Sahih al-Jami]

The Word Itself: What “Ghuraba’” Carries

Before reading the hadith, listen to the word.

Imam al-Raghib al-Isfahani (d. 502 AH), in al-Mufradat fi Gharib al-Quran, traces the root gh-r-b to the meanings’ distance’ and ‘going far’.

The setting sun “tagharrabat” because it has gone far west. The gharib is the one who has gone far from his familiar people. [al-Raghib al-Isfahani, al-Mufradat, entry غرب]

Ibn al-Athir al-Jazari (d. 606 AH), in al-Nihaya fi Gharib al-Hadith, adds the sense of the rare and the uncommon. The gharib is what people do not know how to place. [Ibn al-Athir, al-Nihaya, entry غرب]

The strangers in the hadith are therefore doubly named. They have traveled far outward, from the easy comforts of their tribes.

They have traveled far inward, from the world’s noise toward Allah’s remembrance. And they are rare. The age cannot place them, because the age has forgotten what they hold.

The Hadith Through Its Classical Commentators

Imam al-Nawawi (d. 676 AH) gathers the early readings in his commentary on Sahih Muslim. He cites Qadi Iyad (d. 544 AH). Islam began among a few.

It then spread and prevailed. It will return to being held by a few, as in its first days. [al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj sharh Sahih Muslim, kitab al-iman]

The hadith does two things in this reading. It describes what will happen. It consoles those who live through it.

The commentators also draw out the word tuba in three classical readings. Some read it as “all good.” Others as Paradise itself.

Others still, as the tree in Paradise whose shade a rider crosses for a hundred years and does not complete [Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH), Tafsir, on Quran 13:29; Sahih Muslim, on the tree of tuba]. By any of the three, the reward is large.

Ibn Rajab’s Treatise on the Strangers

Imam Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali (d. 795 AH) devoted a focused treatise to this question, Kashf al-Kurba fi Wasf Hal Ahl al-Ghurba. He gathers the variants and grounds them in the early Muslims (salaf).

He frames the matter historically. Those who first answered the Prophet’s call were strangers among their tribes. Islam then spread until the Companions stood at its summit. Then two great trials entered the community: doubts (shubuhat) and desires (shahawat).

The carriers of the original light became, again, few [Ibn Rajab, Kashf al-Kurba].

Ibn Rajab cites Imam al-Awza’i (d. 157 AH). “It does not mean that Islam will go away, but that the people of the Sunna will go away, until there does not remain in a land any of them save one.” [al-Lalika’i (d. 418 AH), Sharh Usul I’tiqad, cited by Ibn Rajab]

He then divides the strangers into two categories.

The first: those who rectify themselves when the people have grown corrupt.

The second, and the higher of the two: those who, by Allah’s grace, also rectify what others have corrupted of the Sunna [Ibn Rajab, Kashf al-Kurba]. The latter group inherits the Prophet’s work in the literal sense. They hold a piece of his call in their hands.

Ibn Rajab also preserves a striking passage from Ahmad ibn Asim al-Antaki (d. ca. 235 AH), a student of Sulayman al-Darani (d. 215 AH) in early Sufism:

“I have reached a time in which Islam has returned to being as strange as it began. The scholar is tested by the love of this world and the love of authority.

The worshipper is ignorant of how to worship. And the rest of the people are quick to follow whoever wolf-like wishes to feed on them.” [al-Antaki, cited in Ibn Rajab, Kashf al-Kurba]

Ibn Rajab then asks: “That was al-Antaki’s age. What has the matter become in ours?

The Voices of the Early Muslims: Gentle With the Few

Ibn Rajab strings together early voices that give this strangeness its inner shape.

Al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110 AH) used to say to those who came to him: “O people of the Sunna, be gentle with one another, for you are the fewest of people.” [al-Lalika’i, Sharh Usul I’tiqad; al-Darimi (d. 255 AH)]

Yunus ibn Ubayd (d. 139 AH) said: “There is nothing more strange than the Sunna. And what is stranger than it is the one who knows it.” [Ibn Rajab, Kashf al-Kurba]

Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 161 AH) said: “Treat the people of the Sunna kindly, for they are strangers.” [al-Lalika’i, cited by Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597 AH), Talbis Iblis]

Al-Fudayl ibn Iyad (d. 187 AH) said: “The person of the Sunna is the one who knows what enters his stomach from the lawful.” [Ibn Rajab, Kashf al-Kurba]

The Sunna in this register is not a slogan. It is the table, the tongue, the trade, and the time spent.

What runs through these sayings is not the warrior’s posture of separation. It is the gardener’s posture of tending: gentle, careful, and few.

The Reward of Those Who Hold On

A second hadith stands behind the glad tidings.

The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: “Ahead of you are days of patience. Holding on to the religion in them will be like holding on to a burning coal. Whoever holds on in those days will have the reward of fifty.” The Companions asked: “Fifty of them, or fifty of us?” He said: “Fifty of you.” [Tirmidhi, hasan; Abu Dawud; Ibn Maja]

The promise is not romantic. The Prophet measures his praise for those who keep their hand on the rope when the rope burns.

