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Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As

Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As

616 CE684 CE · Mecca

Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As was a Companion (sahabi, a contemporary follower of the Prophet Muhammad) best remembered in Muslim tradition for writing hadith — reports of the Prophet's words and deeds — down on paper at a time when most were preserved by memory. The collection attributed to him, al-Sahifa al-Sadiqa ("the truthful page"), is described in later hadith scholarship as one of the earliest such written documents; it does not survive independently, but its contents are traditionally said to have passed through his grandson Amr ibn Shuayb and to have been largely absorbed into the ninth-century Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He is the son of Amr ibn al-As, the general who conquered Egypt.

Tradition holds that he embraced Islam shortly before his father, and reports credit him with an unusual interest in the earlier scriptures alongside the Qur'an. He is widely remembered for intense asceticism — constant fasting and night-long Qur'an recitation — which, according to well-known reports in the canonical collections, the Prophet personally counseled him to moderate.

He was present at the Battle of Siffin (37/657) on the side of his father and Mu'awiya, but several reports have him saying he neither struck a blow nor fired an arrow, and that he regretted being there; other accounts have him holding the standard or commanding a wing. His later years were spent largely in Egypt. Both the year and place of his death are disputed in the classical sources.

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Mecca

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Born in Mecca into the Banu Sahm clan of Quraysh, son of Amr ibn al-As. His exact birth year is not recorded; modern reference works place it around 616 CE based on his being roughly a dozen years younger than his father, but this is an estimate, not an attested date.

About Mecca

Mecca (Makka), in the Hejaz of western Saudi Arabia, is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the site of the Ka'ba; it is Islam's holiest city and the destination of the annual hajj pilgrimage, toward which Muslims pray. As a centre of learning that drew scholars from across the Muslim world, it hosted many of the figures connected here during periods of study, teaching, or pilgrimage.

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