Sa'd

May my father and mother be ransomed for you

During the Battle of Uhud, the archers scattered, the Prophet ﷺ under fire — and Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas (RA) shooting arrow after arrow while the Prophet ﷺ handed them to him and said what he said to no one else that day: "shoot, Sa'd — may my father and mother be ransomed for you" (Bukhari 3725; Muslim 2411).

Ali (RA) himself reports this, adding that he never heard the Prophet ﷺ gather both his parents in ransom for anyone but Sa'd. This is the man the tradition counts as the first to shoot an arrow in the path of Allah — and among the ten given glad tidings of Paradise.

Kindness without surrender

His hardest battlefield was home. His mother swore off food and drink until he abandoned his faith — betting that Quraysh's reverence for parents would break him.

It did not. The Qur'an answered through him: keep their company in this world with kindness, but do not obey them in shirk (Surah Luqman, 31:15; also Surah al-Ankabut, 29:8). Sa'd honored his mother and kept his faith, and every believer squeezed between love and truth has used this verse since.

One-third, and one-third is much

Years later, gravely ill in Makkah during the Farewell Pilgrimage, Sa'd (RA) asked the Prophet ﷺ whether he could give two-thirds of his wealth away in charity. No. Half? No. A third?

"A third — and a third is much. It is better to leave your heirs wealthy than to leave them poor, begging from people" (Bukhari 2742; Muslim 1628).

That exchange became one of the foundations of Islamic inheritance law: no more than a third may be willed away from one's heirs. And the same conversation produced a line the ummah has never stopped quoting — that whatever you spend seeking Allah's face is rewarded, even the morsel of food you place in your wife's mouth.

He recovered. The Prophet ﷺ had said he might yet live so that some would benefit through him and others be defeated through him. Decades later it was Sa'd at Qadisiyyah, commanding the campaign that broke Sasanian power in Iraq.

The answered du'a

The tradition relates that the Prophet ﷺ prayed for him: O Allah, answer Sa'd when he calls upon You. The wording is widely transmitted in the biographical literature, though this site has not been able to trace it to a specific graded narration.

What Bukhari does preserve is the episode that made the reputation. As governor of Kufah, Sa'd was accused by the people of not praying properly. Umar (RA) summoned him; Sa'd explained that he prayed exactly as the Prophet ﷺ had — lengthening the first two rak'ahs of Isha, shortening the last two. Umar answered: "that is what I thought of you, Abu Ishaq."

He sent investigators anyway. They went mosque to mosque through Kufah, and everyone praised him — until the mosque of Banu Abs, where a man named Usamah ibn Qatadah stood and made three accusations: that Sa'd never marched out with the army, never divided the spoils fairly, and never judged justly.

Sa'd made three supplications in return: O Allah, if this servant of Yours is a liar and stood up for show, then prolong his life, prolong his poverty, and expose him to trials. The narrator, Abd al-Malik ibn Umayr, later described the man himself — aged past dignity, destitute, his eyebrows fallen over his eyes — saying of himself only that he was an old man struck by Sa'd's supplication (Bukhari 755; Muslim).

Felicity, by name

His name means felicity, or good fortune. And he lived long enough to see almost everything. The persecution in Makkah. Badr. Uhud. The fall of the Persian empire. And finally the ummah's first civil war — which he sat out completely, refusing to raise his sword against other Muslims.