This is the rope the Quran names. Allah Most High says: “And hold fast (i’tasimu) to the rope of Allah together, and do not be divided.” [Quran 3:103] The strangers are precisely those who do not let go.

The Quranic Profile of the Strangers

Two verses outline the character profile described in the hadith literature.

Allah Most High says: “Allah will bring a people whom He loves and who love Him. Humble toward the believers, dignified toward the disbelievers, striving in the way of Allah and not fearing the blame of any blamer.” [Quran 5:54]

Note the order. Love comes first: His for them, and theirs for Him. Then the inward posture toward the community of faith: humility. Then the outward posture under pressure: dignity, striving, indifference to public blame.

A second verse names the word the hadith uses. “Those who believe and do righteous deeds, for them is tuba (glad tidings) and an excellent place of return.” [Quran 13:29]

The two texts converse. The hadith promises tuba to the strangers. The Quran promises tuba to those who believe and do good.

The strangers are those whose beliefs and works hold when others have given way.

Stranger in the World: The Sister Hadith

The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) took Ibn Umar (Allah be pleased with them both) by the shoulder and said: “Be in this world as if you were a stranger or a wayfarer.” [Sahih al-Bukhari, kitab al-riqaq; Tirmidhi, sahih]

Ibn Umar would add: “When evening comes, do not expect the morning. When morning comes, do not expect the evening. Take from your health for your sickness, and from your life for your death.”

Imam al-Nawawi placed this hadith fortieth in his al-Arba’in al-Nawawiyya, the seal of the collection.

The same root (gh-r-b) carries both hadiths. Outwardly, the strangers of the first hadith hold the Sunna in an age that has let it go. Inwardly, every believer is asked by the second to live as a stranger here. Passing through, not settled.

The two hadiths interlock. The outer stranger is sustained by the inner stranger. Without the heart’s traveling-light posture, the outer adherence becomes ideology: proud, brittle, and loud. With it, the adherence becomes a man’s quiet way of life.

The Inner Strangeness: The Heart at Home With Its Lord

The spiritual masters draw out the inward dimension with care.

Imam al-Qushayri (d. 465 AH) names it directly in al-Risala al-Qushayriyya. The one who knows Allah finds his intimacy in His remembrance.

Allah then estranges him from creatures, so that he becomes a stranger among them, his heart at home only with his Lord. [al-Qushayri, al-Risala al-Qushayriyya, on ma’rifa]

Imam al-Ghazali (d. 505 AH), in the Ihya, treats the believer’s posture in this world as that of a traveler. A guest in transit. Neither despising the world nor swallowed by it [al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, Kitab al-Faqr wa al-Zuhd].

Imam Ibn Ata’illah al-Sakandari (d. 709 AH) captures the same posture in al-Hikam. The soul holds to its Lord while the world rushes by [Ibn Ata’illah, al-Hikam, with Ibn Ajiba’s Iqaz al-Himam].

The later Sufi tradition continues in the same register.

Shaykh al-Akbar Muhyi al-Din ibn Arabi (d. 638 AH), in al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, treats spiritual stations of strangeness under the names afrad (the singular ones) and malamatiyya (those who hide under blame).

They are friends of Allah who walk among people without being known [Ibn Arabi, al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya].

Imam Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha’rani (d. 973 AH) writes in his Tabaqat al-Kubra from the perspective of the stranger. He frames his lives of the saints as a corrective.

The Sunna of the path has been corrupted by impostors in his age, and he wishes to recover for the reader what was truly held by those who knew Allah. [al-Sha’rani, preface to al-Tabaqat al-Kubra]

Imam Abd al-Ghani al-Nablusi (d. 1143 AH) sings the same theme in his Diwan al-Haqa’iq. The closing couplet of his qasida “Qalbiya alladhi fi dhatikum yataqallabu” turns precisely on our root:

أَفَلَتْ شُمُوسُ الْأَوَّلِينَ وَشَمْسُنَا أَبَدًا عَلَى فَلَكِ الْعُلَا لَا تَغْرُبُ

The suns of the earliest ones have set, yet our sun, forever on the orbit of loftiness, does not set. [al-Nablusi, Diwan al-Haqa’iq, qasida “Qalbiya alladhi fi dhatikum yataqallabu”]

Listen to the verb. The Arabic “tagharrabu” carries the same root as “ghuraba’.” The strangers of the hadith hold to a sun that has, in one sense, set. In the deeper sense, it has not. Its light continues through those who carry it.

Imam Abdullah ibn Alawi al-Haddad (d. 1132 AH) writes in this register throughout the Risalat al-Mu’awana and the Nasa’ih al-Diniyya. The believer’s loneliness in faith is the price of the heart’s company with Allah. And Allah’s company is worth the price. [al-Haddad, Risalat al-Mu’awana]

Shah Wali Allah on Why the Inheritors Are Sent

Imam Shah Wali Allah al-Dehlawi (d. 1176 AH), in Hujjat Allah al-Baligha, frames the whole matter within Allah’s wisdom in preserving His religion.

The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: “Allah will send for this community, at the head of every century, one who renews for it its religion.” [Abu Dawud]

Shah Wali Allah reads the strangers as the long arc of this renewal. Allah keeps His religion alive through the inheritors of the prophets (warathat al-anbiya’) when its first carriers have passed. [Shah Wali Allah, Hujjat Allah al-Baligha]

The hadith of the strangers, in this reading, is not a description of decline. It is a description of Allah’s care. He does not leave His religion without carriers.

He keeps a few faithful in every age, where the religion would otherwise have failed.

The Pitfall the Hadith Itself Warns Against

The inverse temptation is real, and the tradition is alert to it.

Identifying with the strangers can feed spiritual pride. It can lead to the conviction that one is among the saved few while the masses are deluded. The Sunna’s framing is the opposite.

The strangers are loved by Allah for their fidelity, not their separateness. Their hallmark is humility and steadiness, not the noise of difference.

Note where al-Hasan al-Basri begins. Not with separation from the corrupt, but with tenderness toward the few. “Be gentle with one another.”

Ibn Rajab’s higher category, those who rectify what others have corrupted of the Sunna, does its work by teaching, by character, and by patience. Not by contempt.

The Carriers of the Religion in Our Age

To be among the strangers today is to be faithful, not aggrieved. Quietly diligent, not loudly different.

It is to pray the prayer when most have forgotten it. To learn the religion soundly from those who carry it.

To sit with the inherited schools of fiqh, the Ashari and Maturidi theology, and the disciplined inner life of tasawwuf, when shortcuts are everywhere.

To hold to the adab of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) when adab is treated as optional. To remain warm with people regardless of the prevailing winds.

Shaykh Muhammad Awwama (Allah preserve him), in Ma’alim Irshadiyya, his counsel to the seeker of knowledge in our time, keeps returning to a single picture. The seeker is known by sincerity. By humility before knowledge and its bearers.

By careful transmission of what he has truly received. By gentleness in his dealings with people. [Awwama, Ma’alim Irshadiyya]

He is not known by his volume. He is not known for scoring points against opponents. He is known by what he gives, quietly, to whoever sits with him.

That is the picture of the stranger in this hadith’s gentlest sense: rooted, humble, patient, and useful.

Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Allah preserve him), in Sea Without Shore, draws the same outline for the seeker on the Sufi path in our age.

The path to Allah runs through the inherited Sunni tradition: the schools of fiqh, the creed of Ahl al-Sunna, and the disciplined orders.

There is no shortcut around the tradition. The shortcut is the tradition, taken in good company [Keller, Sea Without Shore].

Sayyidi Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri al-Hamsi (d. 1425 AH), the Damascene Shadhili-Hashimi shaykh, set the same counsel to verse in his ode “Rufi’at astar al-bayn”:

صَاحِ فَاغْنَمِ الْمَعَاشَا كَمْ مَمَاتٍ أَتَاهُمْ عَاشَا

Dear friend, seize the chance to live. How many corpses came to them and were revived?

And later in the ode:

جِدَّ سَيْرًا لِلْمَنَازِلْ وَانْهَجْ نَهْجَ الْأَوَائِلْ

Speed with might and main to the stations, following the way of the earliest ones. [al-Shaghouri, “Rufi’at astar al-bayn,” in Songs of Presence: Qasidas of the Shadhili Path]

The earliest ones, al-awa’il, are the first strangers of the hadith. Following their way is the strangers’ work in every age.

Habib Abu Bakr al-Adani ibn Ali al-Mashhur (Allah preserve him), in his many works, among them al-Nubdha al-Sughra, Usul al-Din al-Arba’a, and Ihya’ Manhajiyya al-Wasat al-Awsat, locates the strangers of our age in the slow, patient work of the inherited ribats and zawiyas.

Keeping the ulama who carry the religion. Raising the next generation. Walking the middle-most path between rigidity and slackness. [al-Mashhur, Usul al-Din al-Arba’a; al-Nubdha al-Sughra]

The carriers are not those who shout the loudest. They are those who keep the lights of the ribat burning when the night is long.

Quiet Fidelity in Our Age

The strangers do not announce themselves. They live the religion plainly, where Allah has placed them. Gentle with the few, patient with the many, and quietly at work on themselves and on what they can reach.

The Quran closes this register with a promise that the strangers carry in their hearts when the days are heavy:

“Indeed, those who say ‘Our Lord is Allah,’ and then remain steadfast, upon them the angels descend, saying: ‘Do not fear, do not grieve, and receive glad tidings of the Paradise which you were promised.’” [Quran 41:30]

This is what upholding the Sunna in testing times opens onto. Not loneliness, but the company of angels. Not the noise of difference, but the steady descent of reassurance. Do not fear, do not grieve.

May Allah Most High make us among them. Not by claim, but by the small daily work of a life lived for Him.

May He place us where al-Hasan al-Basri placed his people: gentle with one another, and content to be few.

May He grant us steadfastness when the rope burns.

May He keep our hearts traveling light, as the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) counseled Ibn Umar: strangers here, wayfarers passing through.

And may the glad tidings of tuba, by whichever of its meanings He pleases, be ours.

And Allah knows best.

[Shaykh] Faraz Rabbani

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